Rio Bravo (HD DVD)

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The movie is notable for its moments of action; its gunplay; its main characters' amusing interplay, camaraderie, and male bonding; and its general good spirits. This was not enough, however, to convince me it was 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 was 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:
As with the standard-definition Special Edition, Warner Bros. went out of their way to provide the best possible video quality for this picture, restoring the print and transferring it to HD-DVD at close to the film's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The film's Technicolor shows up in very deep, luxurious tones, with black levels so intense they actually make the image look too dark most of the time. Outdoor scenes fare better in this regard, but since Hawks filmed so much of the movie indoors, there is most always a dark cast to the images. The hues are remarkably rich, though, and definition, while not spectacularly sharp for an HD-DVD, is good. Finally, there is a touch of grain in the opening credits and some light grain in the darker indoor scenes, but nothing that matters.

Audio:
It is always a little disappointing when a movie cannot take full advantage of HD-DVD's Dolby Digital Plus (or when available Dolby TrueHD) high-definition audio, but we have what we have here, a monaural soundtrack of the day. With the audio engineers cleaning it up as well as they did, reducing the noise and transferring it to disc via DD+ 1.0 processing, it takes its place among the best mono recordings you'll hear. The sonics are quite smooth, slightly clearer in DD+ than in regular Dolby Digital, with a good dynamic response and a most natural-sounding tonal range for Dimitri Tiomkin's musical score.

Extras:
The HD-DVD repeats the extras offered on the Two-Disc Special Edition, all of them presented on the one HD-DVD disc in standard definition. The main bonus attraction 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.

Next, we find a lengthy, fifty-five-minute documentary, "The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks," a 2001, Turner Classic Movies biography of the director divided into sixteen chapters. Then, we get two newly made featurettes. The first of them, "Commemoration: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo," is a thirty-three-minute tribute to the film and its director and includes comments by 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 John Wayne trailer gallery of five Wayne trailers, including one for this picture; English and French spoken languages; English, French, and Spanish subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired; and forty-one scene selections (but no chapter insert). As always on their HD-DVDs, WB include a bookmark component, an indicator of elapsed time, a zoom-and-pan feature, and an Elite Red HD case.

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 the DVD and HD-DVD arrived. 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, its luxurious high-definition colors among them, to make it a pleasant viewing experience and a reminder of relatively gentler times at the picture show.