In an Old West border town in Presidio County, Texas, a flea bitten drunk named Dude (Dean Martin) slinks into a saloon. He’s tormented by thug Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) who offers Dude a silver dollar by tossing it into a spittoon. Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) attempts to intervene, but Dude waylays him and then gets beat up by Burdette, who shoots an unarmed man for good measure.
John T. locks Burdette up, but is aware that the thug’s cattle baron brother Nathan (John Russell) will probably not allow him be turned over to the U.S. marshal. With help coming from only the sobered up Dude, an “old cripple” guarding the jail named Stumpy (the great Walter Brennan) and a hotshot kid named Colorado (Ricky Nelson), the Sheriff has to hold down the fort against Burdette’s professional guns until the marshals arrive.
Directed by Howard Hawks, with a screenplay adapted by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett from a short story by B.H. McCampbell, Rio Bravo was Hawks’ first film since his attempt at a swords and sandals epic – Land of the Pharaohs – and several years in Europe. His return to the kind of picture he knew best drew faint praise from the critics, but has since grown in stature among cinema lovers.
When interviewed by Charlie Rose prior to the release of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino named Taxi Driver, Blow Out and this film as his three favorite of all time. John Carpenter, another Hawks fan, used it as the basis for Assault On Precinct 13, moving the action to an urban jail.
Rio Bravo aspired to be a rollicking mix of comedy, action and the good ole fashioned values anyone with a flag swaying from their porch could respect: the stoic male who stands alone against injustice, honor among friends, horses, gunfights, a saloon brawl, a wagon train, and a greedy cattle baron who gets what’s coming to him. Fans definitely got all that, in Technicolor with rousing music by Dimitri Tiomkin.
But this is not a great film, or even a good John Wayne oater, for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s not really a western. As Carpenter demonstrated, this story can be moved to any time period and any locale without missing a beat. Hawks never bothers to recreate the Old West anyway. The costumes are far too dandy, while Dude routinely shoots bad guys in the hand or splits their reign with a bullet. That’s the kind of movie it is.
At 141 minutes, it’s also impossibly long winded. Hawks gets in the habit of staging action around town, then having characters return to the jail to notify Stumpy of what we just saw. There is much too much talking in the movie, which is ironic, because Hawks shot the entire opening saloon sequence without dialogue. No one speaks for the first 4 1/2 minutes of the film, but after that, man, they never shut up.
Dean Martin steals the movie as a drunk seeking the respect of his peers and does get one of the best bar busting scenes of all time. Angie Dickinson – playing a fugitive gambler – also does outstanding work. But Wayne is essentially camping it up as himself here. The drawn out “love story” between him and Dickinson is totally unbelievable. The Duke was 51 years old at the time, Dickinson 27. Gross. And Ricky Nelson cannot act.
John Wayne intended this as his rebuke to High Noon, seen by many as a liberal’s allegory for America turning its back on suspected Communists, which Wayne was all for. Hawks was equally displeased by the Gary Cooper classic, saying “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him.”
Unlike High Noon and other classic westerns, there is no relationship whatsoever between Wayne and the unnamed town he’s supposed to be protecting, other than tedious comic bits by Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales, playing the trademark beaner. The laziness and camp quality of this stuff has more in common with The Cannonball Run than anything resembling a masterwork.
The best thing in movie was actually something groaned about by some, the musical interlude in jail. Martin starts out singing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” and is joined by Nelson, who also plays guitar and then performs a brief version of “Get Along Home, Cindy.” Martin was also backed by the Nelson Riddle Orchestra singing an original song, “Rio Bravo,” over the closing credits.
Hawks sure knew how to give an audience what they bought a ticket to see, but aside from the singing cowboys, I am at a loss to explain what film geeks like Tarantino see in this movie.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Vincent // Oct 11, 2007 at 12:02 am
Maybe i can give you some clues
“Rio Bravo” is a truly masterpiece, in the full sense of the word. The achievment of Hawks’s research in a cinematographic form.
It is not a western ? Yes ! it is a comedy, as all Hawks’s movies. It is about relationship between men and women and the way they work and live together. It is more than a western because it is pure cinema. That’s why Hawks doesn’t care about ths “real things”, like Hitchcock does or even Ford. They doesnt care about history, they care about legend, about something right, not true.
“Rio bravo” is something of an experimental movie in its way, an abstraction of western, a territory of imagination. That’s why it is great.
The story whith “Hight noon”, i think it is some kind of joke. Maybe not for Wayne, but if you think back of the movie, you’ll see that Chance always refuses help, but in fact, he is always force to accept it. He thinks he is strong, but in fact, he is always too impulsive and not very bright. All the others characters helps him against his will. In this way, it is not a typical Wayne movie, because it plays with Duke’s image. An dit is so so so funny.
Last, the relationship between Feather and Chance : I love it. It is as unbelievable as the one between Stewart and Novak in “Vertigo”, or the real story between Bogart an Bacall (!)
They talk a lot, it is true, but the important thing in this movie is what they do, the way they do it and what goes beteween them, far from the words. And the dialogues are brilliant.
So, i think of Rio Bravo as the more beautiful of all Hawks ‘movies, and for me, one of the best movies ever made. But you can dislike Hawks work, it is your absolute right. But maybe you can try to see it again, with another way of seeing it, and maybe you’ll discover all his beauty.
Sorry to be so long and for the approximative english.
2 Susanne // Aug 25, 2008 at 12:03 am
Wow, that is an incrediably shallow reading of the film, when analysing the film, I found it is to be so complex and rich in characterisation, relationships, values and meanings. The movie is a classic example of intextual intergrity. The story is driven by the characters of the movie and they are presented as human beings with flaws like the people in real life. Chance represents the masculine authority and strength that everyone looks up to. However throughout the movie we constantly see that it is not true all the time. He can be impulsive, quick to judge and lacks humanity. While he presents the image as someone who is strong he is shy and insecure when he is expressing his emotions and that is where the character of Feathers comes in. She brings out the humanity in him and she constantly challenges this image of him sometimes reducing him to look like a goof which is incrediably cute and something which reflects reality. What is the huge deal with age difference? It is not like they were doing anything illegal, she’s not a child, there are a lot of relationships with age difference. You have to get out more often. The romance also can be up for debate because it is so rich with textual intergity because Feathers is not someone who is weak, she is a strong and dominate woman who lives by her own rules, she can stand toe to toe with Chance and be his equal while at the same time bringing in some vunerablity to her character without making her look like a bitch or a whimp that requires someone to save her. There are scenes when she does help chance. There is so many different critical readings of this film like feminist, marxist, psychoanalystical etc. They talk a lot but when you analyse this film closely it is about language, power and relationships between men and women. What made this movie a classic is the use of characterisation and how fully rounded and developed they are and the story is not plot driven, it’s character driven.
Dude is the center of the story from beginning to end, it was really his film, in search for redemption, trying to get back his confidence and his mascaulity that was stripped from him due to his heartache and because of alcohol. It is a long battle for him tp kick the habit and this is done through the eyes of Chance who is his friend and mentor, Chance is the reactor. Dude looks for the strength to redemn him to the man that he once was. Stumpy represents a loss of mascuality due to his limp and inability to walk which is symbolic of a man’s mascuality.
I strongly disagree with your analysis and I know why those appreciate this film being a critic myself I can analyse this film over and over and still walk away with something new. This film is filled with endless critical readings and interrpetations and rich with characterisation that represents humanity and reality.
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