LGM Film Club, Part 505: Ranch Album

I’ve gotten back to watching some of the valuable documentaries on American life collected at Folkstreams. I recently watched Ranch Album, a 1987 documentary directed by Gail Steiger about a year in the life of Arizona cowboys, capturing a moment in time in a rapidly changing industry. The cowboys don’t want much to change and they want their kids to follow them into the cowboy life. But of course cowboying in 1987 is a lot different than it had been in 1957. Today, running cattle is increasingly dominated by hedge fund capital and the cowboys are quite often from Latin America and more or less held on the ranches as semi-captive labor, so I doubt that these kids ended up doing much in the cowboying world. The film doesn’t move at a rapid pace, but then neither does a year on the ranch. Here’s the trailer, but you can watch the whole thing at the link above.