Then there's Jebediah Nightlinger, the cook and only other adult figure on the scene, who tries less hard than Wil to hide his enjoyment of the situation. "You'll do," Wil replies, about all the affection he gives or they want. "I hope I haven't ridden all the rough off her!" one offers as he hands back the reins. Another scene early on, just as classic, has Andersen deciding to give the boys a lesson with a wild mare, Crazy Alice, only to get taught a lesson in turn by these surprisingly spry youngsters, who each manage to prove themselves to Wil's wry chagrin. But there's a lot of joy in "The Cowboys", too. I can't figure it out." Seen through that prism, everything Andersen does with his young cowboys makes a lot of sense, right down to the famously grim finale with Bruce Dern, whose memorable "Long Hair" is one of the great Wayne-movie villains.
"They went bad on me," is about all he can say on the matter. The key to Andersen are those dead sons he has buried out in his spread back home. Wayne might seem out of place, yet he finds the right balance here between his characteristic latter-day gruff humorousness and the sterner stuff we remember from his classic turns in "Red River" and "The Searchers".
Picking up on the rougher theme of post-"Wild Bunch" westerns, it presents a modern sensibility where people swear and bleed profusely when shot or punched. John Wayne in his post-Oscar years didn't have much to prove, and many of his movies from that time play today as little more than agreeable trips to the well.
"It's not how you're buried, it's how they remember you," Wayne's Wil Andersen tells one of his charges, the half-breed Cimarron (A Martinez), and "The Cowboys" is a two-hour rumination on that theme, of how Andersen, a man whose hard-bitten ways cost him two sons, finds a sort of redemption with these boys who come to help him take his cattle 400 miles to Belle Fourche while the only menfolk are either off panning for gold or else aiming to get their fortune in seedier ways.
John Wayne led many a cattle drive, but there's something especially satisfying about this final turn on the trail, alongside ten young boys for what turns out to be a hardnosed yet winning salute to the Duke's legacy of manly comportment.
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