Rooster Cogburn (1975)

Please don't spend money on this.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

. . . Ay-Ya, it's none other than the Connecticut Yankee herself, Katharine Hepburn, angling for that elusive fourth Best Actress Oscar if she can pull off the Miracle of bringing Salvation to that most Unrepentent scoundrel, Rooster Cogburn. Ol' Rooster has slaughtered scads of Abolitionist families as a Confederate Civil War "raider," in his failed attempt to coddle the lazy Southern cotton plantation guys and their Racist System of Genocidal Black Slavery. Instead of being hung for his status as a traitor and a War Criminal, this Chicken Man has hit the reset button on his Rolodex of Death, and started enumerating his Quasi-Legal murders in a U.S. Marshal capacity from Absolute Zero. However, in just eight years this crowing bully has notched 60 kill shots among his 64 gun attacks--a fatality rate that only a back-shooting sniper could achieve, as any REAL military man will tell you. His renegade judicial enabler points this out in stripping Rooster of all authority as this sequel opens, but immediately defies his better angel by reinstating the drunken killing machine for the quality of his "Blue Spit" (caused by 86-proof Bourbon and 14% alcohol Beer). Even the AFR!CAN QUEEN can't salvage THIS geezer; she'd have to look for her next Oscar ON GOLDEN POND. However, with the NRA running what passes for the American Government nowadays, an open-carrying Rooster could lurch into nearly any public gathering in America, and feel as comfortable shooting off his mouth as a Chicago Cop.

Rooster J. Cogburn (John Wayne) is the deputy Marshall for the western district of Arkansas and the Indian Nation. He has already killed 60 suspects in 8 years. Judge Parker takes his badge. Breed (Anthony Zerbe) leads a group of US Calvary into an ambush by Hawk (Richard Jordan) and his men. They steal the nitro to use for a bank job. Parker offers Rooster $500 for the return of the dynamite and $1500 for the arrest of Hawk. He tracks them to an Indian settlement where they killed many including the Minister. The minister's daughter Eula Goodnight (Katharine Hepburn) insists on joining Rooster with Indian boy Wolf.Wayne and Hepburn have some good banter but it overtakes the movie. Instead of a really hard man, he's simply a kindly old guy set in his way. He's not even that drunk. The overall tone of the movie is too light which takes away from the hard edge of the material and the action. This is like The African Queen done with a nudge and a wink. Both Zerbe and Jordan are good solid character actors and they both are good villains. Although it may be better to have only one to solidify that position.

Now that the two stellar co-stars are long gone, the truth can be told:Rooster Cogburn is turkey, a formulaic film designed by the marketing department, written by a writer paid by the word, directed by a producer who was faking it. Some posters praise the chemistry between Wayne and Hepburn. What chemistry? They seem to be reading their lines off a Teleprompter, and in a great hurry. This trivia tidbit tells it all:-- Director Stuart Millar insisted on so many takes that eventually John Wayne snapped, "God damn it Stuart, there's only so many times we can say these awful lines before they stop making any sense at all." --A better director might have been able to get truer performances out of these great stars, but Millar, a fine producer but apparently a talentless director, got little more than worn pennies. A good director would have told them to slow down, breathe, react and interact. Or just let these stars alone. There's not much of a plot, and the writer doesn't do much of setting up the relationship; Hepburn just suddenly decides to tag along with Wayne, after the promised posse just happens to not show up, and Wayne puts up very little argument against what should have been absolutely against his code. So the setup has little credibility to begin with. The comparison with African Queen is obvious, too obvious, complete with a ride down the rapids. It sets Rooster Cogburn a very high standard to live up to, and it falls flat. It looks like some movie execs figured it was a can't-fail formula. In African Queen there was some tension in the initial relationship between Hepburn and Bogart, two odd fish brought together, but both transform the other, so you get personality development in the film.But in Cogburn there is no personality development, and way too much chatter that makes you want to fall asleep. Hepburn is constantly spouting platitudes and homilies, while Wayne has little more than cornball lines. The other movie this inevitably gets compared with is The Shootist, Wayne's next and last film with Lauren Bacall (ironically, Bogart's long, faithful wife.) Here, Wayne showed he could still act, and there was real chemistry between Wayne and Bacall. I suspect when Bacall looks out the window crying, the tears were real, though she may have also been thinking of Bogie, who, like Wayne, died of lung cancer. By the 1970s the problem was not that audiences were tired of Westerns so much as that it was hard to find new angles on this genre. Cogburn tries, but needed a less routine plot. Rooster Cogburn falls into the "end of the cowboy era" Western, with the judge firing him for killing too many bad guys, but fails to develop the theme. The Shootist, on the other hand, succeeds wonderfully. Like Westerns at their best, it uses the genre to tell the story of a man dying of cancer, alone in a world that no longer has any use for gunslingers, who did good but was hated by almost everyone. You see some similarities in "Monte Walsh" decades later. It is the movie Rooster Cogburn tried to be. In short, a great Western transcends its genre. Rooster Cogburn, unfortunately, barely rises above a B movie, even with the heavy lifting of its stars.The low point in the movie is a plastered Wayne doing skeet shooting and never missing, but who can't stand up on his own, and then drives off with a wagon full of nitroglycerin, which could have blown up even with the most careful, sober handlers. The movie would have been better off if it had. Cogburn is full of such improbable details. Why are they hauling bottles of nitroglycerin when there are also crates labeled dynamite? Dynamite, invented in 1867, is stable in transport, and made nitroglycerin, which is extremely unstable and dangerous, obsolete. Obviously, based on the movie's rating, there are fans of John Wayne who will watch anything he's made. But fans of Katherine Hepburn will be appalled, for Rooster Cogburn is a disgrace to her memory. It is by far the worst movie she ever made; I can't think of anything even close. If you imagine seeing this movie without knowing who the two stars are, what you are left with is a lethargic, overly long chase with some of the most atrocious dialog every committed by a major studio. The script is garbage that leaves a bad taste long after seeing it. So, minus the stars, this movie would rate somewhere between a 4 and a 2. It is really that bad.Still, John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn could have been great in a Western together. I would have loved to have seen them in Going' South, instead of Jack Nicholson and Mary Steenburgen, especially in that scene with the brass bed and ropes. Hmmmm. You know, that's what Rooster Cogburn needed: for the Duke to tie Hepburn up and stick a gag in her mouth.

That's the hero of African Queen of course and as many others have noted, you can't help but think of it while watching John and Kate interact. I've seen almost every picture John Wayne made after 1939 but waited until near the last to watch this one because I just couldn't believe it would live up to True Grit and it doesn't. About ten minutes into the film there's a scene with Rooster dancing around his back room apartment singing about being retired that almost made me turn it off. That's not the Rooster Cogburn I knew and loved from True Grit, not even close -- it's not even Charlie Allnut. My main problem with this movie is that I would have preferred it not to be a sequel to True Grit -- that story and the Rooster Cogburn character is somewhat sacred to me and if they weren't going to be true to them, why not just make it a generic John Wayne vehicle of the time? There's a lot to like about the movie so I give it a recommend. There's the genial inter-action between the two stars who don't let the mediocre script and story get in the way. The scenery is fine, really beautiful and to me that means a lot in a western. Though the script is poorly written, the story is actually pretty good. However, in addition to the crime of tarnishing the memory of a great film and performance, the direction is poor and the bad guys just chew up the dialogue in ham-handed fashion so it's not a very high recommend. Maybe you're better off to skip this one and do what I'll be doing this afternoon, watch True Grit.