The Cowboys

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General		Extras
Category	Western	Theatrical Trailer(s)	Yes, 1 - 1.85:1, 16x9, Dolby Digital 1.0 (3:02)
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	No
Year Released	1972	Commentary Tracks	No
Running Time	128:55 minutes	Other Extras	Featurette - Making Of "The Breaking Of Boys And The Making Of Men" (8:53)
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (75:54)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Mark Rydell
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	John Wayne Roscoe Lee Browne Bruce Dern Colleen Dewhurst
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$36.95	Music	John Williams

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Dolby Digital	5.1
16x9 Enhancement		Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 1.0, 192 Kb/s) Italian (Dolby Digital 1.0, 192 Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	2.20:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese German English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, in and after credits

    As is typical for a John Wayne vehicle, the story is not likely to be confused with the works of such notable "hacks" as William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. This really is just another take on the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood, a theme that has been seen in film since the time they were first invented. This particular take on the theme sees rancher Wil Andersen (John Wayne) with somewhat of a problem: 1,600 head of cattle and 100 horses to get from his ranch to Bellfush, 400 miles away, and no trail hands to do it with. Seems a little gold rush in the territory has seen all the hands, including those he hired, decide to test their luck on the fields. Left with little choice, Wil decides to recruit eleven local schoolboys to help him with his task, no mean feat considering that none of them have ever done anything like this before. The only real help he has on this extraordinary quest is Jebediah Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne), cook extraordinaire. Enter into the picture the obligatory bad guy, in the form of Asa "Long Hair" Watts (Bruce Dern), former jail resident turned cattle rustler after Wil knocks back his application to join the drive. Taking the eleven boys into his care, Wil sets out on the journey not just to Bellfush but to manhood for these boys. Naturally, things don't quite go according to plan, and the boys are forced to finish something they began without their mentor, thereby completing their journey to manhood.

    There is nothing really new here, and even towards the tail end of his great career, John Wayne proves that he still cannot really act. However, as he reached legend status, this became less of an issue as the roles he played suited his style admirably - True Grit and The Cowboys being two especially notable examples of this. His sheer presence on screen has rarely been equalled and with the benefit of years of experience he used that presence as well as he possibly could. Put simply, he carries this picture from go to not quite whoa, and he does it better than anyone else ever could. Everything else here is really completely subordinate to John Wayne, although Roscoe Lee Browne does a pretty fair job as the slightly acerbic cook and dispenser of worldly information. Bruce Dern is slightly over the top in the relatively minor role of Asa Watts, and really was not that convincing. The collection of virtually unknown talent making up the rookie trail hands were serviceable at best. Director Mark Rydell did a decent enough job with the direction here, and the cinematography is decent enough, too. However, this is not going to be confused with something like the infinitely more appealing The Searchers, released on DVD at the same time and therefore inevitably to what this film will be compared.

    The Cowboys is a solid enough film, rehashing a rather banal story. But hey, I can live with that just to return to those Saturday afternoon matinees when films of John Wayne were a staple.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced. It should be noted that this framing is slightly different to the 2.20:1 theatrical aspect ratio.

    Just where to begin with the video problems here is the question. Perhaps I was expecting too much after a succession of Warners releases along the lines of My Fair Lady and The Searchers which have shown how good older films can look on DVD. Since this is somewhat younger in vintage than those films, quite why it is such a poorish transfer will remain a great mystery to me. Most of the problems come from the way the film was shot I would think, but this really does not present much more than an average transfer as far as sharpness and definition are concerned. This really does lack a little in the detail stakes, and the resulting image is a little on the flat and indistinct side, and consequently tiring to watch. Shadow detail is especially poor and there is a whole lot of detail that must be buried in the film somewhere that we do not get to see. The Region 1 version has been accused of being poorly contrasted and it would seem that this is a fault shared with the Region 4 release. Clarity at times is quite poor, and the transfer suffers somewhat from grain problems. It also seems to suffer from quite extensive low level noise through extended portions of the film.

