prionx87
The shot composition in this film is excellent. The key frames from every scene could easily fill an art museum. This film is worth watching for that alone. Watch this film with the sound off. Wayne and Margaret, the lead actors, do a fine job. Rod Taylor as a cowboy? Sorry, but no. The secondary supporting actors are miscast as well. They would be better suited for urban settings. Ricardo Montalban is underused.
Wizard-8
"The Train Robbers" was a box office disappointment when released to theaters in 1973. Most likely the reasons audiences largely ignored it at the time were that westerns (at least "standard" westerns without an interesting edge) were on the way out, and that John Wayne's box office draw power was weakening. The fact that the movie has less action that you'd think (it takes about an hour for the first real action sequence to occur) probably also hurt its appeal. But seen today more than forty years later, the movie has a lot of appeal. John Wayne may be older and slower than he was in the 1950s and 1960s, but he still commands the screen pretty well, and comes across as very likable. Writer/director Burt Kennedy keeps the movie moving fairly well despite the lack of action as well as a lack of tension (there is no doubt that the protagonists will prevail.) The movie also looks pretty good, with professional photography and some visually striking backdrops. While the movie may come across as old- fashioned a lot of the time, it is without doubt entertaining. Apparently others would agree with me, seeing that the movie has been regularly aired on cable TV, which leaves me confident that the movie by now has made a respectable profit.
Leofwine_draca
THE TRAIN ROBBERS is another solid John Wayne adventure, not one of his best stories but certainly watchable enough. It's a film where you can just sit back and enjoy both the ruggedness of the scenery and the main actor, the performances of the recognisable supporting cast members, and the regular action bits with all of the shoot-outs, horse riding, and fist fights you could want. These films are neither the best nor the worst of the genre; they're merely pretty good, and pass the time ably enough.Wayne leads a posse of cowboys who are tasked by a beautiful widow to receive a missing gold shipment located on the far side of the desert. The film follows their journey through a hostile terrain as they face pursuit by the dedicated Ricardo Montalban and battles with various murderous bandits. There's a heck of a lot of horse riding here if that's your thing. Wayne is well supported in this one by a fading Rod Taylor (little seen after the 1960s), a hardy Christopher George, and the reliable Ben Johnson. Ann-Margaret does quite well in the rather thankless widow role.
Robert J. Maxwell
It's a light-hearted nonsensical Western in which Wayne leads four old buddies and Ann-Margret in search of half a million dollars in buried gold, robbed from Wells Fargo by her now-dead outlaw husband. Her intention: to return it to the bank, clear her name, and give the sizable reward to Wayne's gang.It was written and directed by Burt Kennedy, who did the scripts for Randolph Scott's more memorable Westerns. There were spots in which the dialog became positively lyrical in a vernacular kind of way. "Ma'am, if you was my woman I'd of come for you even if I'd a died in the doin' of it." It takes a peculiar talent to dream up lines like that.They're not absent from "The Train Robbers" although they don't reach the dazzling heights of Scott's westerns from ten years earlier. Off by themselves in the desert at night, lit only by a distant camp fire, Ann-Margaret gets sort of quietly hormonal with Wayne and tells him that when this is all over, he might want to stop by her house. "Ma'am, I've got a saddle that's older'n you are." Wayne had done a startling thing is playing an old curmudgeon in "True Grit" a few years earlier. It was truly a good performance. But it was a character role and Wayne couldn't seem to bring himself to continue along that line. And this movie represents one of a half dozen or so of increasingly dull Western standards, with Wayne in his leather vest, exercising common sense, being brave and authoritative. At the very end, he pulled himself out of that commercial slump and did very nicely in his last work, "The Shootist." He gets decent support here from Rod Taylor, Christopher George, and Wayne's old working partner, the always reliable and always relaxed Ben Johnson, the actor not the playwright.Except for a few scenes -- one quasi-romantic and one a discussion of aging -- it's pretty routine, almost adolescent. "Should we rob another train?" "Ain't nothing' else to do." That kind of thing. But it's diverting enough and William Clothier's photography of the cactus-studded desert of Durango, Mexico, is colorful, picturesque. Makes you kinda . . . wanna . . . live there.
AD
