on rio bravo

You never know what will be considered a classic in the future. I first saw Rio Bravo on TV when I was a kid, and I loved it, as I have every time I have seen it since then. But it would never have occurred to me on that first viewing that I was watching a classic. Well, when you are a kid, there are only two kinds of movies, those that rule and those that suck ... it's the Beavis and Butthead method of evaluation. But even later, Rio Bravo would have been a guilty pleasure if I believed in such things. Howard Hawks was an acclaimed Hollywood director (and over time, I came to realize he was one of my own very favorites), John Wayne the biggest of stars, but Rio Bravo wasn't thought of as their best work, alone or together. And the presence of actors like Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Angie Dickinson didn't exactly help (they are all wonderful in Rio Bravo ... well, Ricky is only OK ... but really, do you think a movie is a classic if all you know is that Dean Martin plays a drunk, Ricky Nelson plays a gunslinger named Colorado, Police Woman is a woman of mystery, and everything stops in the middle of the film so Dino and Ricky can sing a couple of songs with Walter Brennan accompanying them?)

The thing is, Rio Bravo is fun ... maybe that's one reason it wasn't always taken seriously. When I took a class on the Western tradition at Cal, I was delighted to see Rio Bravo on the syllabus, and I still recall Dick Hutson's lecture on the importance of humor in establishing character in the film. By that time, of course, Rio Bravo was treated with far more respect that I could have imagined watching it on TV back in the day.

The fine critic Charles Taylor has an essay on Rio Bravo in Dissent that is well worth the time of fans of the movie:

Wayne, whose centenary occurred this past spring, remains in some ways the most undefined of iconic movie stars. When we say we “know” Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo, or George Clooney or Julia Roberts, we’re talking about the intimacy we feel from having watched them at work. But much of what’s “known” of John Wayne depends on ignoring what’s on screen.

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. It was easier to think of Wayne as something like the vigilante of the plains—macho, indomitable, always in the right, ordering women and Indians around because that’s the way God planned it....

[I]n Howard Hawks’s 1959 Rio Bravo, the director’s masterpiece ... Wayne gave us the richest, most likable, and probably the most daring version of his screen persona....

Over and over, Hawks tells the stories of disparate individuals who, by necessity or fluke, drift together into groups that meld their professional and personal lives. The ad hoc communities of Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Thing . . . From Another World, Hatari!, and El Dorado are held together by an unspoken ethos that values competence, confidence, resourcefulness, respect and self-respect, stern generosity, shared good humor, empathy, and the ability to recognize and appreciate those qualities in others. Human frailty (Dean Martin’s alcoholism in Rio Bravo; Walter Brennan’s in To Have and Have Not) is acknowledged but never judged to be the sum of a person’s character. Women are assumed to be every bit as capable as men. Hawks recognized the differences between responsibility and duty, sympathy and pity, honesty and cruelty, individualism and selfishness....

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....

[I]t’s Rio Bravo that remains Hawks’s deepest expression of his delight in people, and his warmest, most casual vision of the ordinary and profound ways they lift each other up. Rio Bravo rejects the notion that there are people who can be thrown away. When the film critic Robin Wood was writing about the movie, he said, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo.” Let me offer my own overstatement: If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the idea of America, it would be Rio Bravo.