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Director: Howard Hawks
Screenwriters: Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman / Leigh Brackett
By Roderick Heath
The inspiration of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo has become folklore. After going from strength to strength in the decade or so after Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Hawks had a more varied experience in the 1950s, working across the field of commercial movie genres: science fiction, comedy, musical, western, and historical epic, but only connecting intermittently with audiences. The failure of Land of the Pharaohs (1955) shook Hawks’ confidence badly, and he spent the following three years lying fallow. The seed of his comeback lay in an odd sense of aggravation. Hawks had often in his films extolled the peculiar kind of community that grows around activities requiring professional zeal and grit. So it wasn’t particularly surprising that he disliked the basic premise of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), with its portrait of a frontier town sheriff trying and failing to get help from the community he serves in a dangerous situation. Hawks looked for a story that would contrast it with a tale about a sheriff who, faced with a situation of heavy odds and real danger, wouldn’t run cap in hand to civilians looking for help, but would bring his professionalism to bear and take on the danger without complaint – even, indeed, with hostility to the attempted intervention of people who couldn’t necessarily be relied on. This story is given a more loaded spin by the added fact Rio Bravo star John Wayne also loathed High Noon, if for more political reasons.
All that wasn’t really fair to the specific situation of High Noon, just as it doesn’t entirely encompass what takes place in Rio Bravo or its follow-up El Dorado. But it was the kind of stance that provokes appreciation for how even in a genre as seemingly hallowed and oft-formulaic in motifs as the Western, it could be subtly sculpted into vastly different shapes nonetheless by an artist’s personality and priorities. Rio Bravo and El Dorado are also difficult to approach in a critical sense. For me, anyway, as they resonate on a wavelength like few other movies, as indeed they have for many others, indeed with some subsequent great filmmakers who all but assimilated these movies into their personalities, from Sergio Leone on. After being initially patronized upon release by critics but proving enormously popular with audiences, Rio Bravo quickly found status one of Hawks’ greatest films – indeed, one of the greatest films. It’s proven endlessly influential, and remains perhaps the most balanced and refined of Hawks’ efforts to infuse a nominally straightforward, intensely focused story with a richness of observed behaviour and interaction between characters, in a way that breaks down the nominal distance between dramatic creation and the actors playing the roles, and speaking to something essential about movie stardom and performance itself as a fount of entertainment and meaning. It is also mythic, playing with archetypes as stone-cut as any runic heroes of ancient legend, but not in a stark and self-important way like too many modern attempts to invoke such comparisons, but rather in using those archetypes like a great playwright of an earlier age, as pots of earth to grow tangles of dramatic foliage from. With the added quality of a narrative setting that comes close to obeying classical dramatic unity, albeit unfolding over several days rather than just one.
El Dorado is a film Hawks made as a self-conscious variation on the basic themes and situation of Rio Bravo. He would later make a third, 1970’s uneven and ungainly but still vital Rio Lobo, which would serve as his swan song. Hawks was straining to repeat the earlier success as his career and, indeed, a whole cinematic era were on the last, chugging, running-on-empty lap. But it’s also plain Hawks kept returning to the basic template of Rio Bravo because he had finally distilled through it his own personal mythology to an essence. Rio Bravo reached the screen with a billing stating it was based on a short story by B. H. McCampbell, actually Hawks’ daughter using her married name, and the script credited to Hawks’ longtime collaborators Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett. Hawks’ commercial savvy and fascination with using actors who had more talents than merely making faces on camera was also plainly exhibited in backing up Wayne with Dean Martin, already long-experienced as both a movie star and singer but still testing the waters of being a dramatic actor, and Ricky Nelson, a flash-in-the-pan pop-rock star with modest acting talent but some screen charisma: between the three leads Hawks nailed down appeal to three different sectors of the potential audience. It’s a testimony to the alchemy of Rio Bravo that what ought to be its silliest and most superfluous scene, where Hawks has Martin and Nelson sing (with costar Walter Brennan getting in on the act), is actually the essence of what Quentin Tarantino dubbed its “hangout” appeal, a vital moment of behaviour for the characters mediated through the higher realm of stars showing off what makes them stars.
Okay then, yes, Rio Bravo has a story. That story is set up in a famous opening sequence where no line of dialogue is spoken for several minutes, and yet the essentials of all that unfolds are sketched and a little universe brought into being. The first shot offers, without fanfare or establishing verbiage, the sight of a sorry-looking man known only as Dude (Martin) entering a saloon. Unkempt, dressed in soiled and tattered clothes, Dude is a seedy and pathetic drunk, plainly hanging out for a drink he has no funds to pay for. A man drinking at the bar, Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), sees Dude and stirs his hopes by signaling with his own drink: Dude nods, and Joe takes out a silver dollar piece. Rather than give it to him, Joe, with sadistic pleasure, tosses it into a well-filled spittoon, and it seems he’s going to be rewarded with the spectacle of Dude overcoming his last remaining shreds of dignity and plucking out the coin. Before he can, the spittoon is kicked over by a booted foot. Dude looks up and sees, in a perfectly framed shot, the figure of Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) standing over him, his expression blending disgust and anger that betrays how this sight stirs him personally: a friend appalled to see what another friend has become, and refusing to let him sink that much lower. Dude, in a flare of delirious anger, swats Chance with a log whilst the sheriff moves to berate Joe, and also tries to hit Joe when he laughs at the scene. Joe’s pals grab Dude and let Joe punch him, and when another patron (Bing Russell) tries to intervene Joe casually shoots him dead with the cold pleasure of a man satisfying all the frustrated appetites when the officers of the law have laid each-other low.
Joe leaves the tavern and heads to another saloon down the street of this small, rough-hewn, unnamed Texas town: this tavern belongs to his brother Nathan (John Russell), a big local ranch owner with a small army of goons and cronies, many of them hanging out in the saloon as potential backup. But he’s followed by Chance, who, despite his bleeding head, saw the shooting and now announces, in the first actual line of dialogue, “Joe, you’re under arrest.” Dude has followed him in, and the seemingly broken-down rummy suddenly grabs a gun from the holster of a gunman and reveals preternatural shooting skills, backing Chance up as the sheriff knocks Joe out and drags his body out of the tavern. As Rio Bravo unfolds it emerges that Dude was once Chance’s deputy, famous for his prowess with the gun. But he’s been lost in an alcoholic spiral for two years now, since being left broken-hearted by a woman who got off a stagecoach one day and left the same way, leaving human refuse in her wake. Arresting and holding Joe until the Marshall can collect him and whisk him away to face trial is obvious and essential work for Chance and his only currently employed deputy, an aging, limping man dubbed Stumpy (Brennan) who has own reasons for resenting the Burdettes, but Chance expects that Nathan will do everything in his power to extract his brother from prison and spirit him beyond the law’s reach.
