Rio Bravo (1959) Review

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

Rio Bravo is the hangout Western I’d keep if I could only keep one. I’m happy spending two hours in that jail with these people, and by the time the dynamite comes out I care about every one of them. The only thing holding it back from a 10 for me is Ricky Nelson, who’s fine at standing still and not much else.

Hawks made it at sixty-two, after forty years of directing, and it’s 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. That’s 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 all of them refuse him.

His objection was professional instead of political, whatever he called it. A good lawman doesn’t 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’re not good enough and he’d 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 shows for two hours. Brennan is a treat. He whines about everything, and I believe completely that the old man would die at that door before he’d leave it.

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 can’t roll a cigarette, can’t pour a drink without spilling it, and the film returns to his hands repeatedly without comment. The scene where he’s 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’s 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’s earned it.

The mud scene is where the humiliation is worst and the film doesn’t flinch from it.

He’s 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. I find that stretch hard to watch, and I think it’s why his recovery lands as hard as it does.

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’s 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.

Martin and Nelson singing while Brennan wheezes along on harmonica is the most relaxed this film ever gets, and it’s the part I’d miss most if somebody trimmed the picture for time. Hawks understood something most action directors don’t: an audience won’t 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’s 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 aren’t decorative. Feathers is smarter than Chance, aware of it, and entirely uninterested in pretending otherwise, and the same writer had already worked on The Big Sleep and would later work on 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 uncertain for the only time in the film, and Wayne plays the discomfort of a man who has no procedure for this.

Wayne squirming around Angie Dickinson is my favorite version of him. He looks like a man who’s just figured out his gun won’t help, and I think it’s the funniest he ever let himself be on screen.

It’s also the source of the film’s confidence. Nothing needs to be established about Chance because everybody watching already knows what he is. That 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’s competent, quiet and young, and the film asks him to show instead of perform. That’s 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 work 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 showed it in a bar. Stumpy holds the jail because the film hasn’t let him leave it once in two hours of screen time. That’s characterization arriving disguised as a running joke about an old man who won’t 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, and Rio Bravo is the best of the three. It’s either a lack of ideas or a man who found the shape he wanted and saw no reason to abandon it.

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. That’s why almost none of them work as well.

Should you watch Rio Bravo?

Yes, and settle in. I give it a 9 because it trusts you to enjoy the company before the gunfire, and the fifteen-minute shootout works entirely because of the card games, the songs and a man learning to pour a drink without spilling it. Ricky Nelson is the only thing I’d change.

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