This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

THE TRAIN ROBBERS is another solid John Wayne adventure, not one of his best stories but certainly watchable enough. It's a film where you can just sit back and enjoy both the ruggedness of the scenery and the main actor, the performances of the recognisable supporting cast members, and the regular action bits with all of the shoot-outs, horse riding, and fist fights you could want. These films are neither the best nor the worst of the genre; they're merely pretty good, and pass the time ably enough.Wayne leads a posse of cowboys who are tasked by a beautiful widow to receive a missing gold shipment located on the far side of the desert. The film follows their journey through a hostile terrain as they face pursuit by the dedicated Ricardo Montalban and battles with various murderous bandits. There's a heck of a lot of horse riding here if that's your thing. Wayne is well supported in this one by a fading Rod Taylor (little seen after the 1960s), a hardy Christopher George, and the reliable Ben Johnson. Ann-Margaret does quite well in the rather thankless widow role.

64 minutes and change into the movie, four slaughtered horses laying out --and way too many horse riding scenes, used as filler --It looks like it was produced by one of John's sons, so John probably did the movie as a favor to his boy --The "widow" looked to be maybe 19 to 20, which is kind of typical for a movie, but still a person gets tired of seeing this, old or modern movies. Lets see, we have a woman who has been married for several years, has a kid of a few years, so lets make her a 19 year old. many modern movies use a gal in her very early 20s that have teen age kids, so I guess its par for the course --I did not bother finishing the movie, as slaughtering animals out of hand for movie footage makes the movie not worth a plug nickel to me --

It's a light-hearted nonsensical Western in which Wayne leads four old buddies and Ann-Margret in search of half a million dollars in buried gold, robbed from Wells Fargo by her now-dead outlaw husband. Her intention: to return it to the bank, clear her name, and give the sizable reward to Wayne's gang.It was written and directed by Burt Kennedy, who did the scripts for Randolph Scott's more memorable Westerns. There were spots in which the dialog became positively lyrical in a vernacular kind of way. "Ma'am, if you was my woman I'd of come for you even if I'd a died in the doin' of it." It takes a peculiar talent to dream up lines like that.They're not absent from "The Train Robbers" although they don't reach the dazzling heights of Scott's westerns from ten years earlier. Off by themselves in the desert at night, lit only by a distant camp fire, Ann-Margaret gets sort of quietly hormonal with Wayne and tells him that when this is all over, he might want to stop by her house. "Ma'am, I've got a saddle that's older'n you are." Wayne had done a startling thing is playing an old curmudgeon in "True Grit" a few years earlier. It was truly a good performance. But it was a character role and Wayne couldn't seem to bring himself to continue along that line. And this movie represents one of a half dozen or so of increasingly dull Western standards, with Wayne in his leather vest, exercising common sense, being brave and authoritative. At the very end, he pulled himself out of that commercial slump and did very nicely in his last work, "The Shootist." He gets decent support here from Rod Taylor, Christopher George, and Wayne's old working partner, the always reliable and always relaxed Ben Johnson, the actor not the playwright.Except for a few scenes -- one quasi-romantic and one a discussion of aging -- it's pretty routine, almost adolescent. "Should we rob another train?" "Ain't nothing' else to do." That kind of thing. But it's diverting enough and William Clothier's photography of the cactus-studded desert of Durango, Mexico, is colorful, picturesque. Makes you kinda . . . wanna . . . live there.

Mrs. Lowe (Ann-Margret) is a widow of a man who led a 10 men gang who robbed a train of $500k of gold. He hid the gold, but was killed before he could return to it. She wants to tell railroad the location of the gold so she could clear the family name for her son. Lane (John Wayne) convinces her to get the gold themselves to get the $50k reward money. Lane gathers up his gang, but is soon being followed by others who want the gold for themselves.The biggest problem for this movie is the motivations. John Wayne is so perfectly good. There's a half a million dollars out there, and he never tries to steal it. When it's all over, they even give away the reward money. And Mrs. Lowe's story doesn't add up. She should be worried about being robbed showing the location. There is an easy trust at the start that makes no sense. Even with the reveal, the trust seems out of place. Everybody's motivations are all seen through rose colored glasses.The setting is beautifully desolated. Director/writer Burt Kennedy blew up a few things. It looks good. The action is reasonable, but the shootouts aren't that exciting. The story is straight forward and bland. It's an uninspired western.