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Rio Bravo 4K

by Glenn Erickson Aug 15, 2023
Everyone’s favorite gun-down & sing-along John Wayne western is also Howard Hawks’ cagy comeback in an industry that had left him behind. Hawks stitched together favorite ‘pieces’ of his 1940s hits and imposed the structure of an impromptu TV sitcom. Accompanying the box office powerhouse Wayne is a comedian-crooner still proving his worth as an actor, a hollow teen idol, and yet another sharp actress trying to embody the ideal ‘Hawks woman.’  This western is all about personality. It clicked with audiences big-time, and Hawks more or less re-made it again and again. Caution — there’s no backup Blu-ray version on board.


Rio Bravo 4K
4K Ultra HD + Digital Code
Warner Brothers
1959 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 141 min. / Street Date August 1, 2023 / Available from / 33.99
Starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez, Claude Akins, Malcolm Atterbury, Myron Healy, Chuck Roberson, Bob Steele.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art Director: Leo K. Kuter
Stunt coordinator: Yakima Canutt
Costume Design: Marjorie Best
Film Editor: Folmar Blangsted
Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Screenplay by Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett from a short story bry B.H. McCampbell
Produced and Directed by
Howard Hawks

Rio Bravo 4K has always left this viewer scratching his head in confusion. The movie makes its own rules, dodging the charge that it lacks a fresh storyline, or a well-developed plot, or particularly convincing characters. Fans consider it one of the most entertaining, relaxing westerns ever, two hours plus passing the time with a quartet of likable lawmen under siege in a sheriff’s office. It’s a movie for people, not film critics. Not every western is part of the genre’s evolution, and needs to fit into a preconceived pattern.

That’s almost how we thought at UCLA, studying great work by Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher and others. The early ’70s was when Ford’s The Searchers was rediscovered — students that reviled John Wayne’s politics began to appreciate how the actor represented the values of the previous generation. We looked beyond elements in The Searchers that were less than ideal (cornball humor, occasional cheap interior sets) and saw qualities that transcended Ford, the western, and cinema in general. The story of Ethan Edwards was the Story of America past and present. For reborn western fanatics, it bent time and space just as surely as did 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

Yes, much of critical film studies wanted Great Cinema to follow what Antonioni once read in a fortune cookie: Go Profound or Go Home. At the end of a semester viewing what lecturer Jim Kitses considered the most significant Westerns ever, we were shown Hawks’ Rio Bravo in a perfect 35mm Technicolor print. It was big, it was colorful . . . and it played like a TV show. It didn’t begin to reward our kind of genre analysis. After the screening in Melnitz 1409, I still remember the first remark, made by a grad student who normally didn’t speak:

“This is a Howard Hawks classic?  This movie has nothing that can even be called good.”

Well, it wasn’t trying to combine Citizen Kane with Beowulf. Yet Rio Bravo is pretty much ground zero for American pop culture circa 1959.

Howard Hawks had been one of the most successful directors in Hollywood, and since the middle 1930s had found ways to choose what he filmed and how he filmed it. When he wasn’t making box-office history, he was finding ways for established stars to stretch their range. His effort to develop (and put under contract) new talent was only partly successful, but it resulted in at least one major discovery, Lauren Bacall.

Since roughly 1950 Hawks had strayed from conventional star-oriented storytelling, experimenting somewhat with his film subjects. His humanistic Red-scare movie The Thing from Another World  broke new ground in science-fiction. His best western The Big Sky embraced real frontier history, to dream of an America where races might exist in harmony. Hawks went far out of his comfort zone for Land of the Pharaohs, shooting in Egypt and fixating on building pyramids over star personalities. Those last two movies were not considered successes. Hawks took some time off.

 

The great director needs a hit.

After four years in the wilderness Hawks came back to find that American entertainment had changed. The movies now shared more of the spotlight with TV, and America was hooked on shows about happy families and gun-down westerns. Hawks regrouped, and applied himself to the practical problem of making a surefire hit. Rio Bravo is a BIG color western designed to outshine anything on TV. But it doesn’t emphasize lavish spectacle and exotic locations. Most of it was filmed on interior sets and a standard Movie Town in Arizona. The CAST is everything. Rio Bravo runs on pure celebrity personality.

Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) is keeping the peace in the town of Rio Bravo, with the aid of cranky old Stumpy (Walter Brennan). The no-good Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) kills an unarmed man, which forces a showdown with Joe’s brother Nathan (John Russell), the wealthiest rancher in the territory. Burdette enlists a pack of hired guns to secure Joe’s freedom. Although John is the ‘go it alone’ type, he attracts two more volunteer deputies. Dude, also known by the slur borrachón (Dean Martin) shakes off his liquor habit in an attempt to regain his lost pride. Young Colorado Ryan (Ricky Nelson) is a complete loner, but he volunteers his services after Burnette’s killers gun down his employer Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond).

Chance also has a loyal friend in hotel keeper Carlos Robante (Pedro Gonzales Gonzales), and a new love interest in the gambler-entertainer ‘Feathers’ (Angie Dickinson). The siege of Rio Bravo by the Burdette gang lasts for 141 minutes. The defenders of the tiny jailhouse have time to swap smart talk, visit the hotel, and participate in jolly musical diversions. Stumpy exercises his cranky muscles, while Sheriff Chance counsels Dude on going sober, praises Colorado’s straight-arrow professionalism — and takes a few hotel breaks, to sample Feather’s amorous provocations.

 

Anyone who’s seen more than three Howard Hawks films will recognize that Rio Bravo is a cut & paste job of ‘Hawks’ Greatest Hits.’  The jail house harbors a Professional Male Unit par exellence — Chance asks for no help but accepts qualified volunteers. Personifying a decade’s worth of American substance abuse, Dean Martin’s Dude is the Male Animal brought low by booze.  Dude is so humiliated, he considers digging coins out of a barroom spittoon.

In two short years Martin had lifted himself up from the status of sidekick to Jerry Lewis. He had already made some progress as a dramatic actor, in The Young Lions and Some Came Running. Recovering from booze can be easy, when it happens in a movie. A year or two of grinding alcoholism hasn’t impaired Dude’s aim, even though he shows a shaking hand now and then. He’s given Hawks’ buzz phrase “Don’t ever do that again” that was handed down from Humphrey Bogart (“See how close you came?”) to Clift to even Joan Collins.

 

Hawks’ canny calculation is to tailor Rio Bravo to connect with TV viewers. Thus we get 18 year-old Ricky Nelson, scion of TV’s long-running The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, as an incredibly professional baby-faced gunslinger. Representing clean-cut PTA-approved youth at its best, Nelson did pretty well in show biz. The success of Rio Bravo overrode the reality that he is Absolutely Terrible in Every Respect. Hawks knew how to make the character work: the audience accepts Colorado because John Wayne accepts him. John Chance spends the whole movie paying compliments to this New Kid in town.

Otherwise Colorado Ryan is a limp joke. Nelson must have been coached up the Ying Yang to imitate Montgomery Clift in Hawks’ Red River. Nelson talks slow and adds pauses. He rubs his nose just like Clift.

 

Angie Dickinson entered Rio Bravo as a busy starlet and came out in much better career shape. Tasked to play the ‘Hawks woman’ to the hilt, she makes Feathers a dame who talks vague dirty talk like Lauren Bacall, defers to male pride and preference (‘you stand over there while I strut in my underwear’) and then folds up in self-generated emotional fits. Feathers has at least three of these self-contained verbal fits — she talks herself into a tizzy worrying about Chance, and then scolds herself for being such a ninny. Chance just stands there, enjoying the show.

The sexy Hawks Woman partial melt-down.

The idea may have developed through Hawks’ work with Jean Arthur,  Rosalind Russell and others, but we see Feathers’ antics as a direct imitation of Joanne Dru in Red River. Barely in the movie, Joanne Dru’s character Tess Millay arrives to do little more than express hysteria over the death pact between the male stars Wayne and Montgomery Clift. ‘Real Women’ in the Hawks world are normally tough birds until triggered by the male conflicts in play. Hawks uses a Millay tizzy fit to sidestep what would seem to be an inevitable downer finale — she grabs up a gun and intervenes. What ought to be ridiculous instead works like a charm.

Except for throwing a flower pot through a window, Feathers in Rio Bravo is almost a complete narrative sidebar, isolated from the rest of the action. If Angie Dickinson hadn’t performed to satisfaction, Hawks could have cut her out, and only a few dialogue lines would be affected. Instead, the role cemented the actress’s status as a minor star.

