"Most cult films are too hip to be popular," Allen Barra writes in The Wall Street Journal, "and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip." This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Howard Hawks's Western, which Barra argues "may be the most popular cult film ever made...[which] was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history", John Wayne, and kudos to him for keeping in an eye on the calendar so as to be sure and catch this. One critic, Robin Wood, has written that "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." Another, David Thomson, recently asked, "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time?" Quentin Tarantino, who once listed it as one of his three favorite movies of all time, introduced a screening of it at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and informed the room that whenever he starts seeing a woman for the first time, he always wants to show her Rio Bravo. If the woman doesn't like it, it is not his opinion of the movie that he proceeds to re-evaluate.
Rio Bravo, Barra writes, "was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called The Alamo.)" Hawks and Wayne liked to tell interviewers that the movie was designed as a fuck-you to Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning High Noon, which was written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman. In that movie, the townspeople are too cowardly to help sheriff Gary Cooper when word arrives that four vengeful gunman are on their way to shoot it out with him; in the end, Coop mows them all down and throws his badge away in disgust. Oddly, what seems to have rankled Hawks about this wasn't that the townspeople were gutless but that Cooper was, as the director saw it, so unmanly as to stoop to asking for anyone's help. ""I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help," he said. So Wayne, in a town that barely seems to have any townspeople except for the staff at the hotel, faces down a much larger force than Cooper had to contend with, backed up by a drunk (Dean Martin), a crippled old man (Walter Brennan), and a suburban-rockabilly show biz kid moonlighting as a cow hand (Rick Nelson). "The odds," Barra notes wryly, "are about the same for the good guys in both films."
The fact is that most people couldn't care less about whatever political message the people behind either film imagined they were peddling at the time. Tarantino summed up Bravo's enduring appeal to a great degree when he called it the greatest "hang-out movie" of all time, a term, he explained, refers to movies that hold up under repeated viewings just because the people onscreen are so damned pleasurable to spend time with. Barra refers to Rio Bravo's longish running time (two hours, twenty minutes) and measured pacing, with a time out from the plot for such digressions as a musical interlude in the jail, as evidence of Hawks's "daring", but they play to what Tarantino perceives as the film's strength; the audience, enjoying the unlikely mix of personalities onscreen (which also includes Angie Dickinson, in her breakout role as a seductive lady gambler named Feathers), cares less about suspense and action than in kicking back with them and forgetting about the clock.
This was indeed a gamble on Hawks's part, but he had the elements to make it work. This is all the more remarkable considering how he had gone about casting the picture. Most people assume that the casting of Nelson, who then had one foot in the music charts and one on the set of his parents' The Ozzie and Harriet Show, was a sop to the youth audience and TV watchers, and they are not wrong. (His role was originally written for an older man, and Hawks considered such leathery faces as Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance before deciding to look for a pretty boy. He apparently toyed with the idea of using Michael Landon, then best known as the star of I Was a Teenage Werewolf< before deciding that it would be nice for Dean Martin to have a singing partner.) Surpringly, Walter Brennan, who had worked for Hawks in five earlier movies and won an Oscar for one of them, Come and Get It, was also asked aboard in part because he was, thanks to his series The Real McCoys, now a TV star. According to Todd McCarthy's 1997 biography of Hawks, this would in fact cause the only real tension on the set, when Hawks discovered that Brennan was locked into the lovable, folksy old duffer act he'd been doing on TV and had to scream at his old reliable for a spell before Brennan became sufficiently pissed off to become the picture of a "crabby, evil, nasty old man" that the director had in mind.
Perhaps because some of the things that make the movie seem downright lovable today struck some critics as the time as something between facetiousness and blasphemous, Rio Bravo, despite being a great international success and the second-biggest box office hit of Hawks's career, it won no Oscar nominations, which seems an even more remarkable feat when you consider that Wayne's unfortunate The Alamo racked up seven of them. But we can guess at Hawks's estimation of it from the fact that, for the rest of his career, he continued to rifle it for spare parts. For some of us fans, Rio Bravo stands as the director's last hurrah. He worked for another dozen years, but the slow pace that feels so right here would come to see ever duller and more meandering, especially in the two additional Westerns he made with Wayne, El Dorado (1967) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970). Both borrow heavily from Rio Bravo for their stories and characters, but at least El Dorado made back its costs. In 1975, when John Wayne walked out onto the stage at the Academy Awards show to present Hawks with a special lifetime achievement Oscar, the star of Red River and Hatari! told the crowd that he and Howard Hawks had made four pictures together. Everyone who knew that the real total was five knew that the one they wanted to forget was Rio Lobo.
