83. Rio Bravo

Howard Hawks, 1959

This is probably my favorite Western, as far as traditional, Hollywood Westerns are concerned. I call it a traditional, Hollywood western because of the way it is made, the way it looks, which is wholly in keeping with the clean, action packed Westerns Hollywood put out throughout the fifties and which are stylistically very different from the grittier Spaghetti Westerns or “End of the West” Westerns that came from Hollywood in the late sixties and seventies, films like The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yet, director Howard Hawks and star John Wayne would likely push that statement even farther, considering the film to be, in many ways, the prototypical Western, as they made it in rebuttal to a film which they believed had the ideals of the West, or, at least, the screen West, all wrong. This is how Howard Hawks relates the story in Peter Bogdanovich’s book Who the Devil Made It? “[Rio Bravo] started with some scenes in a picture called High Noon in which Gary Cooper [playing the town sheriff] ran around trying to get help and no one would give him any. And that’s rather a silly thing for a man to do, especially since at the end of the picture he is able to do the job by himself. So I said, we’ll do just the opposite, and take a real professional viewpoint. We did everything that way -- the exact opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon -- and it worked.”

Part of the reason I like this movie so much is that I agree with Hawks absolutely. High Noon really is a bullshit Western. The sheriffs job, particularly in the world of the Hollywood Western, is to protect the townspeople at all costs. Yet, here we have Gary Cooper going up to every last townsperson he can find, asking them to help him in a gunfight. Good day, sir. In Rio Bravo, however, we find John Wayne faced with a similar problem, but he doesn’t once go looking for help. He sucks it up, like the Duke always does. Hell, poor Duke’s even stuck with some of the crummiest deputies this side of the Picos. You’ve got Walter Brennan, who is not only doing his usually old timey prospector style performance, which is always a lot of fun, really, but is crippled, Ricky Nelson, who is as wet behind the ears as you can be, and Dean Martin, playing against type as a drunk. Again, though, the Duke never goes looking for more men, but makes his stand with what he has.

I also just think its great that, instead of just sitting around griping about how crappie High Noon was, Hawks got off his ass and actually made a film rebuttal. How cool is that? Maybe, someday, I’ll get to make a rebuttal to Surf Ninjas. It could happen. Regardless, this film really does stand in my mind as the iconic Hollywood Western. It has a great look, there may be dirt on the floor, but everyone’s pretty clean and their shirts are real bright, and some terrific directing and camera work. You have a solid Western story, banditos are a comin’, with some terrific character work, particularly the redemptive arc for Dean Martin’s character. You also have the two people who really need to be in every Hollywood Western: Walter Brennan and, of course, John Wayne. Really, you can’t get much better than that.