 

Hawks’ keen understanding of the power of TV can be seen in the ‘special guest star’ status afforded actor Ward Bond.  At age 7,  Rio Bravo was my introduction to the legend of John Wayne . . . but Ward Bond got a big cheer from the kids at my matinee show. We already knew him well — we saw him every week on TV’s Wagon Train.

We knew Bond even better than we knew Walter Brennan . . . who is of course a self-contained Howard Hawks tradition: Barbary Coast,  Come and Get It,  Sergeant York,  To Have and Have Not, Red River. Brennan lays the crotchety cranky schtick on extra thick . . . we kids loved it.

 

Can we assume that John Wayne had considerable influence in the casting?  The capable Pedro Gonzales Gonzales has his most respectable role in Rio Bravo, after making good in Wayne’s Batjac productions The High and the Mighty, Man in the Vault and Gun the Man Down. That last show featured Angie Dickinson, too.

20 years before, Howard Hawks was known to sometimes alter scripts all the way through production, discussing everything with his actors and  making major changes on the fly. Rio Bravo’s sing-along-sessions may have been partly improvised, but they can’t touch Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and to Have Not.  But what can?

The movie gives its star composer free rein as well. Dimitri Tiomkin had spun gold for Wayne and Hawks before. Besides a couple of new songs for the sing-alongs, Tiomkin reprises his main themes from Blowing Wild and  Red River. He likely had already begun working on Wayne’s long-gestating The Alamo, considering that its Mexican song El Degüello  is used here. The music cue reinforces Burdette’s otherwise not-too-threatening hired guns.

Suddenly it’s all about Feelings, too.

Rio Bravo’s John Chance is a kinder, gentler alpha male. Gone are the embittered days of Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards. Supposedly under siege, the lawmen spend lots of time confabbing in the jailhouse, with nobody but Carlos monitoring what’s happening with the bad guys. When not sparring with Stumpy (“Well, if ya don’t come back, me ‘n’ Joe’ll have us a good cry!”), Wayne’s Chance is positively feelings-oriented. He worries about the geriatric Stumpy, and practically nursemaids the spittoon-diving Dude, the confirmed drunk who shows unusually selective effects of alcoholism. All the jailhouse needs is Mister Rogers in chaps and spurs, helping Colorado with the inner trauma of shifting between father figures Pat Wheeler and John Chance. Rio Bravo helped Wayne solidify the character he’d play in his remaining westerns … sixteen or seventeen of them in as many years.

 


 

Warner Brothers’ 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code of Rio Bravo is a fine-looking candidate for home theater presentation. Earlier Blu-rays looked good as well, so the improvement is the double-resolution and the HDR boost; warm up those high-end video projectors and get ready for that Eisenhower-era solid state MONO audio.

It needs to be repeated that there’s no standard Blu-ray backup here, just a code for the digital version.

The one extra is an audio commentary from quite a while back, with critic Richard Schickel and major Hawks acolyte-director John Carpenter. It’s a long haul with that pair covering a 140-minute movie. Both speakers are somewhat laid back and unemotional.

The package blurb gives us a critic quote that many may agree with: “Arguably Howard Hawks’ greatest film.”  That’s a stretch, yet we admit freely that Rio Bravo is always entertaining. Every scene has a winning self-assurance, with John Wayne’s personality setting the serio-comic pace and tone. Somewhere in the development or rehearsals, somebody had to have joked about Wayne’s 1930s series westerns, when he had to play a singing cowboy.

John T. Chance may sing in the shower, but not with Dude or Colorado. Nine years later Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin would croon on screen, probably because the money was too good to pass up. The resulting film footage is always good for a laugh.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson



Rio Bravo 4K
4K Ultra HD + Digital Code rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Richard Schickel and John Carpenter.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English + 8 other languages (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
August 14, 2023
(6979rio)
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Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Gareth Moses

This very much falls into the hang-out movie camp; it’s just really nice to be in the company of this group of characters. There are many more exciting, tense westerns – but very few (especially at his length) that feel so relaxed and self-assured.

