Purely Joyful Movie!

Let's be realistic.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

I saw this at the pictures as a kid in the 60s and loved the action scenes at the film's climax. 50 or so years on I find I can happily sit through an afternoon showing of it on TV. It's fairly formulaic for Wayne but its strengths are in the (relatively) inventive plot and the expert interplay between Wayne and Douglas. One if those movies Wayne made now and again that have a big more spark in the dialogue.One notable line near the beginning is where Douglas' character refers to Keenan Wynn's as a 'crazy old man'. In reality Wynn was less than 5 months older than Douglas.

Former prisoner Taw Jackson (John Wayne) has returned to town. Frank Pierce (Bruce Cabot) sends his man Hammond (Bruce Dern) to offer Lomax (Kirk Douglas) $10k to kill him. Pierce had Jackson falsely imprisoned before and stole his ranch when gold was discovered. Lomax was the man who shot him but this time Jackson offers Lomax $100k to rob a gold shipment on Pierce's War Wagon, an armored stage coach. They rescue Levi Walking Bear from Mexican bandits. Lomax recruits drunken explosive expert Billy Hyatt. With an inside man and Indian warriors, Jackson aims to take back what was his.This is a no-brainer western. Wayne and Douglas together make a compelling duo. The recruitment is a little messy and the actual robbery needs to be bigger. There is a lot of talk of explosives but it's hardly used in the robbery. It's an old fashion western and a fun watch for the most part.

. . . for ripping off a key aspect of a great Western, then trying to "dumb it down" to what he feels is the intelligence level of his target audience, and winding up with a weak stew more paltry than the sum of its parts. Wayne collaborated most infamously and overtly along these lines with director Howard Hawks, in "Batjacking" (his trademark term for "hijacking") Gary Cooper's Classic HIGH NOON into the thin broth of RIO BRAVO. Since THE WAR WAGON is directed by an even lesser never-was (Burt Kennedy), its attempt to steal story lines from John Huston and Humphrey Bogart's masterpiece--THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE--is more pitiable than offensive. John Wayne's personal Real Life credo is spelled out twice in THE WAR WAGON. Kiowa "Levi Walking Bear" summarizes it as, "Grab all you can, any time you can." Earlier, in the opening WAR WAGON ballad, Ed Ames sings, "But, wrong or right, I have to fight." Wayne's characters often were wrong in his flicks (such as his "Davy Crockett" murdering scores of Mexican law enforcement officials battling to keep him and his henchmen from RE-ENSLAVING the free Black People of Texas Province), and "Il Duce" himself was wrong 99% of the time in Real Life, especially as he wreaked havoc in the 1940s and 1950s as America's self-appointed Snitch-in-Chief. (The production notes for the 2003 DVD release of THE WAR WAGON reveal that during this Durango shoot Kirk Douglas courageously tried to nip the political career of turncoat Democrat\Assistant Snitch Ronald Reagan ON HIS OWN TIME, but then Wayne put WAR WAGON over budget by rushing from Mexico to L.A. ON ONE OF HIS SCHEDULED SHOOTING DAYS to undo Kirk's Good Deed!) Many of Hitler's generals bought into Davy Crockett and WAR WAGON's philosophy of "Wrong or right, I have to fight." Do you?

As a huge fan of both John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, I was excited to see this sole pairing between the two legends. However, I was slightly disappointed because of the generic plot in which they were involved in which concerned Wayne being framed for an obvious crime he didn't commit, getting out of prison, and seeking revenge on the mastermind (Bruce Cabot) who wanted the gold on his land. The villain has hired Douglas to assassinate Wayne to keep him from loosing everything, but Douglas holds out for the highest bidder which happens to be Wayne. Using "the War Wagon" to transfer the gold off of Wayne's land, Cabot has the tank-like covered wagon made up with a giant machine gun like contraption which truly looks silly driving across the desert while Indians and his enemies chase him.Even sillier is the casting of MGM musical legend Howard Keel as a Native American who joins forces with Wayne and Douglas. Looking absolutely silly in Indian braids, Keel has every right to seem truly embarrassed over having had to take this role. Keenan Wynn plays the grizzled driver of Wayne's caravan who has a younger wife (Valora Noland) coveted by the young Robert Walker Jr. While the film is exciting as an adventure, the dialog is silly, the chase sequences overwrought with slapstick, and the titled war wagon reminded me of the machine in the fantasy sequence of "Kid Millions" (1934) that shot cherries onto Ice Cream sodas like a machine gun. Poor Joanna Barnes, the delightful "top drawer" Gloria Upson of "Auntie Mame" and the gold-digging Vicky of "The Parent Trap", is absolutely wasted as a floozy bar maid. As entertainment, it ranks as watchable, but as serious filmmmaking, it is weak when compared to other films that Wayne and Douglas are remembered for.