Cahill U.S. Marshall (1973)

J.D. Cahill (John Wayne) is a Marshall who spends most of his life tracking down bank robbers. His two sons are feeling neglected and—in addition to talking about it endlessly—decide to rob a bank, during which the Sheriff gets shot.

I'm going to be meaner about this film than it really deserves, since fundamentally it's competently made, watchable and with enjoyable action bit. But mostly it's frustrating because the problems with it are obvious and it has the budget, basic story, and cast to have actually been good.

The good points:

• The story itself—of two naive boys who get themselves caught up in a bank robbery/murder and have to get themselves out—could well be good.
• The acting is generally pretty reasonable: John Wayne is good (although the role was evidently written to cover his exact acting range) and the two sons (played by Danny Grimes and Clay O'Brien) are quite likeable and, unlike most kids in films, not actually that annoying.
• The locations are pretty.
• Many of the action sequences are good – especially the opening, snow-bound ambush.

The bad point: it's so very ham-fisted and forced. The boys repeatedly talk about how their father has been ignoring them in a series of ever most unnecessary and awkward conversations. There's a musical interlude with a song about how "a man gets to thinking" that just left me thinking "yes, but couldn't you show it through acting". There's a scene where the younger boy asks the owner of a boarding house why she keeps giving Cahill meaningful looks that annoyed me on two levels: a) it's irrelevant – she features in the story so little and her "romance" is never mentioned or shown again, and b) this is the sort of thing that would be better shown through actual meaningful looks (which frankly aren't there) rather than clunky dialogue about it. In short there's no subtly: all the characterisation is done through endless exposition, and not acting.

There's then the question of whose fault it is. There's a strong argument to be made for Andrew McLaglen – most of his films suffer the same problems, most notably "The Way West". There's also a case to be made that most of the problems were with the script, and perhaps there's little McLaglen could have done with the material (and given that it was produced by John Wayne's company, perhaps little leeway to try to change the material). Finally, John Wayne presumably has to be heavily to blame, since at this stage of his career he was largely in control of his own projects—to the detriment of the quality of films he appeared in—and the obsession with "father–son" bonding appears in other films of his from around the same time, notably Big Jake and The Cowboys (the latter being pretty good).

The version I saw was a slightly poor pan-and scan TV version (and the person in charge to the pan-and-scan seemed to have a bit of a shaky hand).