Dude’s performance in aiding Chance and his personal investment in seeing Joe face justice nonetheless suggests he might be on his way up from the gutter, so Chance gives him the detail of waiting at the edge of town and collecting guns off anyone wanting to enter. A wagon train bringing supplies for mining operations in the area run by Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) stops at his command, and Wheeler, who’s become friends with Chance since Dude went off the rails, is perturbed by the sight of the man the locals call “Borrachón,” “the drunk,” packing a pistol and a badge. In Wheeler’s company is a young man, “Colorado” Ryan (Nelson), son of an old acquaintance of Chance working as hired gun protecting Wheeler’s train. Colorado needles Chance when he insists, as Chance asks Wheeler about him, “I speak English, Sheriff,” and notes laconically that Stumpy has a shotgun trained on him from the jailhouse door, establishing that he’s neither shy nor stupid – “Not like the usual young fella with a gun,” as Chance notes. Colorado impresses Chance sufficiently to let him keep his two pistols, with the admonition not to start any trouble: “I won’t,” Colorado replies, “Unless I tell you first.”
Hawks seemed set not just on redeploying favourite character types and situations in Rio Bravo, but on smelting all his favourite ideas, lines, and gestures into a new ingot – the coin in the spittoon had first popped up in his script for Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927); heroine Feathers (Angie Dickinson) gets multiple lines stolen straight from the mouth of previous Hawksian women, including versions of “It’s better when two people do it” (referring to a kiss) and “I’m hard to get – you have to ask.” Rather than feeling shopworn, Rio Bravo instead has the quality of a filmmaker determined to get to the essence of the things that obsess him in the faith that’s what he’s really good at and what moves his audience – as indeed Hawks was in trying to stage a comeback after Land of the Pharaohs. The very title has the quality of someone trying to map out his world, with a kind of geographical joke at its heart – the Rio Bravo being of course the Mexican name for part of the Rio Grande, and, whilst meaning closer to “wild,” or “furious,” evokes “brave” to the English-speaking ear, and so placing the movie’s setting somewhere in the land of bravery as well as fury. Chance, Dude, Colorado, and Stumpy are Hawks’ take on the Sphinx’s riddle about the ages of man: four men describing the arc of ages from full youthful promise to absurd yet stalwart old age. Colorado is wise and sure beyond his years, but what Chance initially sees as his good sense, in staying out of the sheriff’s particular problem when Wheeler prods him to help Chance, later becomes a sore point when Wheeler is assassinated and Chance rejects Colorado’s offer to help now as too little, too late: what seems intelligent circumspection in one moment can seem like something else at another, and whilst staying neutral and self-contained might be admirable in crisis if one has no particular talent for dealing with it, on the other hand it can look like a moral lapse if one does have that talent.
Dude is the stuff of legend, a modern Achilles for whom using a gun is as natural as breathing, but riven with a fatal weakness in head and heart rather than ability: he is what happens to most men, along the way, born with all the vital tools and potential but something happens along the way to stymie and ruin. Chance is the essential man, but, pointedly, doesn’t have the same edge of ability as either Dude or Chance. He carries a loop-handled Winchester rifle as his preferred armament because “I found some were faster than me with a short gun.” This admission signals several vital things about Chance. He’s assured enough in himself and what he’s good at to confess a relative lack. He’s aware of that lack and his adapted himself around it in compensation until everything else about him, like muscle around an old wound, is all the stronger. These two truths about John T. Chance are inseparable, whereas the distinction of Dude is like that of a diamond with a flaw. Experience has also invested Chance with a fluid kind of wisdom to match his ability. Hawks approaches his heroes are archetypes, both in terms of their genre story function and also in terms of the actors playing them, including having Wayne wear elements of costume he’d long worn in Westerns and counting on the audience’s complete awareness that Wayne is playing the Wayne role. This is also true to a lesser degree of Martin, offering the flipside of his general image of Hollywood’s most happy-go-lucky inebriate, and Nelson, the version of Elvis Presley grandmothers could like, blending innocence and insouciance. One crucial moment of the personal drama sees Dude reunited with his old guns and clothes, resuming the costume of the heroic avatar. The character names are all noms-de-guerre or, in Chance’s case, a name that seems to stretch over into the realm of description and invocation.
Part of what distinguishes Rio Bravo from most of the Westerns that had preceded it during the mad proliferation of the genre in the previous decade is its tone, which steps back from the bright, brittle atmosphere most of the “adult” westerns had wielded. It seems today an awful lot like Hawks was doing his best to fuse the genre with the atmosphere of his 1940s noir-accented films To Have And Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Whereas most Westerns roam free on the range, the unnamed town in Rio Bravo dominates the drama. Action is almost entirely confined to within a few buildings at the centre of town and its edge. The open space beyond with its warm honey dawn glow peeking over rocky ranges and through saguaro is a place of pure, painterly Technicolor Western mystique, but also tantalisingly out of reach for the heroes. The taverns across the road from the jailhouse are enemy territory or neutral zone; the lawmen patrol the streets which seem relatively innocuous by day but at night become a troublesome warren of light and dark, patched by the tallowy glow of lanterns. The care of Russell Harlan’s photography gives the images a texture inflected with both homey nostalgia and shadowy angst, and he and Hawks conspire to make the space palpable and dominant in the drama. The specifics of the place are both part of the problem facing Chance and allies but also a boon: they know the place, the ins and outs, and ultimately it serves them more than their enemies, in the way, for instance, Dude knows that Burdette’s saloon has two entrances that can both be seen, or in the climax where Stumpy anticipates one route of escape for the villains.
