Cowboy
[DVD]

Description

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Tempers flare and fists fly in Cowboy, an action-packed sagebrush classic based on the real-life adventures of a young tenderfoot turned tough cattleman. Glenn Ford stars as Tom Reece, a range-hardened trail boss who has just arrived in Chicago after months on the plains. When he loses all his money in a high-stakes poker game, he reluctantly accepts a $3,800 loan from hotel desk clerk Frank Harris (Academy Award(r) winner* Jack Lemmon) in exchange for a piece of his cattle business. Frank, a would-be cowboy, has fallen hopelessly in love with Maria Vidal (Anna Kashfi), the voluptuous daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher. Though her father forbids the lovers from seeing each other again, Frank holds Tom to their partnership agreement, and forces the feisty wrangler to take him on the cattle drive to Maria's hometown of Guadalupe. There, the two men find all the excitement they can handlein this all-star Technicolor tale of fiery emotions and dangerous desires. AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW Cowboy is both a sturdy Delmer Daves picture--his third with Glenn Ford, following Jubal and 3:10 to Yuma--and also one of the most offbeat Westerns ever. It must be the most true to form too, with Frank Harris's memoirs as the source and a picaresque screenplay by Edmund H. North and Dalton Trumbo (a blacklistee, credited only posthumously). There's a pileup of oddities and complications at the outset, with Chicago hotel clerk Harris (Jack Lemmon) already in mid-romance with a daughter of the Mexican aristocracy (Anna Kashfi--Mrs Marlon Brando at the time), and Texas cattleman Tom Reese (Ford) storming in to commandeer an entire floor of the hotel for him and his drovers so they can party 'till, well, the cows come home. Partying is curtailed when Reese loses big at cards; Harris bails him out with his savings, and Reese finds he's taken on not only an unwanted partner but a tenderfoot besides. Soon everyone is headed south. Cowboy merits its bedrock title. This is a rare Western in which the job of breaking horses, trail herding, and so on, figures as a dynamic aspect of the storytelling. The film also has a blunt and original way of looking at death, not as a genre convention but as something abrupt, ungainly, and often absurd, in both senses of the word. (This applies equally to men and cattle, by the way.) The camerawork is trim, angular, and somehow precarious, and the jagged editing hustles the very eventful proceedings to a close in barely an hour and a half. Saddle up. --Richard T. Jameson, Amazon.com

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