Rio Bravo (1959) Review

A sheriff arrests a rich man’s brother for murder and has to hold him for six days until a marshal arrives. He has a drunk, an old man with a bad leg, and eventually a boy with a rifle. The town cannot help and he does not want it to.

The 9 is for a film that understands the difference between plot and pleasure. The premise is a countdown to an assault that arrives in the last fifteen minutes, and the two hours before it are men in a jail talking, playing cards, singing and sobering up.

Hawks made it at sixty-two, after forty years of directing, and it is the work of somebody who knows exactly what an audience is there for and refuses to hurry toward it.

It also runs to a hundred and forty-one minutes, which is long for a 1959 Western and was a deliberate decision. The length is the form: a film about waiting six days needs the audience to feel some of the six days.

It Is an Argument With High Noon

Hawks said publicly that he disliked High Noon, in which a marshal goes from door to door asking the town for help and is refused by all of them.

His objection was professional instead of political, whatever he called it. A good lawman does not recruit amateurs into a gunfight, because amateurs get killed and then he has to protect them as well.

So Chance spends the film turning help down. The town offers, a friend offers, a hotel owner offers, and he declines every time, on the grounds that they are not good enough and he would be responsible for them.

That produces the film’s real subject. The three people he does accept are a drunk, a cripple and a boy, all of whom are unqualified, and every one of them has to prove it. The acceptance is earned individually instead of assumed.

Walter Brennan gets the hardest job in that arrangement. Stumpy is comic relief, complains continuously, and is also the only person in the jail at every hour of every day, which the film states once and then simply demonstrates for two hours.

Dean Martin Is the Film

Dude is an alcoholic who was the best gunman in the territory and has spent two years drinking out of spittoons. Martin plays the physical humiliation of it without any performance of nobility.

The shaking hands are the detail everything else is built on. He cannot roll a cigarette, cannot pour a drink without spilling it, and the film returns to his hands repeatedly without comment.

The scene where he is offered a drink and has to decide in front of everybody is the best in the picture. He pours it back into the bottle without spilling a drop, and that is the recovery, stated entirely through an action.

Martin was a singer with a light comic reputation and this is the performance that proved otherwise. Hawks cast against the persona deliberately, and the film is careful never to let Dude be charming until he has earned it.

The mud scene is where the humiliation is worst and the film does not flinch from it. He is thrown into a horse trough, then sent back into a bar to be laughed at, and the camera stays on him while it happens. Recovery stories usually skip this part, and skipping it is what makes most of them unconvincing.

The Hangout Middle

Whole stretches of this film have no plot in them. Men eat, argue about coffee, sit in a jail at night, and at one point Martin and Ricky Nelson sing two songs straight through while Walter Brennan plays harmonica.

That sequence has been faulted for stopping the film and it is the reason people rewatch it. Four men in a room, comfortable with each other for the first time, on the night before an assault that may kill all of them.

Hawks understood something most action directors do not, which is that an audience will not care about a gunfight unless they want to spend time with the people in it. The siege matters because the card games did.

Angie Dickinson’s Feathers is the other reason the middle works. She is twenty-seven playing opposite a man of fifty-one, she pursues him relentlessly, and the film gives her every good line in the exchange.

Leigh Brackett wrote the dialogue and she wrote women who are not decorative. Feathers is smarter than Chance, aware of it, and entirely uninterested in pretending otherwise, and the same writer would later work on The Big Sleep and The Empire Strikes Back.

Wayne Does Almost Nothing

John Chance is the least active protagonist in a major Western. He stands in doorways, refuses offers, waits for a stage, and spends most of the film reacting to the people around him.

That stillness is a deliberate construction. Wayne at fifty-one had been the genre’s center for two decades and Hawks uses the audience’s existing certainty about him as a foundation instead of a subject.

The performance is best in the scenes with Feathers, where the character is genuinely uncertain for the only time in the film, and Wayne plays the discomfort of a man who has no procedure for this.

It is also the source of the film’s confidence. Nothing needs to be established about Chance because everybody watching already knows what he is, which frees two hours for everybody else.

Ricky Nelson was cast for the teenage audience and is the weakest element, which Hawks handles by giving Colorado almost nothing to say. He is competent, quiet and young, and the film asks him to demonstrate instead of perform, which is the correct use of a limited actor.

The Siege Is Short

The final assault takes about fifteen minutes, involves dynamite thrown at a barn, and is over quickly with no extended ceremony.

That proportion is the film’s argument stated structurally. A hundred and twenty minutes of preparation and fifteen of action, when the genre’s convention was closer to the reverse.

What makes it land is that everybody has a job and the audience knows why each of them is capable of it. Dude can shoot again because the film showed him getting there. Colorado is fast because the film demonstrated it in a bar. Stumpy holds the jail because the film has not let him leave it once in two hours of screen time, which is characterization arriving disguised as a running joke about an old man who will not stop complaining about a single minute of the time he spends in there.

Hawks remade the same structure twice more, as El Dorado and Rio Lobo, which is either a lack of ideas or a man who found the shape he wanted and saw no reason to abandon it. The first one is the best.

Its influence ran further than the remakes. Carpenter built Assault on Precinct 13 out of it, credited the debt openly, and the siege-with-misfits structure has been in continuous use ever since. Almost none of the imitations keep the two hours of card games, which is why almost none of them work as well.

Should you watch Rio Bravo?

Yes, and settle in. Two hours of men in a jail being good company, with a fifteen-minute gunfight at the end that works entirely because of the card games, the songs and a man learning to pour a drink without spilling it.

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