    The overall palette here is quite muted and dirty. Whilst this is obviously the way the film was intended to look, and indeed would be very convincing if we could really see it, it really does not come up well in this transfer owing to the myriad of problems it contains. This is a quite an anaemic-looking picture, and there is nothing here that remotely resembles vibrancy at all. Indeed, at times the tonal depth is so indistinct that I am almost satisfied that the director was aiming for this level of indistinct colouration. There is little here that would come anywhere near oversaturation of colours and colour bleed is similarly not an issue at all.

    The rest of the video transfer is not pretty at all. This is an extremely flawed effort that reminds me very much of transfers like The Great Escape or Thelma & Louise. It may well be that this transfer was prepared from a laserdisc master, but whatever the source, it is riddled with problems. None of them in their own right are too disgusting, but the cumulative effect is quite disturbing. There seemed to be a degree of blockiness about the transfer that I have rarely seen on DVD. The worst example is around the 63:45 mark, where there is a quite distinct patch of something very ugly. Other than that, there were no other significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer.

    If you are intending to watch this DVD on a large screen then be warned: there is a constant, often mildly serious problem throughout the transfer of shimmer. In fact, there is probably more here than I recall in any film outside of Backdraft which was notoriously bad in this regard. It is especially prevalent in the background, which may be the result of the combination of the grain and noise problems. There was also a fairly noticeable instance of moiré artefacting at the 16:30 mark.

    If you recall with fondness those inherent faults of VHS tapes like the white interference lines across the picture, you will get to see one here too, at around the 72:26 mark It was this problem that caused me to speculate upon this being a laserdisc master. Compounding all of these problems were a nice selection of film artefacts of both the black and white varieties. Some were just a tad on the noticeable side, and this was far more of a problem than I was anticipating based upon prior Warners efforts. As suggested, there is nothing here that is really ugly in its own right, but the cumulative effect of all of the problems is just far too distracting to the film. There clearly has been no remastering done on this film at all.

    This is an RSDL formatted disc, with the layer change coming at 75:54. This is during the intermission and therefore is completely non-disruptive to the film.

Audio

    There are three audio tracks on this DVD, being an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, a French Dolby Digital 1.0 soundtrack and an Italian Dolby Digital 1.0 soundtrack. It should be noted that the packaging refers to the latter two soundtracks as being in Dolby Digital 5.1, but Michael D's trusty PowerDVD says they are Dolby Digital 1.0. Listening confirms that PowerDVD is right and the packaging wrong: it also confirms that the French soundtrack seems a little shrill whilst the Italian soundtrack is a little brighter. Apart from brief samplings however, I stuck with the English soundtrack.

    The dialogue was generally clear and easy to understand throughout the transfer.

    There did not appear to be any problems with audio sync in the transfer.

    The original musical score is from some bloke named John Williams. Yes, he actually did do some good stuff before that sci-fi film done by George Lucas, and this is a nice example of it. The man is the master of his field and few can even approach him on the basis of one sterling film score, let alone match his consistency of excellence. Sure, this is not the best thing he has ever done (and there are plenty of arguments over which is the best film score he has done) but this is better than most could have come up with. This is another of those occasions when an isolated music score would have been very nice.

    Whilst this is not the greatest Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that you will ever hear, it beats the socks off the Dolby Digital 1.0 efforts. Whilst I am only guessing here, the film probably relied very heavily on ADR work, with the result that in the remastering of the soundtrack into a 5.1 mix, the lack of real direction in the sound is brought out just a little. The overall soundscape just lacks a little in terms of believability: the dialogue at times seems to be coming from a slightly different direction than the visuals. The soundscape is also just a little on the flat side and really could have benefited a little from a bit more in the way of dynamics. The surround channels were not especially well used and the bass channel could have been a lot more supportive of the action. I was especially unimpressed by the lack of decent ambience out of the rear channels, and when the opportunity did arise (such as bird noises during one night scene) for such usage, the sounds were still mixed out of the front channels. At least the sound was free of any distortion. Overall, it is a decent enough soundtrack, but could and should have been a lot better.

Menu

Featurette - The Breaking Of Boys And The Making Of Men (8:53)

Theatrical Trailer (3:02)

• Production notes
• Trailers to thirteen other John Wayne films
• Snapper case packaging

    A highly problematic video transfer.

    A good if unremarkable audio transfer.

    A decent but problematic extras package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
22nd August 2000