MovieChat Forums > The Cowboys (1972) Discussion > Movies Like This Aren't Made Anymore

Movies Like This Aren't Made Anymore


Made in 1972 we sometimes forget just how gritty and brutal a movie portraying the old west can be. This is one such movie.

It wasn't just that "The Duke" was in it. It was that he was fine with the main character (his character) being killed off well before the end of the movie.

There was plenty of brutality before the last half hour. One boy is trampled to death by cattle and another is threatened with a slit throat and a near drowning. It only got more brutal once Mr. Anderson is killed off. Perhaps the most shocking was that a bunch of less than sixteen year old boys would purposely condemn a man to a painful, long and agonizing death in full view of the movie going public.

Movies like this aren't made any more. It had a plot, great dialog, excellent actors, a first rate villain, lots and lots of blood-shed, most of it well after you grow to "love" and empathize with the characters.

Hollywood could do this again if it really wanted to. Will it? That's the question.

Warning: I probably read the book first.

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I've often felt that this is a revisionist Western film, both in terms of its de-glamourized and decidedly un-romantic portrayal of the Old West, as well as its confrontation of issues racial, sexual, and even generational. Movies like this today are certainly very, very few and far between, but every once in a while one comes along that surprises us.

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I've often felt that this is a revisionist Western film, both in terms of its de-glamourized and decidedly un-romantic portrayal of the Old West, as well as its confrontation of issues racial, sexual, and even generational.


I would not call it a "revisionist" Western; rather, The Cowboys is almost self-consciously traditionalist in its moralistic approach. There is a classic good-versus-evil conflict, Wayne embodies and articulates bedrock values, and the redemptive violence at the end is rather romantic in spirit. If anything, The Cowboys represented a countering of the revisionist Westerns that proved more emblematic of that Vietnam War era.

As you note, the film does inject racial and generational tensions that rendered The Cowboys more relevant to a modern audience, and it toys with convention in a couple of memorable manners (namely the fate of the Wayne figure and the age of the cowboys). Thus the movie feels fresh—I would consider it a Western in a classicist or traditionalist vein that manages to resist sheer banality or conventionality through shrewd writing and acting.

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Tommy Lee Jones better hope that isn't true if his remake is to succeed.. I haven't heard if he is starring.. Bit he is writing and directing and I can't imagine anyone else more appropriate.

He may be a bit older but for some reason I would love to see Woody Harrelson as Asa Watts.

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The remake of "True Grit" was actually much...grittier...than the original in most respects.

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