Posts from may2 in thread „Rio Bravo (1959)“

Roger Ebert on Rio Bravo.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com…90715/REVIEWS08/907159989


John Wayne, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson in "Rio Bravo."


Rio Bravo (1959)


/ / / July 15, 2009





by Roger Ebert

Howard Hawks didn’t direct a film for four years after the failure of his "Land of the Pharaohs" in 1955. He thought maybe he had lost it. When he came back to work on "Rio Bravo" in 1958, he was 62 years old, would be working on his 41st film and was so nervous on the first day of shooting that he stood behind a set and vomited. Then he walked out and directed a masterpiece.
To watch "Rio Bravo" is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water. It contains one of John Wayne’s best performances. It has surprisingly warm romantic chemistry between Wayne and Angie Dickinson. Dean Martin is touching. Ricky Nelson, then a rival of Elvis’ and with a pompadour that would have been laughed out of the Old West, improbably works in the role of a kid gunslinger. Old Walter Brennan, as the peg-legged deputy, provides comic support that never oversteps.

Wayne and the other men and the gambling lady inhabit a town that is populous and even crowded, but not a single citizen, except for an early victim, a friendly hotel owner and his wife and of course the villain, ever says a word to them. The shadows are filled with hired killers with $50 gold pieces in their pockets — "the price of a human life." All that buys Wayne and his deputies a stay of execution is the prisoner they precariously hold as a hostage. In a film with suspenseful standoffs and looming peril, even a scene where Wayne and Martin walk down Main Street after nightfall is frightening.

The story situation was fashioned by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, two veterans who wrote Hawks’ great film "The Big Sleep" in 1946. It centers on four men holed up inside a sheriff’s office: a seasoned lawman, a drunk, an old coot and a kid. This formula would prove so resilient that Hawks would remake it in "El Dorado" (1966), John Carpenter would remake it as "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976) and directors from Scorsese to Tarantino to Stone would directly reference it. It is a Western with all of the artifice of the genre, but the characters and their connections take on a curious reality; within this closed system, their relationships have a psychological plausibility.

Hawks and Angie Dickinson on the set.


Wayne, as Sheriff John T. Chance, plays what he himself called "the John Wayne role." He even wears the same hat, now battered and torn, that he had worn in Westerns ever since John Ford’s "Stagecoach" (1939). Yet here he calls upon the role and his own history to bring nuance and depth to the character. Grumpy old Ford, seeing the film, told Hawks, "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act."

Wayne is effective above all when he simply stands and regards people. "I don’t act, I react," he liked to say, and here you see what he meant. His Chance doesn’t feel it necessary to impose himself, apart from the formidable fact of his presence. He never sweet-talks Feathers (Dickinson), indeed tends to be gruff toward her, but his eyes and body language speak for him. There is a moment when he is angered that she didn’t get on the stage out of town, stalks upstairs to her hotel room, barges through the door and then — in the reverse shot — sees her and transforms his whole demeanor. Can you say a man "softens" simply by the way he holds himself? With the most subtle of body movements, he unwinds into the faintest beginning of a courtly bow. You don’t see it. You feel it.

Dickinson was 27, looked younger, when she made the film — her first significant feature role after bit parts and TV. Wayne was 51. No matter. They fit together. They liked each other. They make this palpable without throwing themselves at each other. If you will go to chapter 21 of the DVD, you will see a romantic scene so sweet and unexpected, it may make you hold your breath. Dickinson absolutely holds the screen against the big man. Her carriage and deep, rich voice project a sense of who she is — not a saloon floozy but a competent professional gambler accustomed to sparring with men.



She was the type of woman Hawks liked, and returned to time and again: Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, indeed the future studio executive Sherry Lansing. He loved to use again what had worked for him earlier; when Dickinson asks Wayne to kiss her a second time, because "it’s even better when two people do it," there’s an echo of Bacall in "To Have and Have Not," telling Bogart, "It’s even better when you help." Peter Bogdanovich notices this in a supplement on the DVD and praises the long opening sequence in "Rio Bravo," which runs, he says, five minutes without dialogue. And no wonder: Hawks used the business of a coin thrown into a spittoon in the silent film "Underworld" (1927), for which he wrote the scenario. And where might Hawks have found inspiration for the scene where Wayne lifts Dickinson in his arms and carries her upstairs?

Much of the strength of the Chance character comes from the way he holds himself in reserve, not feeling the need to comment on everything. His delicate relationship with Dean Martin’s alcoholic character Dude involves a minimum of lectures and a lot of simply waiting to see what Dude will do. When Dude and old Stumpy (Brennan) get in a loud argument, Hawks holds Chance in center background, observing, not interfering. Chance is always the unspoken source of authority, the audience the others hope to impress.

The score by Dimitri Tiomkin evokes a frontier spirit when it wants to but also helps deepen the film, which rarely for a Western marks the passage of days with sunsets and sunrises, and makes the town streets seem lonely and exposed. There is also the introduction of a theme known to the Mexicans as "The Cutthroat Song," which the villain Burdette (John Russell) orders the band to play. Chance reads it as a message: "No quarter taken." The song haunts the film.

John Wayne's "Stagecoach" hat.


There is another use of music that some will question. In a lull in the action, the men relax inside the barricaded sheriff’s office, and Martin, resting on his back with his hat shielding his eyes, begins to sing about a cowboy’s loneliness. Nelson picks up his guitar and accompanies him. Then Ricky sings an uptempo song of his own, with Martin and even Brennan in harmony. Does this scene feel airlifted in? Maybe, but I wouldn’t do without it. Martin and Nelson were two of the most popular singers of the time, and the interlude functions well as an affectionate reprise for the men before the final showdown. Needless to say, Sheriff Chance doesn’t sing along.

