General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Wild Rovers

Wild Rovers is a 1971 American Western directed, written, and produced by Blake Edwards, starring William Holden as the aging cowhand Ross Bodine and Ryan O'Neal as the young Frank Post, two ranch hands who rob a bank to escape their dead-end lives and are pursued by the sons of their former employer.¹ Made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after the expensive failure of Edwards's musical Darling Lili (1970), it was one of the year's biggest box-office disappointments, but the studio's heavy re-editing of the film and its later restoration to a longer director's cut have made the story of the film's production as well known as the film itself.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	June 1971, rated GP (MGM had expected an R); domestic limited release June 23, 1971 by MGM¹^•³
Principal cast	William Holden (Ross Bodine), Ryan O'Neal (Frank Post), Karl Malden (Walter Buckman), Tom Skerritt (John Buckman), Joe Don Baker (Paul Buckman)²
Key crew	Cinematography Philip Lathrop; music Jerry Goldsmith; editing John F. Burnett¹^•²
Running times	Original cut 130 minutes per Filmfacts; MGM removed 24 minutes for release; a 136-minute director's cut was prepared in 1986¹^•⁴
Locations	Interiors at the M-G-M Studios; location work in Moab and Monument Valley, UT, and at Nogales, Tucson, Sedona, and Flagstaff, AZ¹
Genre standing	Classified by the scholar Richard Slotkin among revisionist Westerns that show the cowboy as a common working man⁵

Spoilers

Story and production

Ross Bodine and Frank Post are cowhands on Walt Buckman's R-Bar-R ranch. Bodine, older, broods about how he will support himself when he is too old to cowboy; Post is young, rambunctious, and ambitious for a better life than wrangling cattle. After a fellow cowboy is killed in a corral accident, Post proposes robbing the local bank, and Bodine reluctantly joins him. Their escape succeeds at first, but Buckman and his sons John and Paul, incensed at the betrayal by trusted employees, set out after them.⁶ The two leads' comic dialogue about life, death, fate, and hopelessness on the long rides has been compared to Vladimir and Estragon on the prairie, until their boredom and ill-paying labor drive them to crime.⁷

Edwards had begun his career in Westerns, acting in Ten Gentlemen From West Point (1942) and writing and producing the low-budget oaters Panhandle and Stampede at Allied Artists in 1948 and 1949. Wild Rovers also gave him the chance to work with William Holden, whom he had wanted to direct for years; the two had met at Columbia Pictures in the 1940s and become friends in 1964. Edwards wrote an original screenplay without a collaborator for the first time in his career, and the film focused not on conventional genre action but on the friendship between the aging cowhand and the young innocent played by O'Neal, who had just come off Love Story (1970).²

During production the two stars grew close, driving together from Arizona to Utah between locations; when O'Neal received an Oscar nomination for Love Story during shooting, Holden persuaded him to attend the Academy Awards as a mark of respect for the actors who had voted for him.²

The studio cuts

The editing dispute is the film's defining production story. According to Filmfacts, Edwards's original cut ran 130 minutes. After a negative reaction at sneak previews, MGM cut twenty-four minutes, including scenes in which Bodine gives some of the stolen money back to the Billings family and a slow-motion sequence in which Walter Buckman dies; the studio also added, after Frank Post's death, a recurrence of the earlier sequence in which Post dances in the snow while Ross breaks a bronco.¹ Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker after Edwards's death in 2010, reported the cut as twenty minutes of footage removed with no consultation and the ending changed, quoting Edwards on the M-G-M studio head James Aubrey: "It was my best film, and he butchered it. I beseeched them; they still butchered it."⁸ Edwards considered Wild Rovers his best film and disapproved of the shorter released version.¹

The marketing compounded the trouble. On June 15, 1971, Daily Variety reported that the film had been rated GP when MGM expected an R. After release, the studio withdrew its original advertising campaign, which showed O'Neal with his arms around Holden on a horse, because the image had engendered "insider wisecracks" about a possible homosexual relationship between the characters; it was replaced with images of the stars standing separately, holding guns.¹ A later fan community did read a romantic subtext into the relationship and used that same image, O'Neal's arms around Holden's waist as they share a horse, on posters for gay rights rallies.²

In 1986 the film was restored to a lengthier 136-minute running time, with the originally intended overture, intermission card, and exit music.⁴ The 70mm release history records that the Blake Edwards film was edited to 136 minutes for a Panavision anamorphic 70mm blow-up in Australia.⁹ The restored version is the one now generally available; current home-video and streaming listings give a 136-minute runtime.⁶

Reception and legacy

Most reviewers at the time complained that the film departed too much from genre formulas, and it became one of the year's biggest box-office disappointments, deepening the career slump Edwards had entered with Darling Lili; he did not recover commercially until the mid-1970s Pink Panther sequels with Peter Sellers.² Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, gave it three of four stars, calling it "a beautiful, dumb cowboy movie about two beautiful, dumb cowboys" and praising Holden's performance as a sincere old cowhand while finding O'Neal a distraction.¹⁰ Retrospective assessment has been warmer: the film holds a 60% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes against a 46% audience score, and Brody's 2019 note described a rowdy yet haunted Western whose comedic bravado masks the absurdity in its bursts of violence.¹¹^•⁷

The film's standing within the Western genre rests on its revisionist character. In the taxonomy associated with the scholar Richard Slotkin, Wild Rovers belongs with Monte Walsh (1970) and The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) among films that show the cowboy as a common working man rather than a mythic hero.⁵ The very qualities that alienated 1971 audiences, its thoughtful pace and its focus on the growing relationship between Holden and O'Neal, later produced a cult following.² A Warner Archive Blu-ray release brought the restored version back into circulation for home viewers.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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