Rio Bravo (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

Hawks always said a movie was made up of a few good scenes and the rest was just getting there. In "Rio Bravo" there is too much "just getting there." I mean, the movie is way too long. There is about 30 minutes of story involved and a 128-minute running time. Now, I have nothing against long movies--"Gone With the Wind," "Lord of the Rings"--if they enthrall me, excite me, amuse me, entertain me, or enlighten me in some way. But, really, "Rio Bravo" takes forever to get to its big sequences, and much of the rest seems like padding.

The movie is notable for its moments of action, its gunplay, the amusing interplay and camaraderie of its characters, and its general good spirits. It was not enough, however, to convince me it's a great movie. It feels too stagey, most of it the director having filmed on a soundstage, with the outdoor shots done at Old Tucson Studios in Arizona. The outdoor sequences work best, the indoor scenes being generally too talky. The film also lacks a strong central villain. Claude Akins as Joe the murderer spends almost all of his time locked up in a jail cell, and John Russell as Joe's brother, the no-good cattle baron, gets hardly any screen time. Besides, Russell was much too handsome to look like an old-time villain, which his part in this old-timey Western demands. Russell was doing TV's "The Lawman" at the time, a role for which he appeared better suited.

So, "Rio Bravo" is a big, overlong Western that promotes traditional American values by using entertaining but clichéd, only-in-the-movies characters. Its action sequences are at the beginning and the end, both gunfights, with maybe two good character scenes in between. Nevertheless, that's probably enough, and it's more than most recent films can boast.

Trivia: Thanks to John Eastman in his book "Retakes" (Ballantine, New York, 1989) we learn, "Both John Wayne and Howard Hawks had strongly criticized "High Noon" (1952) and "3:10 to Yuma" (1957) for their depiction of Western lawmen as false to the macho stereotype of good American gunfighters; and Hawks intended this film as a response to such heresy. He filmed much of the picture in studio interiors, where he gave it the look and feel of a gangster movie, including the moll played by Angie Dickinson. The Arizona location not only blistered in 120-degree heat, but was plagued by a huge invasion of grasshoppers; they caked on walls, littered the boardwalks, and fried on the hot lights. To film outdoor scenes before the powerful lighting attracted swarms of them, Hawks tried to make each scene a one-take, and he largely succeeded."

Video:
Warner Bros. went out of their way to provide the best possible video quality for this picture, restoring the print and transferring it to disc at a high bit rate and a 1.78:1 (from 1.85:1), anamorphic ratio. The film's Technicolor shows up in deep, luxurious tones, with black levels so intense they actually make the image look too dark at times. The hues are remarkably rich, nonetheless, and definition is about as good as it gets on a standard-def DVD.

Audio:
The sound probably began life as a rather ordinary monaural, but by the time the audio engineers cleaned it up, reduced the noise, and transferred it to disc via Dolby Digital processing, it is among the best mono recordings you'll hear. The sonics are clear and smooth, with fine dynamic contrasts and a most natural-sounding tonal range for Dimitri Tiomkin's musical score.

Extras:
Disc one of this Two-Disc Special Edition contains the feature film; English and French spoken languages; English, French, Portuguese, and Korean subtitles; a John Wayne trailer gallery of five other Wayne pictures; and thirty scene selections (but no chapter insert). The main extra attraction, though, is an audio commentary by film critic Richard Schickel and director John Carpenter. Oddly, although the two men add a wealth of information, they don't seem to interact, making me suppose they had taped their commentaries separately.

Disc two finds a lengthy, fifty-five-minute documentary, "The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks," a biography of the director in sixteen chapters; plus two newly made featurettes. The first featurette, "Commemoration: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo," is a thirty-three-minute tribute to the film and its director, featuring a number of actors, directors, critics, and writers. The second featurette, "Old Tucson: Where the Legends Walked," is an eight-minute look at Old Tucson Studios, where Hollywood filmed any number of Westerns.

The extras conclude with a packet of glossy, black-and-white, postcard-sized movie stills and a pleasingly illustrated slipcover.

Parting Thoughts:
"Rio Bravo" is undoubtedly an American film classic, and according to the audio commentary it was the third biggest-grossing movie of 1959. However, I admit it did not hold up as well as I remembered it as a kid seeing it in a theater for my first and only time until this DVD. I seemed to recall its being funnier and more action-packed than it is, but such is memory and such is the state of today's action flicks by which we now compare things. Although "Rio Bravo" rather ambles along, it still has enough good points to make it a genial viewing experience and a reminder of relatively gentler times at the picture show.

---

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---