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As in Red River, Wil’s regular hands have deserted him to make easy money in a gold strike nearby, providing him an opportunity to recite his personal philosophy, “In my day, a man stayed with you on a handshake.”
Wayne turns down the offer of the villain, Long Hair (Bruce Dern), not because he is an ex-convict, but because he is a liar. But, unable to find help, he is forced to hire eleven youngsters, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen. Suspicious of their abilities, he is at first reluctant but, as in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” it takes his old friend Anse (Slim Pickens) to remind him of his youth, “How old were you when you went on your first drive” “What’s that got to do with it,” replies Wayne angrily. But his friend insists, “How old, Wil” “Thirteen,” Wayne snaps back, but he quickly adds, “I already had a beard.”
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During the cattle drive, the innocent and inexperienced youngsters grow up under Wayne’s tough guidance and demanding leadership. He instructs them how to use a gun, how to drink, and even lets them see a brothel. In other words, Wayne helps them to mature into manhood through many rites of passage. Wayne is a strict disciplinarian, but once again his toughness is more of an exterior. He threatens a lot, but in actuality, his worst deed is to push a dozing boy off his horse.
A benevolent father-figure, Wayne even gets to perform some miracles, curing a stuttering boy by teaching him how to curse, “You goddam, dirty sonnovabitch!” But he warns, “I would not make a habit of calling me that, son.” Responsible for the boys, he commands his cook, after having been shot, to see them back home safely. “A fellow always wants his children to be better than he was,” he tells them, “You are.”
A lot was written at the time about Wayne’s onscreen death, an unusual (even shocking) occurrence that some felt was no more than a gimmick. (See Film Comment). But it also serves screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. an occasion to show the impact of Wil’s death on his loyal wife Annie (Sarah Cunningham) and particularly on the boys.
The boys’ speech after Wayne’s death shows that they have been socialized effectively, that they have internalized his code of ethics. First, one says, “We’re burning daylight,” imitating his master’s call for an early start. Then another claims, also in Wayne’s vein, “It ain’t how you’re buried,” one says in Wayne’s vein, “it’s how you’re remembered,” placing Wayne’s tombstone where he died. In avenging Wil’s death, as if he were their real father, the boys also prove their own true grit.
Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys was even more self-referential and self-congratulatory than John Wayne’s previous Western, Chisum.
“In this one,” John Wayne said about his role, “I play a 60-year-old rancher with eleven kids under my wing, and I try to get all through a cattle drive.”
Aware of his repetitive screen roles as a paternal figure, he said the movie was based on formula that worked in Goodbye Mr. Chips and Sands of Iwo Jima. In all three films, an adult takes a group of youngsters and initiates them into manhood by instructing them the “right” skills and values.
Wayne did not hesitate to appear in The Cowboys, despite the fact that “no actor in his right mind, would try to match the antics of eleven kids on screen,” but for him it became “the greatest experience of my life.”
Director Mark Rydell was also aware of his image as authoritative father: “It’s about an old rancher in his declining years in his last cattle drive, and the boys bursting into young men before his eyes–the whole contrast of fathers and sons and ‘the king is dead, long live the king.'” What attracted Wayne to the role, Rydell said, was “the sense of passing on the mantle to a younger generation. I think he’s about ready.
Many articles on the actor’s paternalism, on and off screen, were written during the shooting of The Cowboy.” One feature in Seventeen entitled, “Do You Think of the Duke as Big Daddy” stated that Wayne had become a universal father figure in American culture. And Vincent Canby described Wayne in the N.Y. Times as “an almost perfect father figure,” whose fictional sons died because they went wrong. But most reviews were harsh about the film’s philosophy. One critic wrote that Wayne’s testament to the younger generation was “be like me, and you can’t go wrong,” and that “the West is safe,” because “we have with us a new generation of Waynes.”
Other critics opposed to The Cowboys message, that kids are old enough to kill, but not old enough to be initiated into sex. They called attention to the idea that “to kill, in cold anger, is not only justifiable in itself, but somehow the key to manhood,” as one critic noted.
Most damning of all was critic Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker: “The movie is about how these schoolboys become men through learning the old-fashioned virtues of killing.” Kael denounced the presentation of Wayne as “an idealized Western father figure,” summing up his philosophy as “there are good men and there are bad men; there are no crossovers or nothing in between. People don’t get a second chance around him; to err once is to be doomed.”
Credits:
Produced, directed by Mark Rydell
Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., based the novel The Cowboys by William Dale Jennings
Music by John Williams
Cinematography Robert L. Surtees
Edited by Robert Swink, Neil Travis
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date: January 13, 1972
Running time: 131 minutes
Budget $6 million
Box office $19,250,211
Cast
John Wayne as Wil Andersen
Roscoe Lee Browne as Jebediah Nightlinger
Bruce Dern as Asa Watts
Colleen Dewhurst as Kate Collingwood, traveling madam
Slim Pickens as Anse Peterson
Lonny Chapman as Mr. Weems
Sarah Cunningham as Annie Andersen
Allyn Ann McLerie as Ellen Price, teacher
