Robert Carradine's First Movie Was A Classic John Wayne Western

Robert Carradine died at the age of 71 on February 23, 2026, and is best remembered for playing the role of Lewis Skolnick in the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies, along with Lizzie's father, Sam McGuire, on the Disney Channel sitcom "Lizzie McGuire." Long before he made his name, however, he appeared alongside John Wayne in the classic 1972 Western "The Cowboys," a film that debuted in theaters 33 years after Carradine's father, John Carradine, had starred alongside The Duke in director John Ford's touchstone oater "Stagecoach."

Carradine started his career in the 1970s by appearing in multiple TV shows. The very first was NBC's beloved Western series "Bonanza," which featured Carradine in the 1971 episode "A Home for Jamie." Soon after, he showed up alongside his half-brother, David Carradine, in a 1972 episode of "Kung Fu," and he made the jump to the big screen that same year when he played a school boy turned cowhand in "The Cowboys."

Based on William Dale Jennings' 1971 novel of the same name, "The Cowboys" was directed by Mark Rydell — one of the few directors The Duke had yet to work with at the time. For Wayne, the movie was especially significant because it depicted his own death. Rather, it saw a wild and bloodthirsty cattle rustler named Asa Watts (Bruce Dern) shoot down Wayne's aging rancher Wil Andersen in full view of a group of boys whom the character had taken under his wing. Carradine was one of those boys.

"The Cowboys" arrived in the wake of a triumph and a travesty for John Wayne. In 1970, the veteran actor won an Oscar for playing Rooster J. Cogburn in 1969's "True Grit." Then, in 1972, he gave an infamous interview to Playboy that saw him attack the Civil Rights movement and Native Americans. In fact, Wayne's politics almost cost him his part in "The Cowboys." As such, many were surely glad to see The Duke felled by Bruce Dern's antagonist in the film. Robert Carradine's character and his fellow youngsters, however, were anything but delighted by the scene. At least, that's how they were required to act on screen.

Carradine, who was a teenager at the time, played Slim Honeycutt, the second-oldest of Wil Andersen's band of schoolboys turned ranch hands. When the film begins, Andersen needs to recruit men to help him on a 400-mile cattle drive but ends up hiring the boys after he discovers most of the men in the nearby town have left. Of course, this sets Wayne up to become a surrogate father figure to the boys, imparting his years of wisdom and teaching them how to be men in the most simplistic, John Wayne way possible.

While most of the boys simply have to look up to Wayne's rancher and become competent cowhands, Carradine's Slim has a little more to do. At one point, he gets into a fight with an older boy, Cimarron (Adolfo Martínez III), who later saves him from drowning after he falls from his horse into a river. Of course, Slim is also on-hand to witness Anderson being shot by Dern's Asa Watts. (Wayne even warned Dern before filming this climactic scene that audiences would hate him for it.)

"The Cowboys" was Robert Carradine's film debut, and, thankfully, it was a successful one. The movie made a decent profit at the box office, bringing in $19 million, and was met with solid reviews, though some critics questioned the wisdom of having John Wayne teach young men how to be boys via violence and an unquestionably outdated macho ethic. Still, a film that featured The Duke being shot down in cold blood was always going to court attention, and it certainly did that.

In fact, "The Cowboys" led to a short-lived TV spin-off of the same name in which Carradine reprised his role as Slim alongside Adolfo Martínez III as Cimarron. The show was overseen by "Bonanza" creator David Dortort, who made it so that the boys were under the care of Wil Andersen's wife. Unfortunately, "The Cowboys" only lasted for 12 episodes before it was put down like Wayne's rancher.

Carradine, on the other hand, went on to have a very successful career that wasn't slowed by the failure of the "Cowboys" TV show. Less than a decade later, he would make his first appearance as Lewis Skolnick in 1984's "Revenge of the Nerds." But he always seemed to look back fondly on his time with Wayne. In a 2019 interview with Word on Westerns, the actor recalled how much he and the other boys idolized The Duke, to the extent they tried to copy his every move. "There's one scene where [Wayne] comes out of his ranch house," he explained. "He's got one pant leg tucked in a boot, and the other one isn't. Well, the next take we all had one pant leg tucked in the boot."