In short: The Train Robbers (1973)

Aging, upright gunfighter Lane (John Wayne), his – also not exactly fresh - buddies Grady (Rod Taylor) and Jesse (Ben Johnson) and their new, comparatively young, hired help Calhoun (Christopher George) and Ben Young (Bobby Vinton) are hired by widow Mrs Lowe (Ann-Margret) for a rather interesting project. Mrs Lowe knows where her late husband hid quite a bit of gold he robbed from a railway company, and needs some experienced gun hands to get it for her. Or really, as it turns out, to accompany her to the gold, for she’s not that trusting. She’s not planning to keep the stuff, mind you, but wants to return it to the railway company to wash her husband’s name clean in the eyes of their son.

The gold is hidden across the border in Mexico, and obviously, Mrs Lowe and her men aren’t the only ones interested in it, making their little project rather dangerous. And that’s before you add the natural dangers of crossing the desert where the gold is hidden and the – pretty mild – tensions in the group to the mix of dangers.

This Burt Kennedy joint isn’t the kind of Western that goes terribly hard or terribly deep, playing a bit too nice with its characters for my taste. Everyone here resolves their conflicts a bit too easily and too pat, and apart from some leering at Ann-Margret and the usual Wayne bluster, there doesn’t seem to be a mean bone in any non-bandit’s body here. From time to time, there are some pleasantly off-handed moments concerned with the plight of being an old man in a young man’s job (certainly something gun hands and our actors have in common, exceptions notwithstanding) that add a bit of melancholy to the mix.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t a entertaining time – Kennedy is after all an old pro with the genre and knows how to keep this more amiable style of Western far from the Italian style or the revisionist Western (some of whose predecessors were ironically enough scripted by Kennedy with rather more depth than this one) engaging and fun.

There are also some pretty spectacular nature shots, and – eventually – some fine action set pieces to keep the willing viewer diverted, again keeping The Train Robbers fun throughout, though seldom more.