RIO BRAVO(1959 – Dir: Howard Hawks – Cast: John Wayne (John T. Chance), Dean Martin (Dude), Angie Dickinson (Feathers), Ricky Nelson (Colorado), Walter Brennan (Stumpy), Ward Bond, John Russell, Claude Akins, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Harry Carey Jr. – Music: Dmitri Tiomkin)Rio Bravo is one of those classics which seem to divide fans of the genre. The film has been called a subtle study in both character and style by a Hawks devotee such as Robin Wood, but in the
Rough Guide to westerns Paul Simpson calls it the most overrated of all westerns, and typifies it as too slack, too hackneyed, and too monotonous. The scenes with Angie Dickenson have been called horrendous, but Simpson thinks they’re the best things this movie has to offer.
I had forgotten how hot Angie Dickenson was in ’59, so in this aspect her scenes were a nice surprise. They also provide the movie with some very funny moments – Angie reducing the Duke to a harmless teddy bear – and also with a typical Hawksian female character – as Wood puts it:
as strong as any man, yet not in the least like one of them. It’s always good to have a strong woman in a western, but there are a few problems with these scenes. In fact they’re twofold: they slow an already slow-moving (and overlong) movie further down, and it’s hard to accept that Angie would fall head over heels in love with a man old enough to be her father. It’s sometimes suggested that Hawks, like Hitchcock, had a desperate (and inevitably unanswered) passion for the young actresses in his movies. In Rio Bravo John Wayne is 52 and actually looking older, probably because the movie offers him a lot of screen time, but gives him very little to do. Rio Bravo is almost the direct opposite of that other great western Wayne made with Hawks,
Red River. As Tom Dunson, the stubborn, unflinching trail boos of Red River, Wayne had a driving mission, a cattle empire to build, as John T. Chance he is a man who will not be frightened away from his post. Red River was a dynamic movie, Rio Bravo is a rather static one. Most of the time Wayne is walking down the main street, to or from the saloon annex hotel where Angie is staying, and he cannot hide his age with his usual bravura.
Rio Bravo usually is interpreted as a riposte to Fred Zinneman’s
High Noon. The stories are different, but like Gary Cooper’s Will Kane, John Wayne’s character is a lawman under pressure. He has arrested the brother of a wealthy rancher and must now defend himself against the hired guns sent to free the prisoner. But whereas Gary Cooper begs for help and gets none, sheriff John T. Chance does
not ask for help,
and gets some. Two people offer their assistance: his former deputy, now an alcoholic, and a crippled old timer. A fourth person joins this club of old pals, a young man who’s quick on the draw, but has not yet put his abilities into practice. Again Chance doesn’t ask him to join the club, he smoothly walks in, apparently because he simply feels he should do so. The central situation of a lawman holding a prisoner under siege, had occurred in Delmer Daves’
3.10 to Yuma, made two years earlier, and Walter Brennan, who plays Stumpy, the crippled old timer, had played a jail-keeper in
The Proud Ones, like Rio Bravo a movie about the relationship between a marshal and his deputy. As an ‘answer movie’ to High Noon, Rio Bravo falls short. High Noon was not a western about a sheriff, it was a western about townspeople. Rio Bravo is a town western in the sense that it’s largely set in a western town, but it doesn’t focus on the community. It’s a movie about friendship and self-respect, about trust and loyalty: all John T. Chance has, is a barfly, a cripple and a greenhorn, but it’s all he needs. Three people you can trust, count more than a dozen that might let you down when things become serious.
This is all classical western stuff: the silent, infallible hero, the hero’s fallible friend, the tart with the heart, the comical sidekick, the ambitious newcomer. What sets Rio Bravo apart, is the rich character study Hawks somehow manages to concoct out of these simple ingredients. Stumpy, the talkative old timer, is far more than the standard comic relief type of character we meet in many a western movie; we gradually find out that he’s a vulnerable old man, who uses his verbosity to prove that he’s still alert, that he can still be of use in a world in which crippled men aren’t wanted. But the best example is Dude, played by Dean Martin. Like the character he plays, Martin had a mighty drinking problem, and Hawks uses this circumstance masterfully. A few scenes with Martin fighting his demons, are a bit painful to watch. Rio Bravo is above all
his movie, probably his finest hour as an actor.
Some people (quite a lot actually) prefer
El Dorado, Hawks’ first (sort of) remake of Rio Bravo. El Dorado is less static and above all it’s shorter. But I miss Nelson and (especially) Martin in it, even though he’s replaced by Robert Mitchum, admittedly a better actor. But Mitchum fared best in westerns of moral ambiguity with a dark, sultry atmosphere, and Hawks’ westerns are none of these things. Like Gary Willis has pointed out in his admirable study, even his noirs with Bogart and Bacall succeed because of their tongue-in-cheek quality. Rio Bravo is not totally unpretentious, but it’s essentially light-hearted (note that most characters have 'funny' names: Feathers, Stumpy, Dude, even Chance sounds like a knickname). It was Hawks who said: Ford is better at westerns, but I am better at comedy. As for the action: El Dorado probably is a grittier, more eventful movie, but again I prefer the action of Rio Bravo. The action scenes are few and far between, but once you’ve seen them, they’ll always stay in your mind: the explosive finale, Nelson throwing a Winchester to un unarmed Wayne, and above all this wonderful scene with Martin entering a saloon, looking for a fugitive villain … suddenly dripping blood tells him the man is right above him … Martin turns on his heels, and shoots the man down … That is wonderful. That is the wood immortal cinema is carved from.
Rio Bravo is not perfect, it has many flaws, but few movies are as easy to enjoy. Apparently Hawks loved his own movie so much, that he remade it twice (albeit loosely), first as the tough and good, but somehow less memorable El Dorado, then and as the enjoyable but otherwise forgettable
Rio Lobo. It also inspired younger film makers, notably John Carpenter, who updated the story to modern day Los Angeles, in
Assault on Precinct 13. Quentin Tarantino calls it his favourite western along with The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, to him it's a perfect 'hangout movie', a film that gives you the opportunity to really ‘hangout’ with these guys, and become friends with them. Sergio Leone was impressed by Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, influenced by Mexican folk songs. Ennio Morricone recalled Leone requesting him to write a ‘Dimitri Tiomkin kind of score’ for A Fistful of Dollars. The Italian title of the movie was by the way Un Dollaro di Onore (Onore = honour). Probably just coincidence, but what a nice coincidence.
References:
• Garry Willis, Rio this and Rio that, in: John Wayne’s America, the politics of Celebrity, 1997, New York
• Robin Wood, Rio Bravo, in: Western movies, edited by W.T. Pilkingtn and Don Graham, 1979, University of New Mexico Press
• Rio Bravo, Allen Eyles, in: They went That-a-Way, edited by Ann Loyd and David Robinson, London 1982
• Paul Simpson, The most overrated western: Rio Bravo, in: The Rough Guide to Westerns
• Rio Bravo (film), Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Subject: Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks) 