Hawks establishes the mixture of known and unknown in this place as Dude and Chance patrol the town at night together, each man tracking the other on opposite sides of the street and keeping eyes peeled for potential threats, the entirely banal and everyday, from a local hovering on a fire escape (“Just taking a little air, sheriff.”) to a listlessly swinging door are all charged with potential danger, the shadows beyond the lantern glow as deep as oceans. The scene that marks a sharp turn in the narrative, from the presence of threat to the outbreak of real violence and consequences, is particularly noir-like in tone, as Wheeler, who’s attracted the unwelcome attention of Burdette gunmen hanging about town through lobbying for help for the sheriff, is ambushed and shot by a killer lurking inside a stable. Wheeler falls dead on the street, and Dude and Chance have to venture after the killer, and the old reflexes of their professional partnership snaps into action, like Dude using a birdcall to signal readiness. Chance takes a fast charge at the door of the barn, crashing through, and scrambling for cover, and quickly drives the killer from cover; Dude shoots at the man as he flees towards the Burdette saloon, but isn’t sure if he hit him, but his oh-so-intimate knowledge of the saloon becomes important as he begs Chance to let him take the lead in confronting the hostile denizens within. Chance responds by handing over his shotgun and letting him go to town.
This scene leads into one of those vignettes that sticks in viewers’ minds decades after first watching, quoted and revised in many movies since. Dude, starting to feel the first quivers of imminent, excruciating withdrawal, nonetheless gives an elegant demonstration of how to be a law enforcer in a dangerous place, with cool and methodical intimidation, with Chance surprising anyone tempted to take him on by coming in from behind. Dude is looking for a man with muddy boots, as he knows the fleeing killer ran through a puddle. But none of the denizens in the bar has muddy boots, and Dude seems to have been humiliated at the very moment he was hoping to prove himself still potent and reliable. Hawks has already visually cued the truth, that the killer is hiding above on a balcony overlooking the whole scene, ready to gun down Dude if he seems to have cottoned on: fate, literally looking down. The barman (Walter Burns) proposes Dude has been seeing things; another heavy teases Dude by tossing another coin into a spittoon for him to retrieve; Chance looks on with a fierce expression. Dude cracks the shotgun open and puts it on the bar – a gesture rife with both immediate character meaning and a dose of Freudian symbolism, Dude literally and figuratively unmanned by the scene, and all that a mere echo of when he was deeply emasculated by the no-good woman who broke his heart. Until Dude notices drops of blood falling into a glass of bear, smearing the glass. The momentary attraction of the beer glass seems merely like Dude falling under the spell of the demon drink again, and he asks the barman for a drink, only to suddenly pivot and blast the lurking killer above, his body plunging to the floor.
The dynamics of character and cinema machinating in this scene, even as Hawks’ cool, spatially careful, slightly standoffish style barely seems to be lifting its pulse, is the stuff of pure moviemaking. The attentiveness to the emotions playing on Dude and Chance’s faces matched on levels both overt and elusive to the hunt for the gunman, which is also a hunt for dignity and friendship, and a demonstration of the tradecraft that defines these men, and by extension all people of the truest kind. It’s also a battle with an entire social paradigm – the Burdette goons all have their tell-tale marker of servitude, rife with Biblical overtones as well as an acidic attitude to pure capitalist behaviour, a fifty dollar gold piece tucked in their pockets, “Just about what Burdette would figure a man’s life is worth.” The corpse that finishes up sprawled on the saloon floor has the stigmata of crime: the coin in pocket, the bloody wound on his leg where Dude’s bullet nicked him outside, testifying to the excellence of his shooting persisting even when the rest of him is falling apart, and the mud he looked for too. Chance meanwhile lays down the script for Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle as one of the other heavies starts moving for his gun and Chance steps forth, ready: “You want that gun, pick it up,” he challenges, before offering a tight smile, savouring not just the upper hand over a creep but also the whole spectacle of his friend having proven himself, and delivering the stinger: “I wish you would.” A little measured payback follows – Chance swats one of the patrons who swore nobody came in and then unwisely still cops an attitude in the jaw with his rifle, and then backs Dude up as he makes the hapless goon who tried to repeat the coin-in-the-spitoon gag reach in and pick out his bounty. “Guess they’ll let you in the front door from now on,” Chance comments, but later amends that, as another stage in the long road to recovery commences, as he tells Dude that he got lucky at least a little because the heavies weren’t expecting anything from Borrachón, but the next time they’ll be on their guard.
The hero looking for redemption after falling prey to an addictive weakness wasn’t new when Rio Bravo was made and has since become a basic motif in movies and TV to the point where it’s rather more surprising when a protagonist doesn’t have such angst. The theme of the fallen man trying to prove himself had cropped up occasionally in Hawks since Furthman helped Hawks define and finally, fully articulate his special sensibility as in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and Furthman had played with it before working with him, employing it in Tay Garnett’s China Seas (1935). What makes Dude’s story in Rio Bravo deeper and truer than most is the way Hawks weaves it in so tightly with the other aspects of the story, and the care Hawks takes in detailing the stages of Dude’s struggle. The Burdette saloon scene bookends the opening with Dude getting satisfaction for being laughed at and generally disgraced by others, but the real struggle is then announced, as Dude struggles with detox symptoms and feels the strong temptation to crawl back within the shroud of his own pathos. Chance takes a tough love line in this regard, believing that any indulgence of Dude’s self-destructive streak is exactly what he’s after, and Martin handles the playing of this side of Dude particularly well, showing off his shakes and shudders like exhibits in a prosecution to justify annihilating himself again. The only things that burn through the haze of his recovery are his sense of fraternity and his skill with the gun – a skill that bypasses his seared and broken nerves and instead operates like his eyes or lungs, almost beyond his conscious self. Self-possession is a supreme virtue in this universe, and it’s a quality that has nothing to do with social stature or worldly affairs. The diminutive, fast-talking Mexican Carlos (Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez), proprietor of the town’s vital hotel, seems at first glance the regulation comic relief Latin character but proves to have a keen sense of his domain: “This is my hotel,” he chides Chance when he gets incidentally bossy, “And I will be told what I shall do and what I shall not do, senor.” And his hotel, as it happens, is called the Alamo Hotel.
