Rhinestone (film)
Rhinestone is a 1984 American musical comedy film directed by Bob Clark from a screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Phil Alden Robinson and starring Stallone, Dolly Parton, Richard Farnsworth and Ron Leibman. It is based on the 1975 hit song "Rhinestone Cowboy" written by Larry Weiss. Although a critical and financial failure, the film spawned two top 10 country hits for Parton.
Rhinestone
Phil Alden Robinson
- Howard Smith
- Marvin Worth
- Sylvester Stallone
- Dolly Parton
- Richard Farnsworth
- Ron Leibman
Timothy Galfas
- Stan Cole
- John W. Wheeler
- Mike Post
- Dolly Parton
20th Century Fox
- June 21, 1984
111 minutes
United States
English
$21 million[3]
Plot[edit]
Jake Farris, a down home country singer stuck in a long-term contract performing at "The Rhinestone", a sleazy urban cowboy nightclub in New York City, boasts to the club's manager, Freddie, that she can make anybody into a country sensation, insisting that she can turn any normal guy into a country singer in just two weeks. Freddie accepts Jake's bet, putting up the remainder of Jake's contract (if she wins the bet, the contract becomes void; if she loses, another five years will be added). He then ups the ante: if Jake loses, she must also sleep with him.
The problem is that Freddie can select the man, and he selects an obnoxious New York City cabbie named Nick Martinelli. Nick not only has no musical talent whatsoever, he claims to hate country music "worse than liver". Realizing she is stuck with Nick, she takes him back to her home in Tennessee to teach him how to walk, talk and behave like a real country star. While there, he has to put up with Jake's constant nagging and berating him about his behavior, the culture-shock of not knowing anything about the South, and Jake's ex-fiancée Barnett Kale who befriends Nick, then turns on him when he realizes that he and Jake have developed feelings for one another.
It all leads to Nick performing a song at The Rhinestone where the crowd is a crazed group of hecklers and are "out for blood." After Nick's first attempt to sing bombs, he turns to the band and says, "Okay guys, let's pick up the beat" and the band begins playing the song in a more Rock n' Roll version and he wins the crowd over. In the end, Jake gets her contract back and she and Nick begin to sing another song with the implication that they will continue their budding relationship together.
Reception[edit]
Critical response[edit]
The film was panned upon its release, and is generally regarded as a commercial and critical flop. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 20% based on reviews from 15 critics.[14] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[15] Nonetheless, the soundtrack album gave Dolly Parton two top ten country singles: "Tennessee Homesick Blues" and "God Won't Get You".
Variety magazine wrote: "Effortlessly living up to its title, Rhinestone is as artificial and synthetic a concoction as has ever made its way to the screen."[16]
Phil Alden Robinson publicly distanced himself from the film during its release.[2] Robinson took the highly unusual step of mounting his own publicity campaign, criticizing the movie, saying that the humor and intelligence of the original script had been replaced with vulgarity, caricature and farce. Disassociating himself from the picture, he sent letters to film critics explaining what had happened to his script. It was, he said, a textbook example of a studio willingly sacrificing the quality of a script for what was perceived as the marketability of star casting.[5]