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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