There is, naturally, also the Hawksian woman. Here, Feathers, a young and comely lady with a past blowing into town on the stagecoach, lodging in the hotel and sticking in Chance’s craw. Chance believes she’s a woman connected with a crooked gambler mentioned in a Wanted handbill that’s been circulated about the territory. His belief proofs correct: known as Feathers thanks to the boa she wears, she admits to being the woman when first asked about it. But she takes exception when Chance assumes she’s the one cheating in a game of cards being played in the hotel saloon, and challenges him to search her, instead pulling off the mean feat of embarrassing Chance instead of the other way around. This commences a long dance of push and pull where Feathers constantly rattles Chance’s cage in a manner that quietly but importantly unifies Hawks’ previous, relatively firm schism between his male-dominated genre films and his female-dominated screwball comedies. In the latter – Bringing Up Baby (1938), I Was A Male War Bride (1949) – it was the women who tended to make the men fall apart in the process of falling in love with them, whereas the more classic “Hawksian woman” was trying to fit in with the odd little boys’ clubs. The hotel exists within the noir portion of the Western town, but becomes rather the screwball stage within a stage. This is suggested early on when Carlos is given a package, a gift for Carlos’s wife Consuela (Estelita Rodriguez) he had Chance order for him to keep secret, but ironically has made him look vaguely suspect: the package turns out to be a pair of red bloomers, which Carlos models on Chance, to Feathers’ wry observation that “Those things have great possibilities but not for you.”
Feathers sets out to protect Chance when he needs a good night’s sleep and camps outside his door with gun in arm, a gesture that particularly frustrate Chance even as it signals something very special come into his life. Feathers is the Right Woman for the Right Man in Chance, compared to the Wrong Woman for the wrong man in Dude’s long-since-departed paramour. That woman herself is an abstraction, an emblem and excuse to expose male weakness, catalysing and revealing rather than causing Dude’s collapse. Perhaps the closest Hawks ever really got to getting down and dirty with the Wrong Woman is Joan Collins’ Nellifer in Land of the Pharaohs. Feathers, by contrast, is a weathered and worldly person but not by any means professionally tough. Dickinson’s great scene in the film comes when she gets hammered and talks away her guilt and distress after she’s proven invaluable to saving Chance’s life but has also played a part in getting several men killed: “I better go before I make a fool of myself…I don’t know why I should thought – we’re all fools! We oughta get along together very well, all of us!” Perhaps the most sublime moment in all of Hawks’ films comes when Feathers insists on keeping guard again, armed with a gun and resting in a rocking chair at the foot of the stairs in the hotel, only for Chance to descend during the night and find her this time unable to stand watch, having fallen asleep: he scoops her up as tenderly as a baby, stirring her to wake and beam as he carries her upstairs.
The appearance of Nathan Burdette, come to confront the lawmen and check on his brother, makes plain the stakes of the drama: with Stumpy locked inside the jail with Joe, any attempt by Nathan’s men to storm the place will result in Joe being summarily gunned down. Joe is basically a hostage as well as prisoner. Nathan, as bogus, slick and urbane as Joe is low and sadistic, promises to get him nonetheless, and begins his careful campaign. Dude gives Nathan a show of his brilliance when he first arrives at the cordon at town’s edge. Hawks pointedly casts Bob Steele, who played the Satanic assassin Canino in The Big Sleep, as Harris, the hired gun whose reins Dude severs with a precisely loosed bullet – Dude’s abilities are more than enough to keep such lesser demons at bay. But Dude’s mind and dulled wits are vulnerable, as Nathan’s heavies prove when they manage to ambush him, jamming his head into a trough he leans over and knocking him up before tying him up. This could befall any of the heroes, but it carries the special sting of new humiliation to Dude, and almost demolishes his recovery: he announces he’s quitting as deputy and plans to get soused, and in a flurry of self-pity also punches Chance, receiving the memorable warning from Chance: “That’s the second time you’ve hit me. Never do it again.” Forbearance for people who are worth it is a supreme virtue, but also knowing when enough is enough is another.
The drama of life and death gains its competing leitmotifs as Nathan pays a local mariachi band to play “El Degüello,” the “Cut-Throat Song” of bullfighting contests and also supposedly played by Santa Anna’s soldiers to the besieged defenders of the Alamo. Colorado explains this little bit of lore, and describes it as Nathan Burdette’s chosen way of speaking, the announcement of siege and battle to the death. This touch connects the little drama of the movie with the greater mythology of American history and indeed tales of outmatched heroism echoing back through to ancient history, and proves Hawks’ own way of speaking. The music’s sudden resumption just as Dude is about to resume drinking shocks him back into gear, for good this time, the music provoking not just his deepest wellspring of existential fight and will, but also revealing Hawks’ conviction, his particular faith in the idea that music, movies, any art, communicates something more pure and coherent than the mess of life. And this connects to the way Rio Bravo manages to contain a working vista of life from a certain metaphorical angle.
Dude himself, when he lounges about in a state of relaxation for the first time in the movie, chooses his own song of expression, warbling out a ditty called “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” a title the confirms it as the ultimate anthem of a particular vision of complete masculine self-reliance. Colorado’s answer, as Stumpy requests something a bit livelier they can sing along to, is the sprightly courting song “Get Along Home, Cindy,” a song for a lad like Colorado for who romantic promise is a vast field of potential rather than the carefully weeded garden of the older men. It could be said the pity of this scene is that, as was standard practice at the time, the actors weren’t allowed to naturally sing and play on set, and yet the stylisation might actually help amplify the ritual underpinning of the supposedly louche and pure behaviour of these men striking up camaraderie and frittering away time. Chance won’t sing of course, but the younger men will, and so will Stumpy, the living incarnation of Old, Weird America who doesn’t give a damn anymore.
