Film Stories From The Book:
Hollywood of the Rockies
By: Frederic B. Wildfang
The Cowboys
1972 — Warner Brothers — produced by Mark Rydell — written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. (based on a novel by William Dale Jennings), directed by Mark Rydell, photography by Robert Surtees, music by John Williams — starring John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, Slim Pickens, and Sarah Cunningham
In this John Wayne western (one of his last), Wayne plays a tough old rancher named Wil Anderson — who loses his hired hands to rumors of gold in the hills — making it necessary for him to hire a bunch of local schoolboys to drive fifteen-hundred head of cattle to a market four-hundred miles away. In the course of the long drive, Wil softens some and becomes almost like a father to the boys and with the help of the colorful trail cook (Roscoe Lee Brown) — Wil and the boys survive all the usual hardships, trail dust and saddle sores — as well as near drowning, stampedes, whiskey and wild women. Only at the violent climax of the movie, though — when they are forced to witness the brutal murder of Wil Anderson by a gang of blood-thirsty cattle-rustlers — do the boys become men.
The Cowboys is noteworthy not only because it is the first movie in which John Wayne is killed since The Alamo (1960) but it is also one of a handful of movies Wayne made in his old age — including True Grit (1969), Rooster Cogburn (1975), and The Shootist (1976) — considered by some to be his best.
“In ‘The Cowboys’ all the forces that have made him a dominant personality as well as a major screen presence seem to combine in a most unusual way, providing him with the best role of his career. Old Dusty Britches can act.” — Rex Reed
John Wayne (1907-1979) was one of the best-known and most successful actors in Hollywood. Between 1949 and 1973, the “Duke” was among the top ten box-office stars an unprecedented 24 times. Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s...Companion gives him a “Rosette” for “appearing in more films than any other star” and — despite a slow start — for “winning respect after a lifetime of larger-than-life roles.” Most of Wayne’s most famous movies — The Big Trail (1930), Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Searchers (1956), and Rio Bravo (1959), for instance — were westerns. “Westerns are closer to art than else in the motion picture business,” Wayne once said.
