Half Turkey

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ROOSTER COGBURN

Directed by STUART MILLAR Screenplay by MARTIN JULIEN

The announcement last year that John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn were to be teamed in a movie for the first time in their long careers was the sort of thing that fills fans with an unsettling mixture of hope and dread. The hope arose out of the possibilities inherent in permitting these feisty senior citizens to have at one another on the screen. The dread derived from knowledge that they would be doing a mere sequel (to True Grit) and that producers have a habit of resting on their packages, not bothering to turn them into movies that would interest us on their own merits. Rooster Cogburn is not as bad as it might have been. It is just not as good as it quite easily could have been. Hepburn is doing her doughty spinster turn, than which there is none finer, and Wayne is doing his crotchety old reprobate number, than which ditto. They meet after an outlaw gang he is pursuing pauses long enough on its way to a gold robbery to murder her father, a missionary to an Indian village. Nothing will do, of course, but that she must join forces with Rooster in order to help avenge her father's death. The pair quarrel along a meandering trail. She tries to reform him or at least get him to take a bath and ease up on the corn likker. He grouses about the talky ways into which her moral fervor leads her. In the end, needless to say, mutual respect bordering on romantic attachment develops between them.

The film's central, bickersome relationship is satisfyingly close to what one expects of Wayne and Hepburn. The tremulous self-awareness that has marred some of her recent performances is entirely absent here, and she is the tough-minded, high-spirited Kate of blessed memory. And the Duke, too, is his old self--the slackness engendered by a succession of dismal late films banished. In short, they are good for each other and fun to watch.

This is a considerable triumph, for the script gives them precious little to work with. The plot line is but minimally suspenseful and the dialogue generally banal. Director Millar has a nice feel for his handsome Oregon locations but none at all for staging action. His tendency is to back away from it and to minimize it so that even a climactic ride down a white-water river on a raft load ed with nitroglycerin turns out to be dull.

Still there they are, in what may be a once-in-a-lifetime pairing. If no one appears much interested in helping them to be their very best, it can be said that no one gets in their way either. That should be reason enough for older view ers to take a flyer on Rooster. And rea son enough to take the kids along, if you were planning a trip to Mount Rushmore.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.