Roscoe Lee Browne

(On Cable TV, July 2021) My indifference to John Wayne is vast and profound, but I liked The Cowboys more than I thought largely because of his place in it. For one thing, my perennial crack about Wayne being best portrayed as a cranky bigoted uncle has seldom been better incarnated than here, as he plays a rancher forced to hire a gaggle of boys in order to complete a cattle drive. The film thus has him explicitly assume a semi-parental role toward an ensemble cast, and doesn’t really mince his portrayal as a tough taskmaster. (There’s also another reason why I like Wayne here, but saying more would be even more spoilerrific than usual for me — although is it really a spoiler when it’s the first thing that almost everyone remembers from the film and the fifth line of the film’s Wikipedia entry?)  Wayne’s grumpy performance is somewhat offset by a warmer one from Roscoe Lee Browne as the other adult in the crew. The Cowboys is clearly a western made in the mould of other genre films — it clearly espouses the usual values of the genre, including that of linking manhood to violence, self-reliance and hanging with other men. It’s never subtle, but it can be entertaining as a big adventure for the eleven boys. It does crystallize an aspect of Wayne’s screen persona better than many other movies I’ve seen of him, and the western surroundings are well-photographed along the way. Even as a non-fan of Wayne, I wasn’t disappointed by The Cowboys.