The Cowboys

Set during the gold rush, The Cowboys centers on rancher Wil Andersen, whose hired hands quit to seek their fortunes in the gold fields. With a herd to deliver before winter and his livelihood at stake, Andersen takes on a group of schoolboys as his crew and sets out to turn them into working cowboys. What begins as a hard lesson in cattle driving becomes more dangerous when a gang of cattle thieves begins tracking the herd.

Mark Rydell directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr. and William Dale Jennings, whose novel the story draws on. It was the first of the director's features. John Wayne leads the cast as Andersen, appearing alongside Roscoe Lee Browne as the cook Jebediah Nightlinger and Bruce Dern as the outlaw Long Hair, with Colleen Dewhurst and young performers including Alfred Barker Jr. and Nicolas Beauvy among a credited cast of forty-six.

Released in January 1972 and running 134 minutes, the film cost about six million dollars and returned roughly eight million worldwide, a modest result for a Warner Bros. production. Audiences have rated it 7.4 out of ten on IMDb from around seventeen thousand votes and 7.1 out of ten on TMDB from a much smaller sample, indicating a durable reputation among viewers of the western genre.