Rooster Cogburn" was John Wayne's penultimate film; his last was to be "The Shootist" from a year later. Here he repeats his role as U.S. Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, the role which he had made famous in "True Grit" and which brought him his only Oscar. "True Grit" was ostensibly set in Oklahoma but was actually shot in Colorado; here the action is ostensibly set further east, in Arkansas, but the film was shot even further West, in Oregon.
The film opens with Cogburn being stripped of his Marshal's badge by a judge on the grounds of drunkenness and his "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude. Soon afterwards, however, his badge is restored to him on the grounds that his style of law enforcement is exactly what is needed to combat a desperate gang of outlaws operating in the area, the authorities having realised that lawmen who ask questions first and shoot later end up dead, shot by the bad guys before they have finished asking their first question. The film then explores how Cogburn goes about his task, aided by Eula Goodnight, a spinster schoolteacher whose preacher father has been murdered by the villains and Wolf, a young Indian whose family have met the same fate.
Vincent Canby, film critic of the New York Times, called "Rooster Cogburn" "a high-class example of the low Hollywood art of recycling". The basic plot- "tough lawman takes on a gang of desperados"- was already an over-familiar one in Westerns by 1975. The film's two most original features are the age of the leading man- at 68 Wayne was considerably older than the average Western action hero- and the active role taken by its leading lady. Despite her rather prim manner- she objects to Cogburn's drinking and profanity- Eula is no passive shrinking violet but a tough lady who can ride and shoot as well as any man and is determined to avenge her father's death. I suspect that Eula (whose father is still alive at the beginning of the film) was originally supposed to be younger than Cogburn, but the role went to Katharine Hepburn, who was the same age as Wayne. (They were born in the same month, May 1907).
I would not rate the film as highly as "The Shootist", which I regard as a masterpiece, but it is at least as good as "True Grit" and considerably better than Wayne's antepenultimate film, the disappointing police drama "Brannigan". It was the only film in which Wayne and Hepburn, two of the most iconic stars of their generation, acted together, probably because Wayne tended to specialise in Westerns and war films, two genres with which Hepburn was not normally associated. She is, however, excellent here, playing in one of her few Westerns a character similar to the one she had created in "The African Queen", one of her few war films, more than twenty years earlier. There was to be no Oscar for Wayne this time, but he is at least as good as he had been in "True Grit". Much of the appeal of the film lies in the way in which Cogburn and Eula, who are about as different from one another as it is possible for two characters to be, nevertheless manage to work together.
Director Stuart Millar handles the action sequences well and there is some striking photography of the Western landscapes, probably the reason why, whatever the film's ostensible setting might be, shooting was moved to the Pacific North-West. The film could easily have ended up as the sort of dull, derivative Western adventure we had all seen too many times before, but Wayne, Hepburn and Millar combine to produce something which still remains worth watching forty years on. 7/10
The film opens with Cogburn being stripped of his Marshal's badge by a judge on the grounds of drunkenness and his "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude. Soon afterwards, however, his badge is restored to him on the grounds that his style of law enforcement is exactly what is needed to combat a desperate gang of outlaws operating in the area, the authorities having realised that lawmen who ask questions first and shoot later end up dead, shot by the bad guys before they have finished asking their first question. The film then explores how Cogburn goes about his task, aided by Eula Goodnight, a spinster schoolteacher whose preacher father has been murdered by the villains and Wolf, a young Indian whose family have met the same fate.
Vincent Canby, film critic of the New York Times, called "Rooster Cogburn" "a high-class example of the low Hollywood art of recycling". The basic plot- "tough lawman takes on a gang of desperados"- was already an over-familiar one in Westerns by 1975. The film's two most original features are the age of the leading man- at 68 Wayne was considerably older than the average Western action hero- and the active role taken by its leading lady. Despite her rather prim manner- she objects to Cogburn's drinking and profanity- Eula is no passive shrinking violet but a tough lady who can ride and shoot as well as any man and is determined to avenge her father's death. I suspect that Eula (whose father is still alive at the beginning of the film) was originally supposed to be younger than Cogburn, but the role went to Katharine Hepburn, who was the same age as Wayne. (They were born in the same month, May 1907).
I would not rate the film as highly as "The Shootist", which I regard as a masterpiece, but it is at least as good as "True Grit" and considerably better than Wayne's antepenultimate film, the disappointing police drama "Brannigan". It was the only film in which Wayne and Hepburn, two of the most iconic stars of their generation, acted together, probably because Wayne tended to specialise in Westerns and war films, two genres with which Hepburn was not normally associated. She is, however, excellent here, playing in one of her few Westerns a character similar to the one she had created in "The African Queen", one of her few war films, more than twenty years earlier. There was to be no Oscar for Wayne this time, but he is at least as good as he had been in "True Grit". Much of the appeal of the film lies in the way in which Cogburn and Eula, who are about as different from one another as it is possible for two characters to be, nevertheless manage to work together.
Director Stuart Millar handles the action sequences well and there is some striking photography of the Western landscapes, probably the reason why, whatever the film's ostensible setting might be, shooting was moved to the Pacific North-West. The film could easily have ended up as the sort of dull, derivative Western adventure we had all seen too many times before, but Wayne, Hepburn and Millar combine to produce something which still remains worth watching forty years on. 7/10