Cowboys, The

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To help celebrate John Wayne's 100th anniversary (1907-1979), Warner Bros. released two more of the actor's hit movies in standard and high definition. Following their previous release of "The Searchers" in SD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, they now give us "Rio Bravo" and "The Cowboys." These latter two movies may not be everyone's favorite choices in the John Wayne catalogue, but they show up nicely in high def.

Let's consider "The Cowboys" for a moment. John Wayne was about sixty-four years old when he made the film in 1971, and he looked it. But he was still going strong and still playing the iconic hero we all expected him to play. Although the movie tries to do a lot more than it delivers, you've got to give Wayne and director Mark Rydell credit for making a big, old-fashioned Western at a time when the genre was in its death throes, and the country was suffering the disillusionment of a long, drawn-out war in Vietnam and looking for weightier, edgier, more cynical things at the movies.

The setting for this one is Montana, the "Big Sky" country, in the 1870s, and Wayne plays Wil Andersen, a proud, flinty, hard-driving cattleman. However, he's got a problem: His cowhands have gotten gold fever and deserted him for the mining camps, leaving him with nobody to help him drive his cattle to the railhead some four-hundred miles away. Then a friend, Anse Petersen (Slim Pickens) suggests he ask the schoolboys in the area if they'd like the job. At first, Wil thinks it's a dumb idea, but being desperate, he gives the boys--close to a dozen of them aged ten to fifteen--a tryout. Even if the kids have never been on a trail drive before, as Wil soon finds out they can all ride and rope darn well.

For a cook, Wil hires a black man, Jedediah Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne), and off they go. Trouble is, a no-goodnik follows them, the villainous Asa Watts (Bruce Dern) and his gang of equally nefarious cutthroats, who are out to steal the cattle.

And that's about it. We see a few long scenes in which the boys do some bronc riding and cattle roping. Then we see Will and the boys herding cattle along the trail. After that, there's a relatively unnecessary scene involving some camp-following ladies. Finally, in the last half hour of this 135-minute extravaganza, there is the inevitable conflict with the would-be cattle rustlers. In essence, we've got about a half an hour of plot and in over two hours of running time.

Sure, it's a coming-of-age story with Wayne as the surrogate father figure, the point being that Wil takes out a group of boys and they return men. Over the years, I've heard this theme advanced in the argument that "The Cowboys" is a good "family" film. However, I would beg to differ. In the course of the story, I saw boys learn only the virtues of killing and revenge, hardly the best of "family" values unless you're a member of the Manson family. Yet even the director in his audio commentary attempts to justify the movie's vengeance motif. There is also the fact that the film winks at the kids' getting drunk, a part of their growing up according to the movie's philosophy, and that Wil's notion of curing a stuttering kid of his speech impediment is to get him to call him a "goddamn, mean, dirty son-of-a-bitch" really fast. One simply has to accept these matters as part and parcel of the movie's view that kids mature through tough experiences. Well, at least Browne's character keeps the boys away from the young ladies. If you buy into any of this, the film works. If you don't, you're going to have a problem.

Anyway, the movie's central premise is only one of several weaknesses, the others being that the film is way too long (it even has an overture, plus entr'acte and exit music); it has a John Williams musical score that is overwrought; and the acting with one notable exception is, to say the least, unexceptional. John Wayne is good at playing John Wayne, and if that's your criterion for success, then he is altogether successful. No one could have played his part any better, not even George C. Scott, whom I've read director Rydell initially wanted. It's just that the role doesn't allow much room for character development, so what you see in Wayne is what you get, no more, no less.

Still and all, the movie's shortcomings don't exactly doom it to failure. For instance, there is the matter of Roscoe Lee Browne. As the black cook, a novelty for the boys, who have never seen a black man before, Browne excels. He is the highlight of the show, in fact, his character noble, eloquent, wise, just, firm, and resourceful. Then, there is the Cinemascope photography of noted cinematographer Robert Surtees, photography as big as all outdoors. Surtees was no stranger to big-screen work, even before wide screens came into being, with movies like "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "King Solomon's Mines," "Quo Vadis," "Oklahoma," "Ben-Hur," "Cimarron," "Mutiny on the Bounty," "The Summer of '42," and dozens of others to his credit. Filmed almost entirely on location in Colorado and New Mexico, "The Cowboys" looks as good as any epic Western ever made.

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