This suddenly gives Chance the great idea of simple holing up in the jailhouse until the Marshall arrives with enough supplies. But the necessary edge of urgency slips from the men as they relax just a little much. They’re soon waylaid by the lurking heavies, who manage to take over that other islet of security, Carlos’s hotel, with thuggery, and take Dude hostage. Nathan sends word to arrange a swap of Dude for Joe, to be done at the edge of town by a warehouse Nathan owns. Chance tells Stumpy to stay behind as the confrontation will be one where speed and agility will be. In one of those contradictions that always stirs perplexity, Brennan, off screen a startling reactionary and racist, was on screen one of the great portrayers of people who have slid down to the bottom of the social totem pole, if they didn’t already start there. With Stumpy he created an instantly indexed edition of an old coot generations of imitators and impressionists could work with, with his high cackle and ornery motor-mouthed attitude, but with flashes of things deeper and keener vital to the way Rio Bravo explores the concept of character. When Stumpy nearly blows Dude’s head off when Dude turns up looking cleaner and better dressed than before, it sparks a little aria of expertly described feeling – Stumpy’s accosting yammering covering his fear and working like sandpaper on Dude’s rekindled anxiety, revealing the lie behind his refreshed appearance which isn’t yet matched to genuine recovery, and Dude’s angry verbal swipe at Stumpy both deepens the old man’s regret and warns Chance that Dude still isn’t quite a functioning human being yet. Stumpy’s forlorn reaction to being told to stay out of the hostage swap similarly notes Stumpy’s frustration at being a stalwart but feeling patronised all the same.
Brennan’s presence is also a nod back to his role in To Have And Have Not, as the rum-soaked Eddy, another element that worked in a previous movie and one Hawks has recycled and reconsidered. Dude and Stumpy are both variations on that character, the once-good alcoholic and the shambolic old pal, with qualities and dimensions teased apart to frame Chance and offset each-other, as Hawks ponders the question of what makes a man past it and what the road back from failure resembles – two questions very much on his mind when making the movie. The finale resolves nearly all the aspects of the drama, hinging on a mix of carefully prepared plot mechanisms and inspired improvisation from its heroes. The former, in the presence of dynamite from Wheeler’s impounded wagon train. The latter, in Dude suddenly tackling Joe and driving him behind cover, Stumpy proving he’s still useful by blocking off one route of attack for the Burdette gang, and the use of the dynamite as improvised artillery that only those as skilled as our heroes could make effective use of: Nathan and his little army suddenly find themselves the ones besieged.
And throughout, even in the midst of battle’s furore, character is still king – the other heroes realising Stumpy’s manoeuvre when they hear his high hooting laugh; Colorado noting, when Chance says Dude will take Joe only for Joe to deck Dude, “He’s got an awful funny way of doing it.”; Carlos turning up and adding his enthusiastically if awkwardly aimed shotgun to the heroic ranks. In Hawks heroes aren’t just heroes because they’re on the side of right; they’re the heroes because they’re the people we like. The one aspect that can’t be resolved in action is romantic, but the resolving romantic clinch between Chance and Feathers is a different kind of shootout, also involving tactical thinking, well-aimed shots, flanking manoeuvres, and a special brand of bravery. Feathers contrives to bait Chance into a show of stirred jealousy and possession by proposing to put on an song-and-dance act in black tights that make her legs look as long as the actual Rio Grande, and gets the reaction she was hoping for: Chance’s attempt to hide his alarm behind his authority as a lawman doesn’t fool Feathers. The final defeat is punctuated by the tantalising sight of gossamer silk set adrift on the wind, dropping down to the street by the amused Dude and Stumpy. Here Hawks sets the seal not just on the movie but on his career-long juggle of the comedy and the thriller, the urbane and the fringe, the violent and the romantic, the stoic and the emotional; all these things have found their place in the flux of this story.
Of course, Hawks couldn’t leave things so neatly disposed. Hatari! (1963) would similarly churn genres together but Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964) would return to the screwball realm with a new, jittery sense of gender instability. Red Line 7000 (1965) would prove an awkward, if still fascinating, attempt to update his template for the Swinging ‘60s era, misjudged more in the jarring jumps between ensemble drama and backdated melodrama. The latter two movies, whilst still shot through with auteurist delights and flashes of excellence, nonetheless betrayed stumbling into hyperbole in touches like having Rock Hudson wearing a bear suit on a bicycle, and a hero learning how to drive with his hook hand in the last minutes of Red Line 7000. El Dorado therefore saw Hawks immediately retreating to safer ground, and the film’s half proves to be a long preamble to a basic situational repeat of Rio Bravo’s: Sheriff and comrades suffer siege in a jailhouse as they sit on a captive with powerful friends. In the historical setting Hawks didn’t have to worry so much about shifting social mores, and could instead encompass them in his own way.
The characters and what they represent are nonetheless reshuffled. The sheriff is now the fallen drunk, but the official hero, Wayne’s Cole Thornton, is closer in nature to Dude as the man tormented by an incident that’s left him alien to himself: his own particular weakness is made manifest in the bullet lodged in his back, and the events that led up to him being shot with it. By comparison, Robert Mitchum’s sheriff, J.P. Harrah, is just on a long, embarrassing bender. The neophyte hero, Mississippi (James Caan) can’t shoot, and has sacrificed some important aspect of his maturation in pursuing the nominally mature responsibility of avenging his father figure, even if he has a surplus of other qualities. Old, ornery Stumpy is swapped out for the younger, slightly less ornery Bull Harris (Arthur Hunnicutt), a self-described “Indian fighter.” The appointed love interest this time, Maudie (Charlene Holt), a “gambler’s widow, not a chip to my name,” who helped set up as a saloon owner. It’s made plain early in the film that she’s been involved with JP at some point, but finally prefers Cole. Not quite polyamory time in the Old West, but close enough. Cole arrives in the town of El Dorado at the outset having been offered a job doing what he does best as a legendary quick-draw artist, but he quickly finds himself being warned off by J.P., an old pal and rival he’s surprised to find is now El Dorado’s sheriff.
