Gunslinger for hire Cole Thornton (John Wayne) rides into the town of El Dorado, where his old partner and now sheriff J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) draws a rifle on him. Thornton is here to mull an offer from cattle baron Bart Jason, who wants access to water controlled by a neighboring ranch family. They’ve refused to sell, and Jason intends to run them off.

After a change of heart, Thornton rides out to tell Jason (Ed Asner) “I’m paid to risk my neck. I’ll decide where and when I’ll do it. This isn’t it.” But the ranch family – led by R.G. Armstrong – is under the impression that Thornton has been hired. Riding back to town, Thornton is fired on by one of the clan’s sons and Wayne instinctively shoots him. In retaliation, the dead boy’s hot headed sister Joey (Michele Carey) ambushes Thornton and puts a bullet in his spine.

Seven months later, with the bullet still lodged in him and at times paralyzing his right arm, Thornton learns that Jason has hired a lethal gunfighter (Christopher George) to run the family off. The only thing standing in their way is Sheriff Harrah, who’s been living at the bottom of a bottle since a woman left him.

Thornton returns to El Dorado, with a poetry spouting kid named Mississippi (James Caan in an early, early performance), who is deadly with a knife but can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a gun. With help from an old Indian fighter named Bull (Arthur Hunnicutt), they quickly sober the sheriff up. Once trouble starts, the men lock Jason up in the jail and have to hold off his hired guns until the U.S. marshal can arrive.

Directed by Howard Hawks, from a screenplay Leigh Brackett adapted from the novel The Stars In Their Courses by Harry Brown, El Dorado is viewed by some as the first of two remakes of Hawks’ Rio Bravo, others as the second in a trilogy from Hawks and John Wayne that includes 1970’s Rio Lobo and are a variation on a sheriff defending his office against desperados trying to break a prisoner out.

While Rio Bravo is regarded as a masterwork by many film geeks, I thought El Dorado was a far superior and much more entertaining movie. Leigh Brackett, who George Lucas would hire to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back before her death, knows how to weave multiple characters and subplots together beautifully on the big screen and does so here.

Paralysis and remorse over shooting a boy were neat concepts to give The Duke. Mitchum and Caan are both terrific. The bad guys are menacing and complex with a minimum of screen time, and the dialogue exchanges are top notch.

Harrah: What the hell are you doin’ here?
Thornton: I’m lookin’ at a tin star with a … drunk pinned to it.

The banter is pretty good throughout, and never reaches the self-indulgent level of Rio Bravo. There’s a lot of build up before the real shootin’ starts, but the movie is a no-nonsense 126 minutes of honor among friends, professional gunslingers, shoot outs, horses, sassy women, drinkin’, fightin’ and gettin’ the bad guy, in no particular order.

Howard Hawks, who was born in 1896, was getting pretty long in the saddle to bring much in the way of energy or ingenuity to the western, and Wayne and Mitchum were no spring chickens either, but the movie is still a lot of fun. The final shot of the hobbled Wayne and Mitchum limping off together arm-in-arm is a great image to hang the film on.

Hawks used the terrific Old West paintings of Olaf Weighorst over the opening credits, and also cast Weighorst in a cameo as the gunsmith. Nelson Riddle provided the outstanding western score.