Product Details

• Actors: Glenn Ford, Jack Lemmon, Anna Kashfi, Brian Donlevy, Dick York
• Directors: Delmer Daves
• Writers: Dalton Trumbo, Edmund H. North, Frank Harris
• Producers: Julian Blaustein
• Format: Color, Live, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Simitar Entertainmen
• VHS Release Date: November 6, 1996
• Run Time: 92 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303928234
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,712 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This sturdy Delmer Daves picture--his third with Glenn Ford, following Jubal and 3:10 to Yuma--is one of the most offbeat Westerns ever. And it must be the most writerly, 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, etc. 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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How could they release this in Pan & Scan????, June 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Cowboy (DVD)

This is a wonderful look at the "real" West for a change; warts and all. BUT, and it is a big BUT, it needs to be seen as originally filmed not cut for television. Neverthless I'll keep this copy and then buy it again when it is released in Widescreen. Why do those who support the rights of directors and complain when someone "messes" with "their" product think nothing of chopping a film to fit a televion screen.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay Movie, Poor DVD, January 31, 2005

By 

RW - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cowboy (DVD)

This is a decent DVD, if you don't mind that 27.9 percent of the original theatrical image has been removed for the DVD exhibition, so that the DVD image fills your entire 4:3 television screen (theatrical aspect ratio - 1.85:1; DVD aspect ratio - 4:3). If you're okay with that, enjoy!

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really the West, October 12, 2004

By 

Steven Hellerstedt "SH" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cowboy (DVD)

There are some movies that force you to contemplate issues swimming in the deep end of the pool. The dvd for COWBOY contains a few trailers, one for COWBOY itself. In it star Jack Lemmon proudly boasts that COWBOY is "really the best, really the west." Amen, brother. The cattle drive this movie takes you on is unlike most others, an adult western as they measured such things in the late `50s.

Lemmon plays tinhorn Frank Norris, a hotel clerk who has a romantic notion about the cowboy life, and Glenn Ford plays Tom Reese, cattle boss and ramrod teflon-coated against the romance of the open range, who reluctantly takes Lemmon on.

There's a dispensable romantic subplot to this one, included only to provide Lemmon with a breakable romantic notion and a reason to want to go south (his forbidden love lives with a protective father in Mexico.) COWBOY is about what happens on the trail, and not much of it is good. Ford's trail gang contains an assortment of deviants and sociopaths enough to make a barbarian blush. Among the wranglers is a character who ate the "left haunch" of a Comanche warrior and is ribbed unmercifully for it. A prank turns fatal and rather than meditate on the meaning of life, the instigator attempts to steal the victim's boots. When an amorous wrangler precipitates a brutal fight with a jealous boyfriend and his gang the wrangler's pardners vamoose before the knives are drawn. COWBOY has a strong anti-romantic message; life on the trail is a dehumanizing experience. Lemmon is at first horrified and then embittered, his anger mainly directed at boss Ford for allowing it. An interesting and nice feature of this smart film is watching the Lemmon and Ford characters evolve along the drive. Lemmon turns hard and mean, while Ford softens up a bit.

The intelligent script is the work of Edmund North and an uncredited Dalton Trumbo. It's based on Frank Harris's My Reminiscences As a Cowboy (1930), one of many real-life cowboy stories published in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Texan historian and folklorist J. Frank Dobie called Harris's book "a blatant farrago of lies". Dobie's judgment is what led me to the deep end. COWBOY was obviously marketed as an adult "really" real alternative to the sugar-coated pap westerns of the 50s. I'm not quite sure what a "blatant farrago" is, but I assume Dobie was in a high lather when he wrote that. In any event, one side says realistic and the other blatant lies. I guess I'd call it myth-busting, probably a lot more shocking in 1958 than it is today. We've been bombarded with a series of myth-busting real west Western in the last fifty years.

On the first pass it seems odd to cast Lemmon and Ford in a western. They're more urban characters, and the 50s were saturated with competent Western actors. My guess it was a conscious decision by director Delmer Daves (who directed Ford in the classic 3:10 TO YUMA the previous year) to go against the grain some.

Warning - those offended by scenes of animal cruelty should be aware that in one scene chickens are buried up to their necks and cowboys compete to pull them out while riding galloping horses. Those offended by chintzy props shouldn't play too close attention to the scene with the fierce bull and his a-little-too-obviously red rubber horns.