Lone Star (1996)

Taglines: John Sayles invites you to return to the scene of the crime.

Lone Star movie storyline. Sheriff Sam Deeds is the county sheriff in Frontera, Texas. He was born and raised in Frontera, and returned two years ago to be sheriff. Sam’s late father had been the legendary Sheriff Buddy Deeds, who is remembered as fair and just. Sam had problems with his father and the pair routinely fought.

Sam is particularly disapproving of efforts by business leader Mercedes Cruz and Buddy’s former deputy, Mayor Hollis Pogue, to enlarge and rename the local courthouse in Buddy’s honor; he considers it an unneeded waste of taxpayers’ money. As a teenager, Sam had been in love with Mercedes’s daughter Pilar, but the courtship was strongly opposed by Buddy and Mercedes. After a chance meeting, Sam and the widowed Pilar, now a local teacher, slowly resume their relationship.

Colonel Delmore Payne has recently arrived in town as the commander of the local U.S. Army base. Delmore is the son of Otis “Big O” Payne, a local nightclub owner and leading figure in the area’s African-American community. The two are estranged because of Otis’s serial infidelity and abandonment of Delmore’s mother when Delmore was a child.

Relic hunters discover a human skeleton on an old shooting range along with a Masonic ring, a Rio County sheriff’s badge, and a bullet not used by the military. Sam brings in Texas Ranger Ben Wetzel to help with the case. Wetzel tells Sam that forensics identify the skeleton as that of Charlie Wade, the corrupt sheriff who preceded Buddy. Wade had mysteriously disappeared in 1957, taking $10,000 in county funds, after which Buddy became sheriff.

Sam investigates the events leading up to Wade’s murder. He learns that Wade terrorized the local African-American and Mexican communities, including numerous murders where he asks his innocent victims to dig out any weapon they might have, to then justify shooting them for “resisting arrest”. Wade used this method to murder Cruz’s husband, Eladio, in front of Deputy Hollis.

Sam visits Wesley Birdsong, a Native American and a roadside tourist stand owner, who reveals that Buddy was a wild young adult who settled down after becoming a deputy sheriff and marrying Sam’s mother – though he did have a mistress, whose name Wesley claims to have forgotten. Sam travels to San Antonio, where he visits his marginally mentally ill ex-wife Bunny and searches through his father’s things, where he discovers love letters to Buddy’s mistress.

Lone Star is a 1996 American mystery film written, edited, and directed by John Sayles and set in a small town in Texas. The ensemble cast features Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey and Elizabeth Peña and deals with a sheriff’s investigation into the murder of one of his predecessors.

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