Just plain "Cowboy"

TCM ran a couple of movies with cattle drive themes in prime time recently. One that was new to me was Cowboy. It's available on DVD, so I recorded it and watched it to do a post on it here.

Jack Lemmon plays Frank Harris, who at the start of the movie is an assistant manager at a hotel in Chicago. He's fallen in love with one of the guests, young Mexican Maria Vidal (Anna Kashfi), who is there with her father and aunt. He writes poetry to her and is winning to ask her hand in marriage, but also knows that her father wouldn't approve, Frank not being of the right social status.

Noy, you may be asking yourself why this is at the start of a movie with the title Cowboy. Soon enough, a cowboy comes into the hotel in the form of Tom Reese (Glenn Ford). Ah, there's a cowboy! He's got a bunch of cattle to sell, and then he's going to relax for a few weeks in Chicago before heading back to pick up some more cattle to drive to the meat market. Part of that relaxation involves playing poker after selling the old herd, and he loses enough money that he's going to have problems getting a new herd.

Thankfully, there's somebody with a little extra money, in the form of Frank, who's been saving up, probably to start of household if he could marry Maria. But she's abruptly gone back to Mexico since Dad knows about Frank's intended relationship. And when Frank learns that Tom is going to be going to the town where Maria's family is from to get a new herd of cattle, Frank has the brilliant idea of offering Tom money to become a partner in business, with the intention of also going down to Mexico to see Maria again.

Frank, of course, has never done anything remotely like being a cowboy, something which is naturally going to cause problems out on the trail at some point. And Tom really doesn't want a partner if he can avoid it. Still, Tom needs the money. So Frank joins the crew. Once he gets to Mexico, he finds that Maria has been married off to another man, and that's that for that subplot. But there's still the matter of getting a whole herd of cattle back to America, with Tom and Frank not particularly liking each other....

I found Cowboy to be another of those movies that I'd use words like "professional" and "pedestrian" to describe. I'm not the biggest fan of westerns, although they are growing on me. There's nothing particularly wrong with Cowboy, but to me it also felt like another movie where there's nothing particularly noteworthy, besides there being Jack Lemmon in a western. The difficult at times relationship between the two business partners by necessity, as well as the standard issue problems they face on the cattle drive, made it seem like the sort of plot I'd seen any number of times before. That having been said, everybody does a workmanlike job, and I can't find anything in the movie to pan it, either. Cowboy is a solid little movie that probably never had any expectations of rising to greatness, but which also does its job of entertaining. Those who enjoy westerns will probably enjoy sitting with a bowl of popcorn and watching Cowboy.