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THE FLICK: Watching an actor as iconic as John Wayne finish out his career can be a painful thing. We’re not talking about some bit player from Omaha. This is John Wayne; a man who played essentially the same character in nearly 200 films over 5 decades and cemented himself into the national identity. So when that identity changed during the Vietnam era – from unquestioning patriotism to cynical mistrust – Wayne became a symbol of right-wing politics gone wrong. And very few members of the free love generation were able – or willing - to separate the actor from the man. Hence The Cowboys, probably Wayne’s best performance in the modern era (he would only make six more films) has slipped into a pile of half-forgotten Westerns the actor crammed into his fading career. His role as Wil Andersen doesn’t differ significantly from any of the other rough, tough cattlemen Duke has played over the years, but his approach to the material is shaded in nostalgia. Like Wayne himself, Wil Andersen is simply a man who wants to die with dignity. And The Cowboys lets him do just that. Forced to hire on a gaggle of school kids after his regular ranch hands bail out, Andersen finds himself serving as an unwilling father figure while they face a cross-country cattle drive through some of the meanest country in the West. Joined by an elegantly loquacious black cook (Roscoe Lee Browne) and trailed by a pack of devious ex-cons (led by a despicable Bruce Dern), Andersen gets a second chance at parenthood in the most trying of circumstances. Buoyed by a bouncy John Williams score and directed with great joie de vive by Mark Rydell, The Cowboys is exceedingly enjoyable simply as a family film. Although it takes a dark turn or two along the way, the story’s focus is on the colorful personalities of the kids and their journey to adulthood along the trail. Like a pre-pubescent Dirty Dozen, each comes with the own skill set and personal demons that have to be faced while Rydell’s mixed casting of professional child actors and experienced “cowkids” works brilliantly. But with over 30 years’ hindsight, The Cowboys seems much more than a boyhood fantasy. It’s an almost perfect eulogy for an actor who became larger than the roles he portrayed. And in a time when both John Wayne and the country that once embraced him were searching for direction, The Cowboys gave them both a sense of closure. THE FEATURES: Released in 1971, I’d wager The Cowboys looks better now on Blu-ray than it did on 35mm. But that’s what we’ve come to expect from the format and from Warner Bros. who’s been doing a bang-up job with their catalog releases. The 5.1 remix, while not overtly expansive, certainly provides a much better showcase for John William’s music. The extras are ported over from the standard-def release and begin with a great documentary, The Cowboys: Together Again, featuring a filmmaker and cast roundtable discussion full of fantastic stories about John Wayne and the joys of being a kid on a Western set. A vintage featurette produced in ’72, The Breaking of Boys and the Making of Men, offers up more onset footage of the making of the film. Director Mark Rydell also contributes his thoughts to a running commentary that gives great insight into his initial reticence to working with Wayne and how the actor defied his expectations.