The Screengrab : rio bravo

"Rio Bravo" Turns Fifty

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"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.

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

Democracy in the Western: Charles Taylor on "Rio Bravo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly mattered." So writes Charles Taylor in the latest issue of the pinko-liberal publication Dissent. While the above statement can be taken as definitive proof that Taylor has never seen McQ, it'll stand for the performances that Taylor cites as among Wayne's best, such as those in Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and the one he's here to preach about tonight: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. As Taylor writes, "The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin. So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn... Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others. When Chance’s friend, the cattleman Wheeler (the inevitable Ward Bond), derides his deputies by asking, 'A bum-legged old man and a drunk—that’s all you’ve got?' Chance answers, 'That’s what I’ve got.' It’s the single best line reading of Wayne’s career. There’s a world of respect in the weight he puts on that one word, 'what,' an irreducible sense of people’s worth as individuals."

Rio Bravo's open affection for its characters--characters that we, the viewer, spend a lot of time cooped up with in small, confining spaces--helps to account for its status as, in Quentin Tarantino's terminology, one of the greatest hang-out movies of all time. Wayne's John T. Chance "is the heroic figure whose self-sufficiency inspires the others to rise above their shortcomings. But because this is a celebration of democracy, the result isn’t a race of isolated heroes but a community in which the strength of each individual buoys up everyone else. Even Chance, the strongest person in the movie, can’t do without those people." Indeed, because without Dean Martin fumbling with the last shreds of his self-respect, Walter Brennan lurching and gabbing, and Rick Nelson leading the camp sing-along, there woule nothing to watch except for Claude Akins complaining about the quality of the jail food until Wayne went back to his cell to bludgeon him to sleep, not that this wouldn't have been something to watch. As it is, it is a film that, in Taylor's eyes, "justif[ies] the idea of America." It is good to know that a film that justifies the idea of America has a scene in which Angie Dickinson appears wearing fishnet stockings.