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We'll always love you: the enduring appeal of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Article Excerpt
Let me begin with a confession: From age eleven, when my overly permissive parents first allowed me to see the movie, until my early twenties, when I first visited Dallas--Fort Worth, virtually my entire understanding of contemporary Texas was based on The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the bawdy musical comedy starring Burr Reynolds and Dolly Parton. This is probably not something I should be publicly admitting. But I spent most of my adolescence in New York City watching movies instead of TV, hence my obliviousness to the (slightly) more accurate vision of the state being offered up in those days by the prime-time soap Dallas. Besides, the Texas of Whorehouse struck me as a pretty fabulous place, a freewheeling fantasyland that I willed myself into believing was real. The towns were all charmingly sleepy and dusty; the lawmen kept order with a mixture of testosterone and good-heartedness; the prostitutes were as wholesome and motherly as my sixth-grade math teacher. All that, and people periodically broke into country-western song-and-dance numbers. What was not to love?

Alas, most critics felt...

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