Cliff Balcony

A “hollow teen idol”? What a pretentious, pathetic thing to say. Are you thinking of Bobby Rydell or Frankie Avalon, by chance? Nobody’s going to accuse Ricky of being a great actor, but he was a fine rock ‘n’ roller and he is in this movie to bring teenage girls into a John Wayne picture and by all reports he was very successful (one of my Balconeers recounted the screams that welcomed Ricky back when the film was new). PLUS he’s the fastest draw I’ve ever seen on screen (that guitar practice, no doubt) and he gives us the movie’s best shot, bursting through a door while tossing a rifle to Wayne with his left hand and shooting villains with his right. You, me, and most other people would’ve hit the Duke in the forehead with the rifle and shot Angie Dickinson in the spleen. PLUS – a duet with Dino?!?!? Get outta here. Ricky brings so much to this movie that is missing from Hawks’ sequels. You sound like one o’ them booing 1970s full-of-yourselves that Rick wrote “Garden Party” about.

Cliff Balcony

“remakes” not “sequels.” Sorry, you got my dander up.

David Smith

I don’t know why Savant is so down on this movie when he likes the flawed Land of the Pharaohs so much. One of the most enjoyable westerns ever

Robin

Because he has overlooked so much of merit in the film, for example, how much of it is a reversal of High Noon. In that film Gary Cooper goes around expecting help from people and then being disappointed when they all refuse except for a drunk, a youngster and an old man well past it. Nevertheless he takes on the outlaws on his own and is so good, that he manages without any real difficulty which makes nonsense of asking amateurs to assist him. In Rio Bravo, it’s the exact opposite. John Wayne rejects help except from a drunk, a youngster and an old man well past it, but on every occasion he needs help and he receives it from his friends.

Mike Del Gaudio

My only problem with Rick Nelson in Rio Bravo is that the success of his casting gave John Wayne the idea to add a ‘teen idol’ or ‘young blood’ to the most of his subsequent movies. Frankie Avalon at the Alamo? Ay-yi-yi! I think Rick gets a bum deal when lumped in with teen idols of the day.
Rio Bravo does play like one of those TV westerns of the day starting off with the Warners logo. Besides TV stalwarts Ward Bond and Rick Nelson, you have Granpappy Amos McCoy, Lawman’s John Russell and Claude Akins, who probably played a bad guy on every one of those Warners shows. Then throw in Roy Barcroft, Myron Healey and Bob Steele whose B movies/serials were constantly being shown on the tube. I grew up with all of this before I first saw Rio Bravo on TV, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Going back to Rick’s acting, or lack of, in this, I thought any deficiencies got swept away by Stumpy’s over the top antics which made it hard to take things too seriously. Geez, they blow up a barn with dynamite and the bad guys all walk out with only a cough and maybe a missing hat.

Mike Del Gaudio

Thanks for the compliment. When I wrote my comment, I had a vague memory of Bob Steele being in a serial, but I admit that I just now had to check his IMDB page. I did find one, Mystery Squadron, whose villian, The Black Ace, is also a vague memory. I can’t explain why I said ‘B movies’ rather than ‘B westerns’. Bob Steele’s B Western output certainly dwarfs his serial output! I probably saw Rio Bravo on TV when I was around 13-14. Those were good times.

John Simpson

Seriously, you think Rick Nelson was given the line, “Don’t ever do that again”? Are you kidding? Try John Wayne after Dean Martin smacks Duke in the face for the second time in the picture.

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[…] weighs in only on films that mean a lot to him, like his track on last month’s 4K disc of Rio Bravo. Carpenter saw this show in a theater as a kid, and believes it was a direct inspiration for his […]

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[…] with the town split between Arizona’s familiar ‘Old Tucson’ set later used in Rio Bravo, and the western set on the main Paramount lot four blocks from CineSavant Central in Hollywood. […]

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[…] up Youth Appeal by reaching for the nearest squeaky-clean pop star, most notably Ricky Nelson in  Rio Bravo. Howard is a far sight easier to take than Wayne’s other teen idols. Fabian Forte was […]

Professor Echo

I always wind up feeling sorry for most critics after I read their reviews of Howard Hawks movies. They are all so obsessed with ticking boxes on their lists of other critic approved ideas and analyses and expectations of Hawks they forget to watch the movie and instead keep looking at their lists like an absent minded housewife shopping the aisles of their local Walmart. The above review is no different. At what point does being a critic become ignoring everything about a movie and instead toiling only to confirm someone else’s preconceptions? I remember explaining to a friend years ago why I didn’t like TERMINATOR 2 and her saying to me afterwards, “I hope I never become like you.” That’s how I feel toward the critic here and his review of RIO BRAVO.

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