The Cowboys (Deluxe Edition)
by Mark Rydell
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Actor: Alfred Barker Jr., Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, John Wayne, Roscoe Lee BrowneDirector: Mark Rydell
Brand: Warner Brothers
Cinematographer: Robert Surtees
Producer: Mark Rydell
Editor: Neil Travis
Producer: Tim Zinnemann
Writer: Harriet Frank Jr.
Writer: Irving Ravetch
Writer: William Dale Jennings
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.20:1
Running Time: 131 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-05-22
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Model: 114535
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- John Wayne had brawled bareknuckle, gunned down desperadoes, fought jungle wars and piloted the skies. But The Cowboys gave him one of his juiciest roles as a leather-tough rancher who, deserted by his regular help, hires 11 greenhorn schoolboys for a cattle drive across 400 treacherous miles. When the dust settled, Wayne had given one of his best performances. In The Cowboys, Rex Reed wrote, a
DVD Reviews of The Cowboys (Deluxe Edition)
DVD Review: Problematic late Duke film is redeemed by acting of three leads
Summary: 3 Stars
** Some necessary SPOILERS near the end of this review **
John Wayne made 23 films in the last decade and a half of his career after the banner year of 1962 in which he managed to put out 4 top-notch pieces of work (HOW THE WEST WAS WON, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, HATARI! and THE LONGEST DAY), but though many of the later movies are fondly rememembered by his fans (particularly the older ones who were around when these films first came out), few are particularly well regarded critically, and the directors he was working with just weren't generally on the level of Ford and Hawks anymore. This isn't to say that the 60s and 70s were disastrous by any means - he worked with Hawks twice more as a matter of fact, and there are still at least a couple of outright classics in my opinion - TRUE GRIT and THE SHOOTIST. But there's no question that most of his greatest work was behind him, and it didn't help that Wayne resisted the changing natures of the western and the war film, still prefering to make "family"-oriented, often rather sanitized films with old-fashioned values and little or no realistic violence, language or sex.
Of course, his great films of the 40s and 50s might seem just as anachronistic and "dated" today as the later, lesser work - but both the films and Wayne himself had more energy and juice, and the Duke seemed more often able to work at the service of a screenplay and a directorial vision - rather than simply hoping there was enough in the star vehicle with himself as the center for the film to succeed. Most of his films still did all right at the box office, so he had no reason to tamper with his formulas: the Duke was always the hero - flawed perhaps, but never deeply so, always the moral center and often the imparter of wisdom to his typically much younger costars, always the exemplar of a definite and simple "right".
Certainly Mark Rydell's film THE COWBOYS seems to fit this pattern in most respects, at least at the beginning, though it's not without interest. Wil Andersen (Wayne) is a rancher in circa 1876-77 Montana who loses all of his ranch hands to a gold strike and is left with a herd of cattle that he needs to move 400 miles east to market. He has no idea what to do until his friend Anse (Slim Pickens in a tiny throwaway role) suggests that he take on a group of local schoolboys, aged 10-15 or so. Andersen of course rejects the idea initially but Anse convinces him (in about 30 seconds) that they're no younger than he was when he started on his first cattle drive. Roscoe Lee Browne as Jebediah Nightlinger completes the crew as cook and driver of the chuckwagon, and soon after the drive starts we run into a trio of ex-convicts looking for work who Andersen rejects for lying to him. Their leader, curly-haired and evil-looking Bruce Dern, doesn't take kindly to Andersen's curt dismissal, and we know he'll be back.
In its first hour and a half or so, THE COWBOYS is fine entertainment - if a little silly at times. The boys were mostly nonprofessional actors - some were burgeoning stunt men and rodeo cowboys - but Rydell's a good director of kids, and their interactions with each other and with Wayne and Brown rarely feel forced or false. Robert Carradine as Slim and A Martinez as Cimarron - a Mexican or Native American cowody, it's never made clear - are probably the standouts, and the two actors have had the most notable careers of any of the kids. The early bronco-busting scene which Andersen uses to test the kids is well done and there's a nice sequence in the latter part of the film when the kids get ahold of a bottle of whisky that Nightlinger and Andersen occasionally dip into. All of this is reasonably fine "family entertainment", and even the larger question of how Andersen could possibly think he could use nothing but kids and one other adult who approaches his own 60 years to drive cattle for weeks can be disregarded to some extent. Kids had to grow up early in the Wild West I guess.
Wayne himself is fine as the grizzled veteran rancher who, interestingly, has a seemingly quite negative attitude about violence - confiscating all of the kids' guns early on and locking them up, and warning them against a confrontation with Dern's gang of bandits even when it become apparent that there won't be a choice late in the film. He's matched in his ability to command the screen by Browne, who certainly seems more than a little out-of-place here, not because of his race but rather for his Ivy League rhetoric professor voice. Certainly his was one of the most mellifluous and perfect speaking voices in all of Hollywood history, and it never stops sounding a little weird coming from a guy driving a chuckwagon in 1870s Montana. But again - a suspension of disbelief is in order already, and Browne's a good sport about it and has a good rapport with Wayne, even though he apparently had no desire to do the film given the star's well-known hard-right conservatism and opposition to many Civil Rights issues. Somehow they must have worked it out, at least on camera.
Bruce Dern is fine also, doing his typical nasty evil-eyed psycho, playing the role that Wayne suggested would make him the most hated man in Hollywood - the man who shoots John Wayne in the back at the climax of the film, as Andersen confronts "Long Hair" (Dern's character never gets a name). But he's a cypher, just a faceless "bad guy", and as he and Andersen come together the film starts to fall apart. What had been a rather fun and optimistic cattle ride movie becomes at the end a bloody quest for vengeance as the boys refuse to leave Andersen's death - and the bandits' theft of his cattle - unpaid for. Which would all make a little bit more sense if the film had led up to it in an even faintly realistic fashion. Andersen just allowing himself to get shot several times in the back makes no sense after he beats the crap out of Long Hair, and Nightlinger's willingness to join in the quest for vengeance after a half-hearted argument against it also seems out of character and ridiculous. We've been told that the boys can shoot, early on, but never seen any evidence of it over the course of the film, and the few conversations about violence and war that we hear aren't exactly of the "they do it to you, you got to do it to them" variety. Not that we don't sympathize with the kids - it's just that it takes the film in a 180-degree turn and feels like a "movie" ending to a film which - however unrealistic overall - had at least a slight feeling of dramatic consistency to it.
The music by John Williams, though occasionally overbearing and very reminiscent of Aaron Copland at times, is probably some of his best and fits the rousing, boy's adventure mood of most of the film quite well. I watched the old Warner Brothers DVD which drains much of the beauty of Robert Surtees' widescreen photography into a series of muddy and dusty browns; it appears that the Blu-Ray is much, much better.
Overall then a lesser film in the late career of John Wayne; better for me than his work with Andrew V. McLaglen (McLINTOCK! and CHISUM), but not on a par with the couple I mentioned in the first paragraph or THE WAR WAGON. The three adult leads keep it watchable enough and Rydell keeps things moving along - the film is over 130 minutes long and doesn't need to be, but it doesn't feel boring either. Some missed opportunities and bad decisions involving the direction of the narrative are really what keep this from being a solid piece of work all around.
Description of The Cowboys (Deluxe Edition)
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/30/2008 Run time: 134 minutesBestsellers in DVD
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