The brave sheriff takes a stand against the outlaws who threaten a town. It is a familiar Western situation, which may remind you of "High Noon" (1952). In 1972, I interviewed Wayne on the set of his "Cahill, U.S. Marshal" in Durango, Mexico. "High Noon" came up, as it will when Westerns are being discussed.

"What a piece of you-know-what that was," he told me. "I think it was popular because of the music. Think about it this way. Here’s a town full of people who have ridden in covered wagons all the way across the plains, fightin’ off Indians and drought and wild animals in order to settle down and make themselves a homestead. And then when three no-good bad guys walk into town and the marshal asks for a little help, everybody in town gets shy. If I’d been the marshal, I would have been so goddamned disgusted with those chicken-livered yellow sons of bitches that I would have just taken my wife and saddled up and rode out of there."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123802062186941663.html

'Rio Bravo,' Still Popular and Hip at 50


It wasn't nominated for any Academy Awards. It was scarcely taken seriously by the critics on its release, and it's never made into the American Film Institute's top 100. But Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo," which had its premiere half a century ago this month, may be the most popular cult film ever made.
The phrase "cult favorite" conjures up images of wobbly hand-held camera shots and little-known actors. But "Rio Bravo" was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history. Most cult films are too hip to be popular, and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But "Rio Bravo" is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip.
Getty Images John Wayne, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson in a scene from the film "Rio Bravo."



French director Jean-Luc Godard called "Rio Bravo" "a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception." British film critic Robin Wood wrote, "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be 'Rio Bravo.'" Quentin Tarantino, whose "Pulp Fiction" was also both popular and hip, told an audience at a 2007 Cannes screening of "Rio Bravo" that he always tested a new girlfriend "by taking her to see 'Rio Bravo' -- and she'd better like it!"
Why has a simple western with an unremarkable plot become such an enduring favorite? The story is simplicity itself: A small-town sheriff, John T. Chance (played by John Wayne), holes up in his jail with just two highly questionable deputies, an old jail keeper named Stumpy (Walter Brennan) and an alcoholic gunfighter named Dude (Dean Martin), while waiting for the marshal to relieve him of a murderous prisoner who happens to be the brother of a powerful rancher (John Russell). That's about it -- there aren't really any side plots except for a slowly developing romance between Chance and Feathers (Angie Dickinson), a dance-hall girl at the local saloon (the role made Ms. Dickinson a star).
This hardly seems the stuff from which legendary films are made. In fact, it seems more like a hodgepodge of elements from many westerns, which is exactly what The New Yorker's Pauline Kael liked about it. "A semi-satiric Western," she called it in "5001 Nights at the Movies," "silly, but with zest."
Todd McCarthy, author of "Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood," says: "'Rio Bravo' isn't, as many people refer to it, a 'classic western' -- it's more like a Neo-classic. It came at the end of an era of great westerns at a time when both Wayne and Hawks needed a hit. They were both happy to recycle elements from earlier pictures, even their own." And they would do so again in 1967, when they remade "Rio Bravo" as "El Dorado," with Robert Mitchum as an alcoholic sheriff and Wayne as his deputy. (The confusion over who starred in which movie made for a very funny sequence in the John Travolta hit "Get Shorty.") In 1976, John Carpenter took the basic story line from both films and remade it as a crime thriller, "Assault on Precinct 13."
"Rio Bravo" 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.")
Tiomkin's music both heightens the tension and relieves it. While the film moves at its own leisurely pace -- at 140 minutes it was longer than most '40s and '50s westerns -- the suspense is sometimes broken for a song. In one sequence, the action stops -- literally -- while Martin and teen idol Ricky Nelson croon "My Rifle, My Pony and Me," a reworking by Tiomkin of his famous theme from Hawks's great 1948 film "Red River." No action movie today would risk anything so daring.
Well known to every "Rio Bravo" aficionado is that it was an intentional response to Fred Zinnemann's 1952 "High Noon," a film that Wayne loathed because it was written by Carl Foreman, who took the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee while "High Noon" was being shot. Foreman, who was later blacklisted, admitted that he wrote scenes in his film to make sure the audience knew he was protesting HUAC. Hawks later said in an interview, "I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help. . . . We did everything the exact opposite of what annoyed me in 'High Noon.'"
But as Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West magazine, notes, too much was made of the differences between "High Noon" and "Rio Bravo." Gary Cooper's sheriff confronts the four outlaws with no one but Grace Kelly to help, while Wayne takes on a couple of dozen with Brennan and Martin, the deputies he started out with, and Nelson, who's only there to get revenge after a friend of his is killed. The odds are about the same for the good guys in both films.
Mr. Bell also notes that the two films are similar in that they perpetuate the myth that a handful of gunmen could simply take over a town without resistance. "When Jesse James and his gang rode into Northfield, Minn., in 1876 to rob the bank, just about every citizen in town reached for a gun and opened fire. That was the case more often than not in the Old West."
Still, two generations of fans have loved "Rio Bravo" without caring at all about its political implications. "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time," the film critic David Thomson asks rhetorically in his recent book "Have You Seen ...?" Fifty years later, the melody lingers on.

Here's a terrific article written by Peter Bogdanovich about Howard Hawks and Rio Bravo.

http://www.nyobserver.com/2007/i-m-hard-get-john-t