Rio Bravo

USA (1959)
Howard Hawks, dir.
John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson

by Christopher Collier (7/17/07)

After starting my John Wayne marathon with The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, it was going to be hard to find a film that could top it, and I was very hopefully of Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo. With the sterling review from the guys at Filmspotting and a recently re-mastered release, including a screening at Cannes, I expected this film to be the pinnacle of the Western, and in everyway it was. I have just come to understand, however, that I am not a fan of the straight-down-the-middle Western. I loved Man because of how it bent the genre and the John Ford touches to characters and sets that made it almost hyper-real. Rio Bravo was the opposite and used all of the genre clichés and caricatures.

Filmed in Old Tucson, the set that hosted the filming of many hundred a cowboy flick, Bravo follows Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) as he attempts to keep a murdering member of a rancher gang behind bars until the Marshall arrives. Assisting him are some of the most stereotyped characters to ever grace the screen: Walter Brennan’s Stumpy, a grizzled ole timer who cackles and hoots as the comic relief, Dean Martin’s Dude, also known as Borachón (Spanish for “drunk”), as the recovering alcoholic and best friend to Chance, Ricky Nelson as the outsider kid who does not want to join the fight but pitches in at the end, and a slew of standards like the Chinese mortician, the Mexican saloon owner complete with a Carmen-esque vixen of a wife, and a wily woman who distracts Chance every time she can and is both equal at drinking and walking around in slinky clothing.

Most of the movie focuses on the team building of the Sheriff’s squad, with Dean battling his urge to drink, Chance battling his urge to give into Angie Dickinson, and Ricky Nelson waiting until he can finally join the group and bust into song. With the exception of Chance, the quintessential American hero of the West, solitary, all-business, and terse, each member of the film has to overcome some hurdle until they can all work as a team to keep the villain at bay. And with the cast, wouldn’t you know that once they all join in, they break into song, a symbol of their camaraderie and unity.

Replete with an epic gun fight, witty one-liners, and classic, albeit played-out, characters, Rio Bravo is a perfect introduction to the Western genre. It does have everything, and provides a perfect diving off place to those other films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that reimagined and made the genre great.