Miss All-American Beauty

I've been on a Diane Lane kick lately and this one was streaming free on Prime Video, where she plays an 18-year-old classical pianist who enters a Texas beauty pageant in hopes of coming in second or third for the scholarship money but ends up winning and going to nationals, where she finds the rigors of pageant life more challenging than she expected. You can tell even in this early role that Lane is talented, but what struck me most about this TV movie was how wildly sexist it was. Beauty pageants are inherently kind of gross and outdated, so I was expecting a moment where Lane defies the sexism of the pageant world, but that never happens. She does rebel against being micromanaged, but not necessarily against the misogynistic requirements of the pageant (pretending she doesn't have a boyfriend, dressing a certain way, presenting herself a certain way in interviews, etc). The weirdest element of the film is that 18-year-old Lane's boyfriend is her late 20s piano teacher (who would co-star with Lane again in 1996 where they would play the parents of Robin Williams in JACK) and later in the film Lane is wooed by a much older pageant organizer. Super creepy and it's never even acknowledged! The early 80s were a different time for sure... Overall, this movie is nothing to go out of your way to watch, but I was entertained and the cast is what holds it all together. Cloris Leachman, David Dukes, and Jayne Meadows also appear in the film. FUN FACT! Co-writer Nancy Audley four years earlier wrote another Texas beauty queen TV movie that featured a before-she-was-famous Kim Basinger and was a darker tale of post-pageant life called KATIE: PORTRAIT OF A CENTERFOLD.