J.P. explains that the rancher who’s hiring Cole, Bart Jason (Ed Asner), is a ruthless empire builder set on bullying his neighbours, the MacDonald family, because they have access to water he lacks. Because the MacDonald patriarch (R.G. Armstrong) has a large brood of hardy children and hands, Jason needs gunmen to force the issue. Cole elects to pass up the job but feels obliged to tell Jason in person, and does so in a charged confrontation with the would-be tycoon and his large coterie of rather less principled goons: Cole, in a pointed display of caution and readiness, makes his horse shuffle backwards so he doesn’t have to take his eyes off any of them until he reaches the gate. On the way back town, Cole, still charged with paranoid readiness, reacts to a shot fired from a bluff above the trail and shoots back, only to find he’s gunned down MacDonald’s youngest son Luke (Johnny Crawford), left to keep watch and warn the family about any approaching strangers. Cole tries to tend to Luke, but the lad shoots himself fearing a long, painful death from being gut-shot. Cole takes his body to the MacDonald ranch: MacDonald himself is grave but judicious in hearing Cole’s story, but his daughter, the tomboyish Joey (Michele Carey), is disdainful and ambushes him as he rides out again, shooting him at a river crossing. Cole knocks her over after playing possum and throws her rifle in the river. El Dorado’s local doctor, Miller (Paul Fix), tells Cole he can’t remove the bullet because it’s lodged against his spine and he isn’t a good enough surgeon to risk trying, so Cole recovers from the wound and leaves town.
The bulk of the narrative unfolds “six or seven months” later, when Cole rides into another town and settles in a cantina to get a meal. Waiting to be served, Cole becomes witness when four other men settle at a table, and another, younger man enters the catina, wearing an odd, old-fashioned hat and seemingly unarmed: Alan Bourdillion Traherne, known by the nickname Mississippi, confronts one of the men, Charlie Hagen (Dean Smith) over how Hagen and three other men killed his mentor, the riverboat gambler Johnny Diamond. Mississippi makes clear that Hagen is the last of the men Traherne’s been taking on and killing one by one in revenge. When Hagen leaps up to draw his gun, Traherne grabs a knife secreted down his neck and throws it, killing Hagen. When two of the men with Hagen, Milt (Robert Donner) and Pedro (John Gabriel), try to kill Mississippi in turn, Cole intervenes and chases them off. The fourth man at the table is Nelse McLeod (Christopher George), one of Cole’s great rivals in the gunslinger stakes and, as Cole learns, the man recently hired by Bart Jason in Cole’s stead to be his chief gunman, who hopes to take advantage of the fact that J.P. is currently falling down drunk on the job. Despite his vividly scarred face and dubious company, McLeod is amicable, intelligent, and deceptively laidback. He’s pleased to meet Cole, albeit with the simmering instinctive reaction between both men’s facades that they’re on a collision course. Collision becomes inevitable when Cole decides to head to El Dorado to warn J.P. and the MacDonalds about the imminent resumption of the range war. Cole also finds himself with stuck with the company of Mississippi, who’s determined to repay Cole for his help despite not being able to wield any weapon other than his knife.
Perhaps the most ready and obvious metaphor to apply to El Dorado in relation to Rio Bravo is to compare Hawks to a master jazz musician who, having played a superlatively cool and refined version of a tune, comes back to it with a more eccentric and deconstructive bent, with rough edges and patches of inelegance but then, suddenly, delivering marvellously eccentric epiphanies and shows of technical genius. El Dorado reveals Hawks’ professional touch near-sublime in some scenes and elsewhere showing signs of a certain fraying patience and lackadaisical attitude, in ways familiar to directorial “late style.” In the first twenty-five minutes Hawks burns through enough incident and flourishes of character to fill a whole movie, shifting focus with orchestral precision and delivering exposition with a kind of louche directness that is at once a little slapdash and yet also admirable in its determination not to screw around. Hawks simply has Maudie recite her history with Cole to J.P., getting it out of the way. Indeed Maudie as a character suffers a bit right through – the film doesn’t even get around to offering a proper resolution to her romance with Cole at the end. Later reels almost start to nudge the self-satirising in the pile-up of characters and running jokes, and the way J.P.’s jailhouse starts to feel as populated as a town square as the heroes and their allies move back and forth.
El Dorado is much closer to a comedy in a Shakespearean Pastoral sense than Rio Bravo. And yet it also touches on deeper and darker anxieties, in Cole’s sense of guilt and the way the price he paid for his great mistake keeps manifesting with sudden attacks of temporary paralysis, whereas the causes of Dude’s alcoholism, if not the results of it, were abstract. The title and basic theme are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Eldorado,” a work Mississippi inherited as a touchstone from Johnny Diamond and likes to quote (curiously enough, this makes El Dorado, whilst credited as drawn from a book by Harry Brown, also as much of a Poe adaptation as any based on, say, “The Raven”) with its spectral voice insisting the aging, tattered knight hero must still “Ride, boldly ride” in the search for the elusive ideal. This motif recalls the retranslated fragment of Shakespeare in Only Angels Have Wings, but this time Hawks turns a sardonic attitude towards the idea of the cherished, nestled artwork that summarises a private worldview, as Mississippi’s quotation meets Cole’s earthy scepticism: “Makes me wanna– ” Mississippi muses only for Cole to question with sarcasm, “‘Ride, boldly ride?’” El Dorado is also plainly a film about the agonies of getting old and past it without deigning to be about getting old and past it. Mississippi’s recitals of the Poe makes overt the prospect of an aging hero still trying as the years advance to live up to his credo. The bullet stuck in Cole’s back actualises the toll on a body starting to falter and fail despite the mind’s need, and the very end of the film sees him and JP limping along on crutches with wounds that are, in terms of the movie, only temporary, but blatantly stand in for time catching up with Hawks, Wayne, Mitchum, and everybody else, even the movie genre and industry they’re working in.
Amidst the reshuffled priorities here is Hawks’ handling of McLeod, who is presented squarely as Cole’s equal-opposite, a doppelganger who like Cole carries in his flesh a permanent reminder of some mistake – only McLeod has his on his face. McLeod, played with tremendous poise and appeal by George, who should likely have been a bigger star than he did, has similar values to Cole, which is why he won’t intervene to help Hagen against Mississippi (“It really shouldn’t have taken four of you.”), and his respect for Cole’s character and method ultimately proves the death of him, hoping for a great high noon battle but instead getting the frantic, desperate, tactical climax that comes instead. The lengthy interplay of stand-offs and death and charged conversation in the scene that introduces both McLeod and Mississippi is plainly a draft for both Leone’s dances of confrontation and gamesmanship, and Tarantino’s roundtable slow-burns. McLeod takes the job that Cole rejects, with all that entails – McLeod has to hang around with and serve men far beneath him, and give his gun arm, a prodigious instrument capable of righteous acts when attached to men like Cole and J.P., over to wicked deeds, and being a professional, takes the contract to serve good or evil in his stride. This aspect is signalled just before McLeod is first glimpsed, as Cole talks with a sheriff and his deputy, both of whom Cole knew when they were wanted men themselves. The price Cole pays for not being McLeod is lodged in his back, but this in turn eventually obliges Cole to evolve, to use wit over mere muscle.
