Rio Bravo (1959)
Directed by Howard Hawks
A small-town sheriff in the American West enlists the help of a disabled man, a drunk, and a young gunfighter in his efforts to hold in jail the brother of the local bad guy.
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7 films that influenced Rio Bravo
What critics say influenced Rio Bravo
I’m for Rio Bravo today, to put it mildly, and if I had to select just one film to demonstrate what Howard Hawks is all about, it would vie at the top of the list with Only Angels Have Wings.
As critics have pointed out, the rich group dynamics recall such earlier Hawks masterpieces as Only Angels have Wings (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944).
It’s a template wonderfully employed by the director in such classics as Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep and His Girl Friday – here, the framework is transplanted to an airstrip in South America, where pilots working for a transport company headed by the fearless Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) risk their lives on a daily basis flying over rugged terrain in less than ideal conditions.
At present, “High Noon” is better known as the movie directly responsible for the making of “Rio Bravo.”
(They reportedly made Rio Bravo as their answer to it.)
One of the film's many notable features is John Wayne's participation as a belated cinematic response to Fred Zinnemann's 1952 Western "High Noon" (written by Carl Foreman), known now as an anti-McCarthyism allegory regarding blacklisting.
He has declared that he made the film in reaction to the Kramer–Foreman–Zinnemann High Noon wherein a sheriff runs to his community for help and is denied.
He loved to use again what had worked for him earlier; when Dickinson asks Wayne to kiss her a second time, because "it’s even better when two people do it," there’s an echo of Bacall in "To Have and Have Not," telling Bogart, "It’s even better when you help."
This reworking of Ernest Hemingway's novel (with a script co-written by William Faulkner and Rio Bravo's Jules Furthman) marked the first of four screen teamings of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, although it's the last to finally be brought to Blu-ray by Warner Bros. As with most things Bogie, it was worth the wait: Second only to The Big Sleep (reviewed here ) as the best of the love birds' quartet of films together (the others were Dark Passage, reviewed here , and Key Largo, reviewed here ), it's yet another gem from Howard Hawks, still the most underrated of all great American directors.
Set in the Morocco nightclub digs of world-weary, acid-tongued Rick Blaine, "Casablanca" is a movie that--as critic Robin Wood once said of "Rio Bravo"--justifies the entire Hollywood studio system.
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Grumpy old Ford, seeing Hawks' " Red River ," said "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act."
He made top movies in all genres: the detective film (The Big Sleep), the western (Red River), the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) the screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the war film (Air Force), the epic (Land of the Pharaohs), the adventure (To Have and Have Not), the gangster film (Scarface), etc.
With the noble exceptions of The Dawn Patrol, Hawks’s first talkie, and the epic Red River, all of the films we have seen have seemed wonderfully relaxed, as if they must have been a pleasure to make.
They had previously only made one film together, Red River (1948), but it had established Hawks as a master of the western and it provided Wayne his first opportunity to stretch as an actor (and, in the process, gain a little respect from his most frequent director and greatest critic, John Ford).
I can only state that I am a great fan of his Westerns, of which “Red River” was the first, “Rio Bravo” (1959) the best, and “El Dorado” (1966) the most underappreciated.
Disc One also comes with a Hawks trailer gallery, including Bringing Up Baby, Sergeant York, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo.
He made top movies in all genres: the detective film (The Big Sleep), the western (Red River), the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) the screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the war film (Air Force), the epic (Land of the Pharaohs), the adventure (To Have and Have Not), the gangster film (Scarface), etc.
It is as necessary to Chance as the anarchy Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) introduces into the life of David Huxley (Cary Grant) in Bringing Up Baby, wherein Huxley cries at one point, “I’m going to be all right—I’m just losing my mind, that’s all”—and in order to be “all right” (or “good,” as Barnaby Fulton says on rollerskates in Monkey Business) he must lose his mind, or abandon all the stuffy categories of thinking in which his existence has become as desiccated as the fossils he reconstructs.
One of the film's screenwriters was no less than William Faulkner; the others were Jules Furthman, responsible for other vintage classics like Mutiny on the Bounty, Nightmare Alley and Rio Bravo, and Leigh Brackett, whose final screen credit would come decades later in the form of The Empire Strikes Back.
He engaged major writing talents such as his old friend William Faulkner and his personal discovery, Leigh Brackett, a Hawksian woman with a great ear for dialogue who went on to write Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back.
The story situation was fashioned by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett , two veterans who wrote Hawks’ great film " The Big Sleep " (1946).
He made top movies in all genres: the detective film (The Big Sleep), the western (Red River), the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) the screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the war film (Air Force), the epic (Land of the Pharaohs), the adventure (To Have and Have Not), the gangster film (Scarface), etc.