Where’s Nico?

So I mentioned a few weeks back when I gave a review of the new Roadhouse movie that I have a borderline obsessive man crush on Sam Elliott. As this trip has progressed, I’ve stopped shaving and I’m not planning on getting a haircut any time too soon, in the fruitless hopes that I could look slightly more Sam Elliott-like.  Unfortunately, that’s just not the way my DNA plays out.  Instead I just ended up looking more like that infamous Nick Nolte mug shot (particularly given the number of Hawaiian shirts in my wardrobe):

Sigh.  It just wasn’t meant to be.  I will say before I get to my top five, I decided to rule out Roadhouse from contention, simply because I have probably rambled enough already about the genius of the underappreciated classic.  But I’ve got to say, Sam Elliott was sporting quite a look in that film too:

That’s the face of a guy who grows his hair out pretty well six weeks into a cross-country camping trip, if he had much better genes than I was blessed with.  Regardless, let’s get to the Sam Elliott Top 5!

5.    Tombstone

This was just a great movie, first off.  Really, all five of these movies are pretty great.  Val Kilmer is fantastic as Doc Holiday, totally wiped by tuberculosis and booze.  But take a look at the hooks on the end of that handlebar in the pic above!  I can only imagine what a mess it would be if he tried to slurp some tomato soup and drink a milkshake without a straw here.

4. Mask

Okay, so this was the 80’s – people bought hair spray by the shipping crate back then.  But seriously, how could you get in a car with that hair?  It seems like it’d totally get smushed up by the roof.  I always wondered a bit if it wasn’t Sam Elliott’s hair in Mask that inspired the early 2000’s kid show, Jimmy Neutron:

3. Up in the Air

I thought I’d throw a bit of a curveball here.  Even though George Clooney was a big deal at the time, it seemed like this was a movie that kind of slipped under the radar when it came out.  Sam Elliott is only in one scene in the whole thing – it’s kind of a sad movie, and Clooney plays this guy whose whole life is around work travel, as his job involves flying out to conduct layoffs at various companies.  His rather hollow goal in life is to rack up ten million miles on American Airlines.  When he hits that milestone, Elliott plays the pilot who comes back to congratulate him.  It’s a good film, and this is Sam Elliott’s hair is at its most ‘presentable to bring home to the parents’-type look.

2. Thank You For Smoking

So if the last movie gave us the cleanest cut Sam Elliott sported, let’s go next to the sloppiest!  I love this movie – both this and Up in the Air were directed by Jason Reitman, and this movie is just plain funny.  It stars Aaron Eckhart as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, and Sam Elliott has a small role as the aged Marlboro Man, who is dying of lung cancer.  Sounds pretty funny, doesn’t it?  But seriously – it’s cynical, but this movie is hysterical.  I really recommend it if you haven’t seen it!

1. The Big Lebowski

As the clean cut narrator of what is one of my favorite movies of all time, Sam Elliott eats up the handful of scenes he gets here.  As he sits next to the disheveled Dude, this clean cut cowboy, swigging down sarsaparillas and asking why the Dude curses so much, has the perfect cool and calm demeanor.  And checkout that ‘stache he’s sporting in the picture here!  It’s almost too perfect to be real!

– Ken 4/21/2024