The motif of finding workarounds for limitations, noted in Rio Bravo, therefore crops up again in El Dorado with new urgency. Cole, satisfying himself that Mississippi has the pith of a gunfighter but none of the talent, gets a gunsmith to sell his new companion a weapon for someone who can’t shoot – which proves to a shotgun drastically sawed off and turned into a kind of miniature blunderbuss that is, at least at a certain range, a foolproof device of mayhem. This comic variation on the theme prepares ground for the more urgent, as Cole finds himself beset by one of his paralytic attacks right in the middle of a fraught confrontation, leaving him and everyone about him vulnerable to their foes. To save the day at the very end, Cole has to come up with a plan to outwit and ambush McLeod – in a way, doing to him what Joey did to Cole himself, if in a braver and more challenging fashion. If Rio Bravo had split and reconfigured various Hawksian masculine concepts, El Dorado pointedly does this with the female: Maudie is the chief love interest, still young but already weathered, mature and bodied in her romantic streak and lacking the usual air of mystery in Hawks’s women, but also a little stranded narrative-wise as a result.
Joey, on the other hand, is the Hawksian woman refashioned for a new age – wilful, aggressive, literally sniping and trigger-happy, blurring gender boundaries in dress and manner. Joey’s shooting of Cole and their subsequent confrontation is fascinating in the barely restrained anger of the two characters for one-another held in check only by the fact he’s a large man and she’s a small woman; as it is Cole settles for smearing the blood from his wound on Joey’s shirt as a badge of dishonour for not only shooting him but also for not doing it properly, before contemptuously hurling her rifle in the river. Hawks, looking upon the dawn of the next feminist wave, does so with both a sense of personal recognition and delight, but also with a sense of caution, seeing that lessons incumbent upon men will now have to be learned across the board. Joey is no less fierce and vengeful when the story returns to her, but she has learned her lesson to a degree: when she aims her rifle at another man who’s shot a brother of hers the second time, she is sensibly restrained. Hawks was having problems in his late film finding up-and-coming actors amenable to his style. He got away with Nelson in Rio Bravo in large part because he contrasted the more seasoned actors and his callowness suited the part, but Hawks had a hell of a time trying to turn Rock Hudson into Cary Grant, and here Holt and Carey seem a little too bright and glossy despite being good, more TV stars than movie ones. Hawks had however discovered Caan for Red Line 7000: his performance as Mississippi is one of the film’s real pleasures (for the most part) as he expertly plays a still-young man still seeking another father figure after his first one’s killing, with aspects of absurdity still needing pruning but with all the necessary virtues packed into him.
The shift in cinematic eras between the Rio Bravo and El Dorado is noticeably demarcated by the scoring: the subtly propulsive chug of Tiomkin’s scoring for the former, only blooming with high drama with the Deguelo rings out, is one of his finest, gives way to the bass-and-pop brass edge of Nelson Riddle’s score for the latter. Only a couple of lines of the Rio Bravo theme song, performed by Martin, are heard at the end of that movie, a pity because it’s the best of the many fake Western ballads attached to movies after High Noon made it compulsory for every genre entry to have one, with a deceptively languorous tune well-served by Martin’s voice. Whereas El Dorado starts with a full rendition of its lamentably pompous anthem, even if the song does play over some great Western genre paintings by Olaf Wieghorst, who also appears in the movie as the gunsmith who sells Mississippi his weapon. On the other hand, Rio Bravo’s relative visual flatness might have partly driven Hawks’s eagerness to draw cinematographer Harold Rosson out of retirement briefly to shoot El Dorado: Rosson’s work has a spatial clarity and a fine touch for making colour images pop. Many shots in El Dorado, like the church under moonlight, the dusk-time landscape vistas, and the town labyrinths, have a texture reminiscent of the best work of 1940s Hollywood translated for better colour and sharper stock. This isn’t a realistic universe at all – those paintings in the opening credits have similar palettes and stylised verve, a calculated crudity, that matches Rosson’s images, which are touched with an aspect of both the dreamlike and the dynamically theatrical. Hunnicutt’s take on the old coot part is also more subtle and sly than Brennan’s.
This time around the process of getting J.P. out of his booze-sodden state isn’t tied in directly to the plot, but rather proves an agonising kind of comic relief as Cole, Mississippi, and Bull try to rouse the sheriff to his duty before all hell breaks out around El Dorado. Mississippi applies an old folk remedy he learned off Johnny Diamond, mixing a concoction that when poured into J.P. prevents him from drinking anymore, and plays havoc with his insides. The odd thing is that this angle on the same theme works. Martin gave the performance of his acting career in Rio Bravo, and yet Mitchum was a better actor than Martin any day of the week. One is aware of Martin giving a damn good performance, but Mitchum inhabits the state of drying out rummy with an immediacy that barely seems acted – the fear, pain, absurdity, the existential self-abuse farce. The way JP contorts in pain after gunning down the killer in the bar and forcing himself back to readiness. J.P. peering at the two men he knows hanging around his jailhouse and the one he doesn’t – Mississippi has to introduce himself three times. His unforced pathos when he calls out “Wait for me!” when duty calls only to drop his gun on the floor, to Cole’s barked demand, “Why?”
