Classic Movie Review: Rio Bravo

By Josh Spiegel

February 7, 2011

Why do you think I'm too old for her? I'm JOHN WAYNE!

New at BOP:
Share & Save
Digg Button  
Print this column
I don’t get the allure of John Wayne. I get the idea of championing a masculine ideal in the American cinema just fine, but for the most part, the men who end up being the ideal (Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and so on) aren’t interesting screen presences to me. The Duke is the worst offender. I see him as the biggest block of wood to ever grace the silver screen. Wayne, of course, won an Academy Award for his 1969 performance as Rooster Cogburn in the original True Grit, but there was a sentimental lifetime achievement quality to the proceedings. Wayne has been in good films — you may remember that I very much enjoyed Stagecoach, one of his earliest roles — but he’s never been the reason for them being good. Wayne beat the bad guys, sure, but he was the most boring film hero in the golden age.

So, we have Rio Bravo, the 1959 Western that would inspire horror-film director John Carpenter decades later to make a modern version, called Assault on Precinct 13. Rio Bravo is, among other things, a rebuke to the iconic and subtle 1952 Western High Noon, in which a sheriff tries, pretty much by himself, to take on a group of thugs who’ve cowed his town into submission. Some see the film as being a critique of McCarthyism and the blacklisting that occurred in Hollywood because of the Red Scare. Wayne is well-known for having been very conservative, and neither he nor director Howard Hawks enjoyed the idea of a sheriff needing to ask people to help him out. In Rio Bravo, the story is somewhat similar (bad guys are coming to town to free someone from the town jail, and Wayne’s tough sheriff plus a few wacky sidekicks aim to take them out), but slicker.




Advertisement



If there’s good to be had in Rio Bravo, it’s outside of Wayne’s typically bland performance as Sheriff John T. Chance. Chance has to face down the evil rancher Nathan Burdette, whose younger brother is currently biding his time in the local jail after killing someone at the beginning of the film. The story of Rio Bravo is pretty much just Chance figuring out how to take Burdette down without getting killed. Many critics have called Rio Bravo a classic, and there’s no question that the film has a certain timeless quality, in that many of its plot points can be — and have been — recycled in other films in other genres. Though the film has the qualities of a Western, you can transplant a lot of the ideas to pretty much any time and place.

What Rio Bravo provides is a cast of interesting side characters, even if their motivations are kind of weak. Playing a drunk who remembers his past glories and sees this current challenge as a way to revisit them, we have Dean Martin as Dude. Martin’s not bad here, but almost always, I kept asking myself the same question: why Dean Martin? Rio Bravo would be essentially remade by Hawks and Wayne years later as El Dorado, where Robert Mitchum played the drunk. Mitchum has stage presence that Martin doesn’t have. While Martin was a skilled performer with the Rat Pack, there’s never a moment in Rio Bravo where he doesn’t just seem like he’s acting. Wayne, at least, you could buy as having been around during the time when the film is set. Not so for Martin, whose presence is so obvious that it’s always distracting.


Continued:       1       2

     


 
 

Need to contact us? E-mail a Box Office Prophet.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
© 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc.