Prairie Free-for-AII

The Duke still rides tall. Trouble is that he doesn't ride often. John Wayne's advancing years (he is 63) are keeping him pretty much out of the thick of things these days. Instead of mixing it up with marauders or running rustlers out of town, the Duke can more often be seen back at the ranch trying to square some domestic difficulty or right a faulty romance. His glorious gun battle with Lucky Ned Pepper's boys in True Grit looks threateningly like a last blast, a melancholy six-gun Gotterdammerung.

Wayne's new movie, Chisum, casts him in the still uncomfortable role of paterfamilias, an aging, worldly-wise ranch owner who spends a good bit of time looking down from a mountain surveying his nearby spread. It is sometimes difficult from that vantage to determine what he has more of--acres or subplots. His niece Sallie (Pamela McMyler)--his brother's girl, daughter of the woman the Duke himself loved and lost--has come to stay. She has been seeing a good deal of that young trail hand from over at the Tunstall place, boy name of Billy Bonney (Geoffrey Deuel). Billy's rival of legend, a onetime buffalo hunter who calls himself Pat Garrett (Glenn Corbett), turns up one night, and that just sets things to steaming. Add an itchy killer for hire (Chris George), a sidewinder (Richard Jaeckel) bent on gunning Billy, and a bunch of cutthroats in the pay of a rich man (Forrest Tucker) looking to own the whole territory--well then, you got yourself a fair-sized prairie free-for-all.

Just when it appears as though this brawl is about to get out of hand, the Duke comes on and settles it all down. After a few furious fistfights, some ripsnorting, glass-shattering shoot-ups and a thunderous cattle stampede, things slip quietly back to normal. "Well," says one character, "everybody knows there's no law west of the Pecos and no God west of Dodge." The Duke smiles, and rides off to the top of that mountain again. There he sits and remembers, perhaps back to the days of the great John Ford westerns when a man could get himself shot for coming up with a line like that.

sbJay Cocks

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