The Train Robbers (1973)

From what I've read and heard, overall, Duke loved children and had a soft spot for them-no doubt. Mark Rydell told how, on the set of The Cowboys, the kids were constantly "all over" Duke (I think he said something like Duke was like a big teddy bear to them). I know that there were certain elements Duke wanted in his film for emotional involvement, to keep them entertaining for families. There weren't many films tho, where I think he let youngsters have big scenes unless he liked them (or the story called for it-The Cowboys, Cahill, Donovan's Reef).

VERY TRUE - Both Elam and Martin were superb character actors that grabbed the audience's attention.

Peter Bogdanovich states that he was invited to direct Train Robbers but was unable to do so because of other commitments.

Lobby Card Mexicaine

I seem to remember this was one of the few movies Duke actually apologised in !!

From memory he also apologised in the Undefeated ..... did he say sorry in any other movies ?

Just posted to my Ben Johnson page (http://benjohnsonscreencaps.shutterfly.com)

Quote from joekiddlouischama

The Train Robbers (Burt Kennedy, 1973) is mildly entertaining and lightly enjoyable, and I certainly prefer it to Rooster Cogburn (Stuart Millar, 1975). However, it's also slight and simplistic, and it needed a richer writer-director than Burt Kennedy to bring out greater depths and darkness, the kind of intricacy and tension that could have made the film something more than disposable entertainment. I didn't feel that Kennedy set up the bizarre, comically ambiguous "twist' ending with appropriate development, either. On the brighter side, Wayne's performance is quite sharp and fluid, really marking an alert groove. I love the silent rage the he suddenly displays at the end of Ann-Margaret's drunken diatribe.

The Train Robbers is free of pretensions. It doesn't have to be more than it is. The film is focused on telling a straightforward story and depicting western characters in a certain way. Simplicity, not simplistic. Simplicity is not a bad thing, certainly not a flaw.

Quote from Robbie

This is one of John Waynes most forgotten movies, upon doing a search relating to this film I was surprised to realise how highly it is regarded by many who have watched it. Below is an interesting review by Roger Egbert which he did in 1973, his observation relating to the colour used in the movie is very interesting.

Burt Kennedy's "The Train Robbers" is a very curious Western, and it gets curiouser the more you think about it. I wonder if there's ever been a Western as visually uncluttered as this one. Most of the action takes place in the high desert around Durango, Mexico, and Kennedy goes for clean blue skies, sculpted white sand dunes and human figures arranged against the landscape in compositions so tasteful we're reminded of samurai dramas.
Aw, come on, you're probably thinking by now: What's all this crap about visual compositions? It's a John Wayne Western, isn't it? Is it any good, or not? Well, yes, it's fairly good, In a quiet and workmanlike sort of way, although there's a plot twist at the end that ruins things unnecessarily. But what's best about it, what makes it worth seeing, is Kennedy's visual approach to the subject of John Wayne. Wayne by now is an artifact, a national heirloom, one of the few immutable presences created by the movies. He is perhaps the only Western actor alive (maybe the only one ever) who can get away with scenes like this one: His group has been riding through the desert all day, pursued by a mysterious band of gunmen. They pull up at a small hacienda. Will they spend the night there? No, because Wayne hears a baby crying. There is likely to be shooting later on, and Wayne asks Ben Johnson: "Did you ever bury a baby? Well, neither did I, and I'm not about to start now. Ride on." They ride on into the night. Now this is honorable dialog; we agree with him; we're glad Wayne doesn't want to endanger the baby. And because it is John Wayne playing this scene, we never pause to realize that such a scene, and such dialog, would be ridiculously impossible in any other context. The audience would be howling if Steve McQueen or Paul Newman - or Robert Mitchum - tried the dialog.
Only Wayne can make plausible the morality in his Westerns. In the new Westerns, the ones by Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and their imitators, the West is a place of anarchy, sadism and routine bloodshed. It almost has to be. Apart from Wayne, there are no actors left who can get away with being decent Western heroes. Am I making this up? Think for a moment.
So. The Wayne character in "The Train Robbers" agrees to help a widow (Ann-Margret) recover some gold her husband had stolen some years before. She wants to return the gold to the railroad it was stolen from, to clear her husband's name and allow her young son to grow up proud. This seems like a sensible plan to Wayne, and he raises a band of friends (Ben Johnson, Rod Taylor, and two younger guns) to help the widow. Their payment will be the $50,000 reward money - although at the movie's end, they forgo even this.
There is a lot of action in the movie - blazing gun battles and stuff like that - but the movie's core is in the campfire scenes, when the characters talk about each other and their beliefs. The Wayne character, not to our surprise, turns out to be heroic in war and noble in peacetime, a subscriber to old moral codes. And it is here that Burt Kennedy's visual strategy comes in.
His material (he also wrote the movie) is, in the context of a Western being released in 1973, a little old-fashioned. The moral drives of Western heroes were fashionable in the 1950s, especially in the movies where John Ford directed Wayne. But no longer. In 1973, any plot exposition at all in a Western seems to drag.
So Kennedy wisely decided to eliminate absolutely every trace of visual clutter, and to shoot his movie with almost abstract clarity. The "town" at the beginning of the movie, for example, consists of two stark structures, a railroad track and a mountain on the horizon. There is not even a railroad crossing sign. Once out of town, the characters inhabit a landscape of horizons and clean natural lines. Kennedy goes for silhouettes and, as I've mentioned, for the kind of carefully casual arrangements of figures we find in samurai films - the Japanese Western.
The result is a movie that isolates the John Wayne mystique and surrounds it with the necessary simplicity and directness. It's too bad that the scale of the plot is a little too small for the scale of the characters, and too bad that Kennedy got in an ironic mood at the end. But he understands John Wayne, all right.

