Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Ron Yearwood This is a great and fun old western. She's awesome and The Duke is at his late career best as Rooster Cogburn. It's not a comedy but there's lots of laughs in this one. Some very cute scenes between the two of them and also a fun adventure to boot.

Michael_Elliott Rooster Cogburn (1975)** 1/2 (out of 4)After being fired for violent conduct, Marshall Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) is asked by Judge Parker (John McIntire) to track down a gang who stole some explosives in order to rob a bank. Cogburn heads out and runs into missionary Eula (Katharine Hepburn) whose father was killed by the gang. She demands to go with Cogburn and the two head out for revenge.ROOSTER COGBURN isn't the best movie out there but it's certainly entertaining enough thanks in large part to its two legendary stars as well as some nice supporting performances. I really can't blame the filmmakers for bringing Wayne back in his Oscar-winning role from TRUE GRIT but I do question why they also seemed to want to remake THE African QUEEN since Hepburn is playing the same type of role and the two films share some other connections.With all of that said, this here is the basic type of Western that you'd expect to see Wayne doing. He plays that lovable, tough-as-nails character who does things his way and usually that means killing off the bad guys. I must admit that I wasn't crazy for Hepburns's role here but there's no question that she's good in it and the two stars have some nice chemistry. The two of them work extremely well together and have some nice back-and-forth as they throw insults and quotes off one another.The film benefits from having some nice action as well including the finale, which I won't spoil but there's some nice tension as well as some loud action. The cinematography is quite good and technically speaking this is a well-made film. Still, I just wish something more had been done with the story and I think the attempt at remaking THE African QUEEN didn't help matters. Still, it's Wayne and Hepburn and that's worth watching.

James Hitchcock Rooster Cogburn" was John Wayne's penultimate film; his last was to be "The Shootist" from a year later. Here he repeats his role as U.S. Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, the role which he had made famous in "True Grit" and which brought him his only Oscar. "True Grit" was ostensibly set in Oklahoma but was actually shot in Colorado; here the action is ostensibly set further east, in Arkansas, but the film was shot even further West, in Oregon.The film opens with Cogburn being stripped of his Marshal's badge by a judge on the grounds of drunkenness and his "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude. Soon afterwards, however, his badge is restored to him on the grounds that his style of law enforcement is exactly what is needed to combat a desperate gang of outlaws operating in the area, the authorities having realised that lawmen who ask questions first and shoot later end up dead, shot by the bad guys before they have finished asking their first question. The film then explores how Cogburn goes about his task, aided by Eula Goodnight, a spinster schoolteacher whose preacher father has been murdered by the villains and Wolf, a young Indian whose family have met the same fate.Vincent Canby, film critic of the New York Times, called "Rooster Cogburn" "a high-class example of the low Hollywood art of recycling". The basic plot- "tough lawman takes on a gang of desperados"- was already an over-familiar one in Westerns by 1975. The film's two most original features are the age of the leading man- at 68 Wayne was considerably older than the average Western action hero- and the active role taken by its leading lady. Despite her rather prim manner- she objects to Cogburn's drinking and profanity- Eula is no passive shrinking violet but a tough lady who can ride and shoot as well as any man and is determined to avenge her father's death. I suspect that Eula (whose father is still alive at the beginning of the film) was originally supposed to be younger than Cogburn, but the role went to Katharine Hepburn, who was the same age as Wayne. (They were born in the same month, May 1907).I would not rate the film as highly as "The Shootist", which I regard as a masterpiece, but it is at least as good as "True Grit" and considerably better than Wayne's antepenultimate film, the disappointing police drama "Brannigan". It was the only film in which Wayne and Hepburn, two of the most iconic stars of their generation, acted together, probably because Wayne tended to specialise in Westerns and war films, two genres with which Hepburn was not normally associated. She is, however, excellent here, playing in one of her few Westerns a character similar to the one she had created in "The African Queen", one of her few war films, more than twenty years earlier. There was to be no Oscar for Wayne this time, but he is at least as good as he had been in "True Grit". Much of the appeal of the film lies in the way in which Cogburn and Eula, who are about as different from one another as it is possible for two characters to be, nevertheless manage to work together.Director Stuart Millar handles the action sequences well and there is some striking photography of the Western landscapes, probably the reason why, whatever the film's ostensible setting might be, shooting was moved to the Pacific North-West. The film could easily have ended up as the sort of dull, derivative Western adventure we had all seen too many times before, but Wayne, Hepburn and Millar combine to produce something which still remains worth watching forty years on. 7/10

Sean Morrow 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.