John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [161]
“I thought it was an interesting idea,” Wayne told me. “It also took some of the responsibility off me because it wasn’t my own production. Mark Rydell produced and directed it. Did a fine job.”
Rydell was an actor who turned to directing for television before directing his third feature film, The Fox, in 1967. He followed that with the hugely enjoyable The Reivers in 1969. The Cowboys, only his third film, began filming in April 1971, on the San Cristobel Ranch, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. It had a budget of $6 million.
Rydell obviously didn’t believe Hawks’s theory about a major costar because Wayne’s major fellow players were the boys. He did, however, have fine support from Roscoe Lee Browne who was excellent as the cook who helps Wayne nursemaid the cowboys on route.
There was also a delightful cameo appearance from noted stage actress Colleen Dewhurst as the madam traveling in a wagon full of prostitutes which some of the boys come across.
Colleen told me, “I wasn’t sure what I would make of Duke Wayne, but we got on so well that he said to me when the opportunity arose, he’d like to do another picture with me. I had seen some of Duke’s films, and I could see why people liked him. But I felt that in The Cowboys he was playing more of a character part, and he seemed to enjoy doing it. I think he had a few disagreements with Mark Rydell, but there was never anything major. Rydell was really trying to get a different kind of performance out of Duke, and I think he succeeded.”
The Cowboys was a superior film, with an epic quality that had not been seen in a Hollywood Western since the early 1960s, thanks largely to the stunning Panavision photography of Robert Surtees.
But what really sets the film apart is the scene where Bruce Dern shoots Wayne in the back. “Usually when I die in my pictures, I go out in a blaze of glory,” said Wayne, “but the character I played in that picture was no gunfighter. Sure, he was a tough old boot, but he was a cattleman, not a gunman. So he turns his back on Bruce 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 302
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Dern—who I have to say was so good he should have been nominated for an Oscar—and gets shot in the back and dies. There’s no glory. No heroic death. I liked that. It was a real story.
“The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the violent way that the boys avenge my death. I mean, that was almost Sam Peckinpah stuff.
But Mark Rydell was a new breed of director, and he had a feel for what the public would go for.”
For a man who had spent his early years in films specializing as pathological killers, Bruce Dern was one of the most amiable and good-humored actors I’ve ever met. When I interviewed him at the Dorchester in London in 1978 (he was over promoting Coming Home), he told me, “I had always played small roles as heavies in films before The Cowboys. I’d been a villain in The War Wagon, I tried to kill Clint Eastwood in Hang ’Em High, and I had a go at bumping off Charlton Heston in Will Penny, so I figured I might as well be the guy who killed John Wayne by shooting him in the back.
But it was a good part. I got to play a really awful guy. There’s a scene where I grab one of the boys and I drag him into the river and just scare the shit out of him, and he really was scared. And so was his mother, who watched from the sidelines convinced I was going to drown her son. So to do that and kill Duke Wayne was something an actor doesn’t get to do very often.”
The film got better reviews than most of Wayne’s recent films.
Rex Reed wrote in the New York Daily News, “In The Cowboys all the forces that have made [John Wayne] a dominant personality as well as a major screen presence seem to combine in an unusual way, providing him with the best role of his career. Old Dusty Britches can act.”
When it opened at the Radio City Music Hall in January 1972, it surprised all concerned when it failed to pull in an audience, so it was moved to a smaller theatre. In London,