Felt appropriate to give this a revisit after starting my first read of Cormac McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses— another fable about a boy wandering out into the territory, and becoming shaped into something else by it. My core memory of
The Cowboys is also still the earliest one I have of it: my father watching it downstairs in his man cave, and I so happened to wander in during the moment where John Wayne gets shot dead like a dog. I really just remember that image specifically kind of haunting me. Taught me that heroes aren’t immortal and that sometimes stories can be immensely fucking sad. I do think this is one of the two best of his late career pictures, the other being his final in
The Shootist. By the time we get to the 1970s, watching The Duke exist in a landscape that had been thoroughly altered by the emergence of a guy named Clint Eastwood was an incredibly interesting experience. It does sort of break one’s brain to remember that the system was ushering in the New Hollywood counterculture guys and, at the same time, for more than half of the decade, John Wayne was still there doing what he did best. And yet he still changed what you could really expect, at least in small ways. His films got grittier and bloodier, a lot of his vanity seemed to get left at the door and he embraced a willingness to portray actual old men. A lot of the criticisms I have for his mid-late 1960s output get resolved during the last stretch of his career. I mean, let’s not beat around the bush, the concept of the Western as John Wayne envisioned it was undeniably out of style and already a thing of the past. But he did show at least a half hearted willingness to let it grow up a little bit. And that’s plenty evident in
The Cowboys. Hardly my first viewing of the film but certainly the first time I’ve sat and watched it from start to finish in a rather long time. Had forgotten how poignant and honest a film it is. An aging American heirloom like John Wayne largely gets to sit back and play mentor to a surly, unruly bunch of boys who get drunk, talk about whores, and cuss and fight. I have to imagine Duke relented a lot of his notorious creative control and followed director Mark Rydell’s lead on a lot of this because it feels less like a John Wayne vehicle and more like something he might have done thirty or forty years prior, and that’s sign on to serve a director’s vision. Watching him bark at and then later come to deeply care about these little shits is genuinely quite moving. I’ve seen a few people who aren’t fond of this film (or, frankly, of John Wayne in his entirety who I will readily admit was a son of a bitch) that want to argue that the film’s message is insidious because Wayne’s character “leads the boys into violence”. Which I think is pretty well bullshit. He takes their guns and locks them away early on, instructs them to keep their heads down when trouble arises and then only resorts to violence to protect them and dies for it. Uses his dying words to try and get them to go home. When the boys choose to avenge his death, it is displayed as an act of defiance. Right, wrong or indifferent, their response to his murder is treated as the exact opposite of his instructions. Which I think is a rather inspired choice and something that Wayne probably deserved to be commended for allowing to make the final cut, considering how protective he was of his image as a badass. That all of the kids are actually quite good in their roles is also one of the film’s bigger accomplishments. They hang with Wayne every step of the way and you come to care a great deal about all of them. I will admit it’s kind of a stretch that these children, and they
are children and not twenty somethings masquerading as children, could become a death squad that can take down a gang of rustlers in the last leg of the film but I’ve bought enough into the journey for the previous two hours that I hardly care about the threat of exaggeration looming in the home stretch. Plus, when you got Roscoe Lee Browne (who is wonderful in the film and consistently makes me laugh out loud whenever these kids piss him off) delivering an absolutely
electric monologue that announces them descending upon the gang like wolves, how can’t I get wrapped up in that? Speaking of electric performances, I’d honestly forgotten how little (in the grand scheme of things) he’s actually in it but Bruce Dern is such a motherfucker here. Pretty much doomed himself to play the bad guy for all of eternity by taking this role but with a face like that, maybe it was just inevitable. One of my favorite stories is Wayne telling him the world would hate him for killing him and Dern saying he’d be a hero at Berkeley. And, full disclosure, Duke was right. My father has nursed a fifty year hatred for Dern (while acknowledging he’s a terrific actor) and a completely inability to imagine him as anything other than a scoundrel. He’s genuinely unhinged and frightening here. But he’s also a fucking weasel who picks on little boys and shoots old men who beat his ass fair and square in the back. I think very few people have ever been as punchable as when he starts breaking that kid’s glasses with a grin on his face. That fight scene between the two of them is handled pretty masterfully. The John Williams completely disappearing and all you can hear and see are their punches and their breathing getting more erratic and their faces getting bloodier. Rydell seemed to understand what an opportunity he’d been afforded by getting to do the impossible and kill the Duke and he treats it like a massive fucking deal. It is genuinely startling seeing Dern and his gang walk over John Wayne’s dying body sprawled on the dirt. One of the many expertly crafted images scattered throughout the entire thing. Others are hardly as vile, including a gorgeous panning zoom of Wayne and Browne watching over the boys as they’re gathered around a campfire with a guitar. None move me nearly as much as the shot of them all standing over his grave sight, and you can see how much they’ve changed and hardened over the course of this journey. Somehow such young faces, most of whom can’t be any older than thirteen, look like they’re made of stone. Perhaps the last true epic of John Wayne’s legendary career. A lot of stirring and poignant meditations on mortality and death and innocence. There’s a simple, quaint beauty to the way this film depicts boyhood. That Wayne was willing to relent some on his family friend formula and showcase these kids as rebellious hellions who get into the whiskey bottle and work up the nerve to talk to sex workers and curse up a storm, all in desperate attempts to grow up because they think that’s what they should do, shows how much he believed in the story and how willing he was to let it play out uncompromised by his instincts. But it also never forgets that they’re children in a man’s world, and it shows that they face incredible odds but have gained the fortitude to overcome those odds. A really wonderful, funny, harrowing, moving film. Far quieter and more contemplative than I’d remembered. Have to imagine this one’s gonna touch home in a whole different way about thirty years from now when I’m the same age as Wayne’s Wil Anderson, when I’m the one looking back on what it meant to be young. Looking forward to it.
“You have to go out and prove yourself in the world. I guess that's right.”
