{"id":23867,"date":"2017-11-20T06:41:56","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T11:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=23867"},"modified":"2017-11-20T07:21:35","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T12:21:35","slug":"the-cowboys-movie-review-for-grandparents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=23867","title":{"rendered":"The Cowboys &#8211; a movie review for grandparents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/t2.gstatic.com\/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTUHKEYCei7ncH5CfnYlzvo6nNM6vlIC75GhxFrlD7k3o-xcdyd\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m always thinking back on movies I think will appeal to my grandsons. <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=22195\">Beau Geste<\/a> was a hit and so was John Wayne&#8217;s 1972 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0068421\/\"><strong>The Cowboys<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t seen the movie since I turned voting age 45 years ago but my recollection was that it was a great ride about an old cowhand forced to hire school boys to drive his cattle to market. Being made in the hippy era I thought the worst sins of Hollywood would be modest and for the most part this turned out to be correct. Claudia was worried about Native American&#8217;s getting the short end of the stick but I couldn&#8217;t recall that they made any appearances at all. One of my Grandsons traces a slice of his ancestry back to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.familysearch.org\/wiki\/en\/Five_Civilized_Tribes\">the Five Civilized Tribes<\/a> which calls for a little extra sensitivity.<\/p>\n<p>There was just a hint of the subject. One <em>boy<\/em> shows up with an attitude and a 30-dollar gun. Asked by Wayne about himself when he tries to join the drive he tells Wayne that he&#8217;s &#8220;a mistake of nature.&#8221; Could he be part Indian? The fight he starts with a school boy moments later starts with his insult in Spanish about another boy&#8217;s mother. The other boy knows enough of the language to take exception to the remark. John Wayne takes the &#8220;mistake&#8217;s&#8221; gun and kicks him out despite his remarkable display of horsemanship. What follows is a nod to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0001976\/bio\">Horst Buckholz&#8217;s<\/a> role in the Magnificent Seven with the mistake shadowing the Cattle Drive until he rides to the rescue winning redemption, gratitude and acceptance. <\/p>\n<p>The film also deftly handles race when the drive&#8217;s cook shows up. He&#8217;s not who Wayne&#8217;s character hired. He&#8217;s black, courtly, confident and a raconteur. The N word is bruited about two or three times in impeccable usage that showed the sting but redounded against its users. After the movie it led to a followup conversation with my youngest grandson. What is the &#8220;N word&#8221; he asked and without saying the word I explained. Then he wanted to know what the &#8220;C word&#8221; was. <\/p>\n<p>Unlike boys of my generation my grandsons rarely see cowboy themed entertainment. It took a while for my younger son to get into the story-line of a gold rush emptying out cattle country of cowhands. I particularly enjoyed the short appearance of Slim Pickens as a barkeep. Early on there was some brotherly get-under-the-skin foot-kicking back and forth on our sofa but the movie grabbed their attention by the time the &#8220;cow<em>boys<\/em>&#8221; aged 10 to 15 had to prove their mettle by riding a nasty little bronco for a count of ten to be signed up for the drive.<\/p>\n<p>Wayne chews up the scenery as expected in his familiar role as a cowboy icon. At the end of his career he also played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit and a dying ex gunman in his final picture, &#8220;The Shootist.&#8221; His Wil Anderson in <strong>The Cowboys<\/strong> is a satisfying role and the only false note for me was a scene where &#8220;Wil&#8221; cures a stutterer with a conservative tongue-lashing about growing up. It works, of course, as it never would in reality. However, Wayne&#8217;s terse, no-nonsense, screenwriter polished, conservativism is vastly more eloquent and appealing than the vitriol being tweeted today from our seven-year-old Commander and Chief. Sad.<\/p>\n<p>The chief reward for a kid watching this movie is the idea that young kids can step up and take on the tough jobs adults do &#8211; even using guns in the heat of battle. Sometimes it comes at a cost, as it does in the movie. My <em>alphabet word<\/em> curious youngest wiped tears away once, but this movie doesn&#8217;t coddle its audience. Instead, it routes Bruce Dern&#8217;s nasty cattle rustlers and gets the cattle to Belle Fourche as you knew it would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m always thinking back on movies I think will appeal to my grandsons. Beau Geste was a hit and so was John Wayne&#8217;s 1972&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,130],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23867"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23879,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23867\/revisions\/23879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}