Rio Bravo (1959)

Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett from a short story B.H. McCampbell
1959/USA
Warner Bros./Armada Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#365 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Pat Wheeler: A game-legged old man and a drunk. That’s all you got?

John T. Chance: That’s WHAT I got.[/box]

Howard Hawks liked this story so much he remade it only seven years later as El Dorado. This original is still the best.

John T. Chance is sheriff of a Texas town in the Old West.  The citizenry is menaced by the Burdette brothers and their gang.  Finally Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the meaner of the brothers, commits cold-blooded murder in front of Chance and is locked in jail.  The gang is still at large and Chance knows that brother Nathan will go to any lengths to free Joe.  He can rely only on his friends Dude (Dean Martin), who has elected to go into alcohol withdrawal especially for the occasion, and Stumpy (Walter Brennan), a gimpy old man.

Chance’s friend Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) suggests he needs more help but Chance wants only pros.  The only real prospect is Colorado (Ricky Nelson), a young hot shot.  Colorado isn’t interested though, at least not until the gang kills his mentor.  On the margins of the central drama, a lady gambler named ‘Feathers’ (Angie Dickinson) is falling for our hero.

According to the commentary, this was Hawks and Wayne’s response to High Noon, which the co-conservatives felt was “phony”.  To their minds no sheriff worth his salt would spend his time begging for help from amateur citizens.  The Feathers-Chance relationship has a lot in common with Hawks’s To Have and Have Not.

This is not the world’s most innovative Western but it is entertaining throughout its almost 2 1/2 hour running time.  Dickinson is a lot of fun to watch.

Rio Bravo was Ward Bond’s final feature film.  He continued to star on TV’s “The Wagon Master”.

Trailer