Growing Up Absurd

By JAY COCKS

THE COWBOYS

Directed by MARK RYDELL

Screenplay by IRVING RAVETCH, HARRIET FRANK JR. and WILLIAM DALE JENNINGS

Wil Anderson, on the sunset side of 50, has to get his herd of cattle to market. The hands he hired for the drive ran out on him when they heard about the gold strike upriver. There is not a man left in the territory to help him, so Wil turns to boys--eleven eager, callow youngsters. He teaches them a little about roping and riding trail. He hires a black man named Jebediah Nightlinger to tend the chuck wagon. Then, uneasy with the entire proposition, he sets off.

The Cowboys sounds like a natural. Good premise, good Southwest locations, and John Wayne. Things go wrong, though, because of Mark Rydell's lallygagging direction and a remarkably inept, even vicious script.

In this moppet Red River, it is the Duke's responsibility to nudge the boys to manhood. This involves him not only as a trail boss and referee but as a speech therapist. He cures one of the kids of a bad stutter by riling him until the boy can call Duke half a dozen kinds of a son of a bitch without a single stumble.

When the bad guys show up, things really fly to pieces. A grubby band of desperadoes led by Bruce Dern (in a splendidly bravura performance) want in on the drive and the profits. Duke shoos them off, but they skulk along behind the cows, waiting to make a move. When they do, Dern and Duke mix it up, and Dern finally gets the best of it. Aided by Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne), the kids vow vengeance.

Ultimately The Cowboys suggests that you are not a man until you have murdered. These children dispatch Dern in an act of outright sadism all the more chilling for its apparent dispassion. Yet Rydell and the screenwriters seem to be congratulating them on their new-found machismo. The Cowboys is no investigation of the inherent evil of the young, like Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica. Nor does it have the awful irony of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (TIME, Dec. 20), in which heroism turned into savagery. Here savagery is seen as heroism.

The ever-fallible Motion Picture Association of America rated The Cowboys GP (all ages permitted, parental discretion advised), and Warner Brothers is pushing it as a swell movie for the whole family.

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