Among Wayne's Best of the 70's
SPOILERS for "The Cowboys" and "The Shootist."
"New Hollywood" gave John Wayne the Best Actor Oscar for 1969's "True Grit" and hoped that he would fade out with that decade. It looked like a swan song.
But, as the Duke himself might say, "Not hardly."
In the 70's, he made 11 films in 6 years, finishing up with a great movie, "The Shootist," in which Wayne an old gunfighter dying of cancer -- just like Wayne was in real life.
Most of Wayne's 70's movies were on the minor side -- solid Western entertainments like "Chisum" and "Cahill, US Marshal" that traded on Wayne's great persona, but in perhaps more of a "pop icon" way. Having turned down "Dirty Harry" (Wayne claimed), he made two plain-clothes cop movies ("McQ" and "Brannigan") which didn't show Wayne off at his best. A "True Grit" sequel called "Rooster Cogburn" paired Wayne for the only time with Katharine Hepburn, but in an informal remake of "The African Queen" for which Hepburn was just too old.
Wayne's really special movies of the seventies were three: "The Shootist" (as fine and fitting a last film as any actor ever made), 1971's "Big Jake" (an actioner with Maureen O'Hara as Wayne's wife and Richard Boone as the bad guy that was tough and entertaining), and "The Cowboys," (1972.)
Like "The Shootist" -- and unlike all of Wayne's other movies in the 70's -- "The Cowboys" is a movie where John Wayne dies at the end. Perhaps these two films demonstrated that if you are going to kill off as beloved a father figure as John Wayne in a movie, it had better be a meaningful, good movie, with some thematic resonance.
Unlike some of Wayne's other 70's movies, which were made by journeyman pals of the Duke with no pressure, "The Cowboys" is a very professional-looking film, directed by a then-hot young director named Mark Rydell, who also acted a little and who had recently directed the difficult Steve McQueen in the hit "The Reivers." imdb tells us that Rydell despised John Wayne's Vietnam politics, but used him in "The Cowboys" anyway. (Rydell wanted George C. Scott, who was also considered for "The Shootist." Odd that Scott and Wayne would be competitors for such roles in the 70's.)
Perhaps with Rydell uneasily teamed with Wayne, "The Cowboys" wasn't allowed to be made lazily. "Show me a happy movie set," Katherine Hepburn said, "and I'll show you a dull movie."
John Williams (Jaws and Star Wars soon to come) provided the film with a strong, lush score -- always important to suggesting that a movie is made by "the A team."
But it was the story itself that perhaps lifted "The Cowboys" higher than the usual Wayne vehicle of the 70's.
Wayne was here playing the Ultimate Father Figure: a tough old rancher who is forced to use young pre-teen boys to drive some cattle across rugged terrain to market. Age-wise, Wayne was really more of a GRANDFATHER figure to these boys, and the film inexorably leads to a physical conflict that Old John Wayne finally can't win -- though he goes down fighting.
In the movies around "The Cowboys," Wayne is more of a fantasy figure: lawman, gunslinger, good-guy train robber. But here, we see that Wayne's Wil Anderson is a figure of some reality. He's an older man -- with a well-cast older wife -- who has some real fears and concerns about his ability to make a living herding cattle. He only agrees to use the boys when all other options are foreclosed.
The movie that unfolds lacks the formulaic structure of other late Wayne Westerns. We go on a cattle drive (shades of "Red River.") An erudite black cook (Roscoe Lee Browne) is enlisted to help out. A small wagonload of frontier hookers offer themselves to the boys (and graciously withdraw when they realize its a bit early for the young lads.) And most of the things that happen are realistic, non-action movie matters -- including the death of one boy on the trail.
Eventually, villains materialize, but even they are somewhat realistic. Bruce Dern (at his most rodentoid and smarmy) leads a group of men who want to join the cattle drive, but Wayne knowingly rejects them. They turn up again later, living up to Wayne's distrust, by looking to steal his cattle.
In recent years, Wayne had had some tough-but-fair adversaries in his movies, from Chris George's gentleman gunman in "El Dorado" to Robert Duvall's practical outlaw in "True Grit" to Richard Boone's mercenary meanie in "Big Jake."
But Bruce Dern was just disgusting -- a sneering punk who, backed by his gang of adult males, hectors and tortures one young Cowboy until the Duke must speak: "We've seen you can beat up a boy. How are you when they come a little bigger?"
The fight that follows is realistic, brutal -- and most satisfying, as Grandpa Wayne believably beats the hell out of the young punk Dern, smashing his face into a tree and disfiguring him (Dern rather follows the villain in "Dirty Harry" in getting nicely bashed-in before finally getting killed much later.)
Dern loses the fight, but elects to shoot Wayne in the back multiple times -- further validating his oily worthlessness as a varmint. Wayne gets a good death scene surrounded by his boys -- and his boys become men, luring Dern and his gang into a slaughter of payback-revenge.
Some critics in 1972 really hated "The Cowboys." They felt that the vengeance undertaken by the boys at the end made them "Dirty Harry Juniors" in a "Wild Bunch for the kiddies." Certainly, the revenge conclusion was well in the tradition of "Dirty Harry" before it and "Death Wish" to come.
But that made "The Cowboys" a very satisfying Western as well. John Wayne's death is the death of fairness and decency at the hands of unprincipled trash, and the film indicates that this cannot be taken lightly in a society of any size. The young cowboys are aided by the black cook (so elegantly played by Roscoe Lee Browne as perhaps the TRUE father figure of the tale), so their vengeance is believably pulled off and given some "adult support." "The Cowboys" is telling a tale of how some boys were forced to become men too soon.
"The Cowboys" is a good 70's John Wayne picture because it is the work of professionals -- director Rydell, composer Williams, and a supporting cast that includes not only Dern (who would soon become a star for awhile) and Browne...but the estimable broadway star Colleen Dewhurst (George C. Scott's ex-wife) as the frontier madam who elects to spare the boys premature virginity loss. The boys are all good too (there's a Carradine in there, plus soap heartthrob-to-be A. Martinez.)
But the ultimate greatness of the film lies in Wayne's performance. He's got a role that means something, so it plays it with heart. Wil Anderson is a good man forced by circumstances to shepard children to manhood.
He's then forced into a fight he knows he can't survive, but fights anyway. And in dying -- as he would in only one more picture after this -- Wayne forced his many fans to contemplate Wayne's own upcoming death, the end of an era...
...and the loss of our "father."