by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: July 19, 2008   Last Updated: July 21, 2008

Rio Bravo (1959) Starring John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Claude Akins, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez, Malcolm Atterbury, Harry Carey, Jr.

Directed by Howard Hawks.

Runtime: 141 minutes.

Rating: Unrated.

"Why don't nobody never tell me nothin'?"

South Texas sheriff John T.Chance (Wayne) takes local thug Joe Burdette (Akins) in for murder knowing that Burdette's brother commands a small army of men on a nearby ranch and will come to set his brother loose. He also knows that the Burdettes are not above hiring saddle tramp hitmen. But Chance's utilitarian form of nobility precludes any kind of deal and makes a showdown inevitable. The baddies even hire a mariachi band to play menacing music to set the scene.

Chance refuses offers of help from others unless they look as they might actually be able to help. He is thus aided only by cackling, old goat jail guard Stumpy (Brennan), the town drunk Dude (Martin) and cocky young gunslinger Colorado (Nelson). Then there is a lot of macho posturing and some contrived clashes of wills in the story leading up to an explosive conclusion.

John Wayne who presented Cooper with his Best Actor Oscar for High Noon privately called that film "UnAmerican". With ubermacho director Howard Hawks who dismissed the Cooper character of Will Kane as unprofessional they decided to give their own take on the story years later which resulted in Rio Bravo.

John Wayne (Marion Morrison was his real name but that doesn't sound very macho does it?) had emerged as the number one movie cowboy hero not merely by his own limited acting ability and marginal star quality but by sheer volume of titles made within that genre. In the 1930s he made dozens of them. By the late 1950s he cast such a big shadow in the genre that merely attaching his name to a western project won it extraordinary leeway with studios.

Wayne got his friends like Walter Brennan and Ward Bond hired and the studios brought in Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson to lure in female audiences that Wayne, aged 55, might have had less resonance with. Martin and Nelson could also do musical numbers playing singing cowboy where Wayne couldn't. This is the first Wayne movie in which such consideration was paid to the soundtrack album.

If there is one thing Hollywood was built to stage it is westerns. There can be no doubt of that and vast ghost towns both built specifically for westerns and those already in existence as remnants of frontier times remained across Southern California well in to the early 1970s (the Manson family lived in one). What else does one need to stage a western really? The costumes and horses are available for rental and the landscapes are there diminished though they may be.

Angie Dickinson portrays the "I'm hard to get, you're gonna have to say you want me" leading lady that Howard Hawks used to like writing into his movies.

Notes:

Martin sings a couple of duets with Nelson accompanied by Nelson on guitar. The gratuitous musical number interlude dissipates some of the tension.

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