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I don't often find myself agreeing with Roger Ebert even when I find him interesting, which I usually do. But this is a fair review. I agree that Burt Kennedy's writing is not his best, but his story is sufficient, and it operates on traditional values that seem like virtues today because they are scarce and, if I may say so, needed. The Train Robbers harkens back to the late 1950s when Kennedy wrote those genuinely rugged, stoic, lean and terse westerns for Boetticher and Scott. Those were impressive films because they were so straightforward, minimalist, and austere. Dramatically The Train Robbers wants to unfold like Comanche Station (1960), Ride Lonesome (1958) and The Tall T (1957). That is how it's written. But it is timed longer and paced slower. It's a 75-minute western stretched out to 93 minutes. Perhaps it's just in the editing. The film is about fifteen-to-twenty minutes longer than it needs to be. If it were shorter, it would seem fuller and play out with more suspense. You wouldn't notice the holes. But you couldn't release a film that short in the 1970s, not with a major star in it.

Technically, the craftsmanship on display is something you rarely see today. Visually, the film is real western, true western. I wallow in the hard light, the rich color, and the pristine scenery. There is dust, rain with thunder and lightning, mountains and rivers, and sunlight bouncing off surfaces and hat brims like some kind of blessing. Through these elements and nature ride men with honor. It's a photographer's western. Cameraman William Clothier was worth his weight in gold -- why don't people talk more about him? This is where his finest western photography resides for all time. The film is all about composition and movement, the pleasure of watching men and horses move across vast pictorial landscapes. It's eye candy, and I have thought so ever since I first saw it at the Hicksville Twin on Long Island on a freezing cold afternoon in early 1973. I was there for the first screening on opening day.

I enjoy The Train Robbers and I prefer it over The War Wagon, The Undefeated, Cahill, and Rooster Cogburn. I think Big Jake could have benefited from Burt Kennedy giving the script his once-over and narrowing the focus on what's important. And getting rid of those damn motorcyles.

Richard

It's beyond me what you all see in this movie! During the day their being chased, or at night their sitting around a campfire watching Ann Margret get Tipsey. Rather watch the Conqueror!

Quote from wtrayah

It's beyond me what you all see in this movie! During the day their being chased, or at night their sitting around a campfire watching Ann Margret get Tipsey. Rather watch the Conqueror!

What I see, is as an immensely enjoyable film from the last part of Duke's career. It has all the right ingredients, even if they aren't mixed quite right, making for one his best of the final ten he made.

It never for one instant tries to be something that it isn't. It doesn't try to be of the grim and unrelentingly dark world of Peckinpah or midnight cowboy or Easy Rider. Instead this is John Wayne's response to the perverseness that was really beginning to show it's ugly head at the time. It's a throwback to those great and lighthearted films of the 40's and early 50's. It's a nice contrast to what was happening at the time.

Regarding the faceless threat represented by the guys after the gold, it was meant to represent an natural force more than anything else I think. After all where's there's gold, there is bandits. They were more symbolic than anything else.

One thing that I refuse to believe is that Rod Taylor is the voice of Pongo from 101 Dalmatians.

The only thing that still bothers me about this movie is that Montalban seems superfluous. He is really an unnecessary character, who's functions could have been done by the plot.

Quote from yomper

I seem to remember this was one of the few movies Duke actually apologised in !!

From memory he also apologised in the Undefeated ..... did he say sorry in any other movies ?

"Horse Soldiers," "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon," and "El Dorado".

I've been posting Train Robbers scans to my Ben Johnson webpage (http://benjohnsonscreencaps.shutterfly.com) this week and have a few more to go. Lasbugas has already posted some of the ones I've done for my page but I've got several more that haven't been posted here. Here's the first of those.

Quote from wtrayah

It's beyond me what you all see in this movie! During the day their being chased, or at night their sitting around a campfire watching Ann Margret get Tipsey. Rather watch the Conqueror!

There was one night attack in this movie in relation to the running off of horses.

Two more.

I enjoyed browsing Paula's Ben Johnson page. Everybody should take a look-see.

The last of my Train Robbers pictures.