Rio Bravo (DVD)

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Who would you rather have star in a Western than John Wayne or maybe Clint Eastwood? And who would you rather have direct that Western than John Ford, Clint Eastwood, or Howard Hawks? In 1959's "Rio Bravo," a big-time Western if there ever was one, we get two of our favorites: John Wayne starring and Howard Hawks directing. They made a popular duo.

In fact, Wayne and Hawks had made such a good team in 1948's "Red River" that they went on to do not only "Rio Bravo" together but two successors, "El Dorado" (1966) and "Rio Lobo" (1970), Hawks's last film, plus the African adventure, "Hatari" (1962). But Hawks was not always a director of Westerns. Indeed, he came late to the genre, having done little in the field prior to "Red River" except some uncredited work on "Viva Villa!" (1934) and "The Outlaw" (1943). No, his previous hits were as diverse as the gangster film "Scarface" (1932), the screwball comedies "Bringing Up Baby" (1938) and "His Girl Friday" (1940), the war drama "Sergeant York" (1941), and the Bogart classics "To Have and Have Not" (1944) and "The Big Sleep" (1946). Add in the sci-fi thriller "The Thing From Another World" (1951), the musical comedy "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953), and the historical epic "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955), and you get a remarkably well-rounded filmmaker.

For all that, though, "Rio Bravo" comes off in my book as only a slightly above-average Western, an old-fashioned, slow-moving affair that doesn't entirely stand up to close scrutiny, despite its enormous popularity and, except for me, its favorable critical support. Frankly, the movie lacks the edge that Wayne brought to some of his great Western performances like "Red River" and "The Searchers." Maybe it was Hawks's coming late to the genre that held him back from ever quite matching the Western work of his compatriot John Ford, I don't know.

Regardless, there are enough good moments in "Rio Bravo" to make it a worthwhile viewing experience, and die-hard Western fans will love it in any case. Wayne plays a typical Wayne hero, the sheriff of a small Texas border town, a fellow with the unlikely but dramatic-sounding name of John T. Chance. He's a tough, rugged man's man, who now faces a dilemma: He's got to hold a murderer, Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), in his jail until the U.S. Marshall can pick him up in six days, but the miscreant's brother, Nathan Burdette (John Russell), is a local cattle baron with an army of men bent on getting Joe out by any means possible. And the poor sheriff has only two deputies to help him, a drunk named Dude (Dean Martin) and a cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), with the rest of the town too afraid to do anything (shades of "High Noon"). Will the sheriff give up his prisoner in the face of overwhelming odds? Will pigs fly? No, the sheriff, like Wayne and Hawks themselves, believes in truth, justice, and the American way, and that when he's in the right, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do (what a man's gotta do-do do). The sheriff will die before he gives in to evil. If you've never seen "Rio Bravo" but find the plot sounds at all familiar, you might have seen John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), in which the director more or less remade the movie in a modern setting. I'm sure it's one of the reasons Warner Bros. asked Carpenter to do a part of the audio commentary for this set.

Anyway, Wayne is, as I say, Wayne in spades. He looks like John Wayne in Western garb, right down to the belt buckle the actor wore in "Red River." Yet it's Dean Martin who steals every scene he's in, proving he could get along fine without ex-partner Jerry Lewis. What's more, Walter Brennan as the gimpy deputy does his share to liven things up. Brennan was only in his mid sixties when he did the part, but he looked eighty. Brennan always looked eighty. He looked eighty when he played Grandpa McCoy in "The Real McCoys" several years earlier on TV. And when he finally did reach eighty, it was when he died in 1974.

Then there's the matter of the two other supporting stars, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson. Nelson plays a young gunslinger, also with an unlikely name, "Colorado" Ryan. His character is sweet, kind, lovable, nice, the all-American boy next door with two guns blazing. He looks and sounds as though he's just stepped out of, well, "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." He does his best here, but he seems out of his league. And what do you mean, Does he sing? Of course, he sings. We couldn't have a movie with one of the country's leading TV stars and rock-and-roll singers and not have the guy sing, especially not when he's paired up in the movie with another of the country's favorite singers; so, yes, Nelson and Martin do a duet that seems straight out of an old Gene Autry or Roy Rogers flick. I expected the Sons of the Pioneers to join them any minute in a chorus. At least they don't sing a rock-and-roll number, although I had my worries.

As for Ms. Dickinson, she plays "Feathers," another cutesy name, a traveling card sharp who becomes the film's romantic interest. For Martin or Nelson, who are closer her age? Certainly not, but a romantic interest for Wayne, who was about twenty-five years her senior. Still, who am I to question? Dickinson is a beautiful woman, and audiences have never seemed to mind the age discrepancy.