This needles J.P. to shows of both angry command and bravura fighting during a mid-film sequence that roughly corresponds to Chance and Dude’s hunt for Wheeler’s assassin in Rio Bravo. This proves a cue for a more elaborate and spectacular sequence, where every honed reflex and skill of Hawks’s filmmaking career seems to operating at the highest pitch. After one of the MacDonald sons is shot in the street, a still barely sober and cantankerous J.P., along with Cole, Mississippi and Bull track three gunmen through the town. The heroes move quietly and diligently through the streets and alleys, a maze of honey-glow windows and fire-lit pueblo walls. Riddle’s slightly funk-tinged scoring helps amplify the shift from the noir-western fusion of Rio Bravo to a slightly more urgent blending with cop manhunt drama, as the heroes check on sprawled drunks and clear blind spots. J.P. contorts and wavers from bouts of sickness all the way and yet refuses to be stopped. No director has ever been better than Hawks in capturing the tantalising nature of random and arresting encounters between people charged with both mystery and erotic allure – The Big Sleep is, famously, practically a collection of such encounters – and here manifests in a brief but wonderful aside when Mississippi is momentarily drawn to a halt by a strange woman who speaks to him from an open window. With long, dark, braided hair, Mexican accent, and a cigar in her fingers, she tells Mississippi where the men he’s looking for are, complete with hints of personal history (“I do not like Bart Jason or his men!”).
The woman tells Mississippi the assassins fled to a church nearby whilst cannily coaching him on not giving the game away. Mississippi fetches the others and they gather outside the church, a rough-hewn Mexican-style structure boding under moonlight, attracting bullets from the killers who lurk in the belfry. Bull returns fire with impudent precision, bouncing bullets off the bells to make quasi-musical motifs; the editing in the whole sequence matches this sense of mischievous musical intricacy. After another bout of bloated, sweat-caked pain, J.P. defies sullied flesh and charges headlong through the church doors; Cole gives chase and gunfire sings noisy psalms in the church, in a shootout lit like a Velazquez. A stuntman falls upon the camera after the setting the bells to jangling out a delirious funeral peal. Mississippi chases one gunman who manages to hobble away, firing off his sawed-off blunderbuss but only managing to dislodge a store sign that dangles and swats the fleeing killer. This segues into a repetition of Dude dominating the saloon in Rio Bravo, this time with J.P. as resurgent protagonist, his whole body bloated and buckled and dripping flopsweat but his bilious brand of seething offense burning through it all. The variations on the Rio Bravo scene hit their own, vivid notes – J.P. wards the barkeeper away from his own secreted bun with a carefully aimed shot that leaves giant splinters jutting from the barkeep’s palm. The killer this time hiding behind the piano, the player hitting “a lot of sour notes” before J.P. tells him to movie and fires through the instrument, flushing out the assassin before killing him. Jason, watching the whol scene at a table with the newly-arrived McLeod, is given a lash of J.P.’s Winchester to the brow, and almost blown away in J.P.’s wrath before Cole intervenes. Instead Jason is arrested and hauled to the jailhouse, but not before promising a thousand dollars to McLeod if he’ll get him out.
The surplus of business in El Dorado is at once messy but also amasses into a little world that’s endlessly inviting. A world of tousle-haired tomboys with tight-strained trousers, scar-faced hired killers who seem like the stuff of great friends, eager young gallants with retro hats and cacophonous sidearms, mystery women behind lace curtains puffing on phallic cigars, homesteads crowded with rifle-packing frontierswomen and gruffly noble patriarchs, doctors who have enough sense when to pass things off to a better doctor, and the better doctor (Anthony Rogers) who doesn’t have a three-year-long waiting list and finds in Cole’s problem a “a more interesting misery,” as Bull puts it, than the bullet wound to the leg Cole takes in an attack. Mississippi pulls off a valiant if misguided stunt during that attack – in which some of Jason’s heavies ride through the centre of town, firing off their guns: Mississippi throws himself on the ground before the horses, which jump over him, and he rises up and shoots a gunman off his mount. Asked about this peculiar move later, Mississippi states that a horse won’t step on a man, only to be told that isn’t true. This scene is another ingeniously handled moment pulled off with some special effects made, alas, a bit too apparent in the blu ray edition of the film, where the last-second cut from Mississippi flinging himself on the ground to a dummy in place with a rope to make the horses jump can be seen. The only part of the movie that really doesn’t work comes when Mississippi improvises a schoolyard-level impression of a Chinese immigrant worker to sneak up on one of Jason’s hoods: Hawks shouldn’t have just cut it but also burned it, as painfully racist and also as bad comedy.
Hawks also notably recycles another great of business from an earlier film, this time from The Big Sleep, as Cole drives one of Jason’s goons, who’s tried to draw him into an ambush, out of the doorway to be shot down by his fellows. Cole is nonetheless brought down at a crucial moment by his body. McLeod takes him captive and uses him to stage a swap for Jason in an improbable but dynamic bit of legerdemain, leaning his prone body against the jailhouse door and shooting out the lock to dump him neatly on the floor. J.P. releases Jason and later they hear Jason has moved with his enemies all wounded or lame, kidnapping one of the MacDonald boys, Saul, and holding him in Jason’s saloon to use to force the family’s water rights over. This forces Cole to come up with a way of taking on McLeod, leading to a climax where Cole takes a flying leap off a wagon and blasting McLeod with his rifle whilst J.P., Mississippi, and Bull hit the kidnappers from behind. The dying McLeod is rueful over his fate as Cole assures him he was too good to take chances with: “I let a one-armed man take me,” McLeod gasps before expiring. Even Joey gets her redemptive and heroic moment by gunning down Jason as he takes aim at Cole.
The life-and-death contest deals out its judgements, but Hawks leaves the smaller tales, the love affairs and the friendships, still hanging in the air. And this honestly feels despite all deliberate: El Dorado is a river the flows in one end of the narrative canyon and out again, the canyon itself being the plot that plays out, and even that is curiously shaped with its long prologue and radical time jump. And the stuff of life just keeps going. If El Dorado had been Hawks’ last film, it would have been ideal emblem for his career – a film where even the imperfections have a rude life denied to so many other movies. El Dorado was a solid box office success, but already seemed like a bit of antique when it came out. Hawks’s influence was coming back to bite him. Leone brought out The Good, The Bad and The Ugly the same year, both deeply indebted to Hawks but also converting his example into a very different argot. The first wave of auteurist-minded critics and budding young filmmakers nonetheless took El Dorado to heart like Rio Bravo before it: indeed in some way El Dorado might have had the deeper real influence, turning up so many recent movies about aging, assailed heroes who find themselves father figures, from the later Indiana Jones movies to Logan (2017) and a swathe of action films. Hollywood’s forgotten too many lessons from Hawks, but in that one, at least, he found his mark.
