by Douglas
Messerli
Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett (screenplay), Howard Hawks
(director) Rio Bravo / 1959
The first of Howard Hawks' western trilogy, representing some of the last films he directed in his long career, Rio Bravo is perhaps the best and most complex, despite what at first appears to be a light-weight cast. The idea of crooner Dean Martin, young singing-idol Ricky Nelson, ingénue Angie Dickinson (playing the role of a hardened gambling woman), and a slightly overweight John Wayne teaming up to help save a small border town from the clutches of the evil rancher Nathan Burdette seems, on the surface, almost ludicrous; and there were still titters in the audience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's late Hawks' retrospective that justify those feelings. Nearly all film critics agree, however, that Rio Bravo one of the better westerns in film history.
Hawks takes us
through the few days between the arrest of Burdette's brother, Joe and the
inevitable showdown, much in the way that Fred Zinneman did in the classic High Noon. But the differences between
these two movies are crucial in their effects. While Gary Cooper, in his
attempt to "save" an idealized and quite lovely small Western town
from Ben Miller and his gang, is refused help from every citizen he asks to
join him, Hawks, in response to High Noon,
presents Wayne as Sherriff John T. Chance, supported at first only by his
cackling old deputy Stumpy (hilariously played by Walter Brennan), as being
ready to tackle the job almost by himself until he is joined by has alcoholic
former sidekick, Dude (Dean Martin). The three of them spend much of the early
part of the film prowling the streets of the gritty-looking, slightly seedy Rio
Bravo, telling other folk to get out of the way.
If High Noon's Hadleyville is a spiffed-up
village of wood-framed houses filled with proper middle-class citizens, Rio
Bravo is as culturally-mixed as any border town probably was in its day: Carlos
Robante and his wife Consuela run the local hotel in which the Sheriff sleeps,
eats and drinks; Burt, the local undertaker, is Chinese. Other than Chance,
Dude, and Stumpy, it appears, the only Caucasians in Rio Bravo are from the
outside: Burdette's men, the cattlemen passing through, and the recently
arrived card shark, Feathers (Dickinson). When cowboy head Pat Wheeler is
killed by Burdette's gang, one of his young assistants Colorado Ryan (Nelson)
casts his lot with the Sheriff, as he and Feathers save the Sheriff's life. In
short, nearly everyone in this bustling little collection of low-stucco
buildings is willing to help, and even those who might only watch the outcome,
help to save the Sheriff from being shot down on the street, since they
might serve as witnesses.
Because the
outcome of the final shootout, accordingly, is fairly apparent—justice will
triumph—Hawks can spend most of his film revealing the interrelationships of
these ragtag figures, demonstrating the power of friendship, loyalty, and love
that connects them. And love in this drab outpost is not just reserved for the
relationships between man and woman (Chance and Feathers, Carlos and Consuela),
but—perhaps due in part to screenwriter Leigh Brackett's perspective as a
woman—is equally expressed between the men, particularly through the
complaining housewife-like role played by Stumpy* (like many a Western
housewife the Sherriff has consigned his partner to the back room of their
little "house"/jail cell, in this case armed with a rifle to protect
it from all intruders), and in the admiration and love between Dude and Chance,
the latter of whom has bought back his friend's gun and other belongings when,
in his drunken nadir, Dude was forced to sell them. With the arrival of the
young Colorado, the prickly trio becomes a happier foursome, as Dude and
Colorado break into song.
Music is quite
essential in Rio Bravo; if the cowboy
songs "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" and "Get Along Home,
Cindy" reveal the isolation and hidden desires of the singers, the enemy's
repeated degüello, with its
references to the battle of the Alamo, haunts these men barricaded in the
jailhouse and torments them with their own failures. But their very
fraternizing spirit ultimately strengthens them, cinematically revealed in the
class of whiskey Dude has just prepared to consume successfully returned to its
bottle without a spill. It is their love and friendship that saves the day.
Only after
normalcy has been restored to this village frontier, does Feathers get her
chance, in more ways than one. But it is she who does the proposing, leaving
nearly nothing to Chance, the man, but to bashfully accept their inevitable
partnership.
*As
the film documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997) made
quite clear, Walter Brennan often played the role of housewife or would-be partner
to the male hero. If one can’t precisely call his male-male relationships as
homosexual, they are most certainly homo-social and anti-heterosexual, as he
time and again attempts to keep his male “friends” from of being entrapped in
marriage as he does the movie Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper, Cooper himself
early on rumored to have engaged in gay relationships with handsome silent
actor Rod La Roque and with bisexual Howard Hughes. Brennan played a role with
Wayne similar to this one of Red River.
Los Angeles,
March 27, 2009
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2009).
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