April 2008

Rio Bravo

• Starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez, Claude Akins
• Directed by: Howard Hawks
• Theatrical release: 1959
• DVD release: 2007
• Video: 1.85:1 (widescreen)
• Sound: Dolby Digital 1.0
• Released by: Warner Home Video

I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the western stars of the twenties and thirties were too perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn’t fight in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back. If someone throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the western hero a roughneck.
-- John Wayne

Here is one of the treasures in the initial blitz of Warner Home Video Blu-ray releases. With John Wayne starring and Howard Hawks directing, you’d expect Rio Bravo to be an action western with lots of horse-riding and gunslinging. Instead, this meandering story of love and friendship takes place in a four-block area of a dusty border town. Nathan Burdette (John Russell) is the territory’s richest, most unscrupulous man. His stupid brother, Joe (Claude Akins), kills an unarmed man for no good reason. Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) arrests Joe, but Nathan intends to spring his brother from jail, no matter who he has to kill.

Sheriff Chance has three deputies and two civilians who want to help him. Dude (Dean Martin) used to be a deputy, but he’s been on a two-year drunk. Stumpy (Walter Brennan) is old and grizzled, with a dangerous mean streak. Colorado Ryan (Ricky Nelson) is a young gunslinger who decides to back Chance after his boss, Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond), is murdered by Burdette’s men. Hotel owner Carlos Robante (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez) is a little man with a big heart intent on doing anything he can to help Chance. Finally, there’s Feathers (Angie Dickinson), a cardsharp who’s probably done a little whoring on the side. She falls for Chance, and is willing to risk her life to save his.

Six people with right on their side vs. a rich man’s army. The story is predictable, but it’s how the cast and crew get there that makes Rio Bravo a classic.

Wayne and Hawks hatched a plan to make Rio Bravo after seeing High Noon. That 1952 film is a thinly veiled liberal slap in the face to the Communist witch-hunt conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy as well as by the House Un-American Activities Committee, who used the Internal Security Act of 1950 to go on a rampage against Hollywood. High Noon depicted a righteous person abandoned by his friends, just as its writer, Carl Foreman, had been when he was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, which ruined his career.

But Wayne and Hawks were staunch Republicans, and High Noon offended their politics. Even more, they thought Foreman had got the characters all wrong. Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich, in the latter’s book Who the Devil Made It, "Gary Cooper ran around trying to get help and no one would give him any. And that’s a rather 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. . . . We did everything that way -- the opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon -- and it worked; people liked it."

Hawks and Wayne felt that a professional lawman wouldn’t have gone door to door begging for help, as Cooper’s character, Sheriff Will Kane, does in High Noon. A strong lawman would face the lawbreakers and get his job done. So they made Chance into a man who wouldn’t ask for help, and if it was offered, he’d take only the best. As Chance says, "If they’re really good, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll just have to take care of them."

Another thing about High Noon that annoyed Wayne and Hawks was the role of Kane’s wife, Amy (Grace Kelly). Just married to Kane, she’s so rigid in her pacifist beliefs that she threatens to leave him if he goes through with the gunfight. Hawks and Wayne liked to see a woman stand by her man, and Feathers does. Nor did they like Kelly’s prim, starched pose; Feathers is a barroom tart.

For years, American critics thought directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Frank Capra were simply talented journeymen, simplistic and frequently corny. On its surface, Rio Bravo is evidence for the prosecution. There’s more bantering than battling. When things look toughest, Dean Martin or Ricky Nelson will sing a song. Angie Dickinson, in her first role, struggles as an actor. John Wayne’s roughneck sheriff looks like the iconic caricature that drives some people crazy, and Hawks telegraphs his moves so that we always know what’s coming. But between the action scenes are some compelling writing and acting, and Hawks’ directing is so subtle it’s almost undetectable.

John Wayne delivers one of his best performances. He was only 51, but five packs a day of unfiltered cigarettes had taken its toll, and here he looks old before his time. Chance thus looks a little haggard, but he’s still the deadly roughneck Wayne had created 20 years before in Stagecoach. The center of the story is Dude. Most of the action relates to him, from the first murder to the final confrontation. Martin worked hard to get this role, and once in it, embodied a tragic soul just looking for a friend. The kind, tender relationship of Chance and Dude gives Rio Bravo its emotional center.

By 1959, when Rio Bravo was released, television had overtaken the movies as America’s dominant entertainment. As Hollywood hustled around trying to lure audiences back to the theaters with 3-D, stereophonic sound, CinemaScope, and Cinerama, Hawks calmly went to the top TV shows and asked their stars to join him on Rio Bravo. Ricky Nelson was the teenage heartthrob of Ozzie and Harriet, Walter Brennan was the star of The Real McCoys, Ward Bond was the star of Wagon Train, and John Russell starred in Soldiers of Fortune. Dean Martin, with Jerry Lewis, was part of the most popular comedy duo of the era, with a string of money-making movies and a hit TV show, The Colgate Comedy Hour. Even Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez had come to fame through an appearance on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. Hawks figured that all these TV stars would help make his movie a financial success.

And succeed Rio Bravo did, not just commercially, but as a compelling film. Hawks understood how to make us care about the characters. Over its slow-rolling 141 minutes, the characters’ personality quirks and emotional outbursts make us care, and that is part of what makes Rio Bravo a classic.

The revolutionary French directors who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma -- Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut -- were the first to brand Hawks a genius, calling him America’s "most intelligent director." Godard, director of the insurgent À bout de souffle (Breathless), went further: "The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game. . . . Take, for example the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject."

For Quentin Tarantino, Rio Bravo is a litmus test, a position he elegantly stated in Vanity Fair: "When I’m getting serious about a girl, I show her Rio Bravo and she better fucking like it."

My long-suffering wife is occasionally willing to watch a John Wayne film, but Rio Bravo is just too much for her: She laughs every time Wayne is onscreen. This kind of ruins the moment, so I watch it alone. She’s worth it.

Warner Home Video has done their usual stellar job of cleaning the print and getting the most vivid colors onto the screen, and the clarity carries over to the sound. Thank God they didn’t try to split the original mono soundtrack into a 5.1-channel signal. It’s just good, clear, 1950s sound.

Critic Richard Schickel and director John Carpenter provide the commentary track. Schickel does his usual good job of providing a historic overview, but Carpenter has a fan’s insights. In fact, he loves Rio Bravo so much that, in 2005, he remade it as Assault on Precinct 13.

Schickel used to have a TV show, The Men Who Made the Movies, in which he showcased great directors. You can occasionally find the shows on TCM, but it’s nice to have his interview with Hawks on this Blu-ray (it’s also on the SD DVD edition). Also worth watching, and included here, is a new documentary with Angie Dickinson and several directors talking about Hawks and Wayne.

I usually like to list some of the awards a film has won, but with Rio Bravo, Hawks and Warner Bros. threw craps. Hawks was content with the fact that he’d won the hearts and devotion of his fellow directors. And since 2001, Warner Bros. has released 12 different versions of Rio Bravo on silver disc. That’s the power of a classic film.

Maybe I’ll try the wife one more time . . .

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

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