The drama is an often sentimental, if not melodramatic study on boys being guided into adulthood by an old man who grows increasingly more aware of his youth and mortality, and when it's not that, and more inconsequential, it tries to compensate for a lack of dramatic edge with other forms of edge. The film seems to try and freshening things up in a lot of ways, and is often successful, but when it's not, it dives pretty deeply into formula, if not predictability, and a little too superficially at times. I never could have imagined seeing John Wayne kick some butt alongside a nerd, yet here it is, and, you know, jokes aside, it does indeed make for a better film than it does a TV show, apparently, despite its flaws. Okay, maybe this film doesn't have quite the respectable ensemble cast of something like "How the West Was Won", because it even predated the moderate success that Robert Carradine saw in, well, of all things, "Revenge of the Nerds". before he was famous (Man, Bruce Dern is old). Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, Stephen Hudis, A Martiniez and - oh - Bruce Dern. I don't even know if this film is that much more successful than Rydell's other filmmaking endeavors, because it barely exceeded its budget upon release, which is shocking, considering that it stars such mega-stars as John Wayne. A good film doesn't necessarily make for a good television, yet that didn't stop Mark Rydell from going on to turn to TV after this film, at least for success. I'd say that it's a testament to the success of this film that it inspired an ABC program, but the TV spin-off to "How the West Was Won" didn't have but 25 forgotten episodes, and it was still way more successful than this film's spin-off.
I don't know if I'm more amused by the sheer genericism of this film's title, or the fact that it must not be that generic, seeing as how the only thing that took that title since this film was its TV series spin-off.
As many westerns as John Wayne has been involved in, at this point, he just quits and goes for a film that is simply titled "The Cowboys".
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