Amazon.com Essentials:
When it comes down to naming the best Western of all time, the
list usually narrows to three completely different pictures: John
Ford's The
Searchers, Howard Hawks's Red River, and
Hawks's Rio Bravo. About the only thing they all have in
common is that they all star John Wayne. But while The
Searchers is an epic quest for revenge and Red River is a
sweeping cattle-drive drama ("Take 'em to Missouri! Yeeee-hah!"),
Rio Bravo is on a much more modest scale. Basically, it comes
down to Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), his sobering-up alcoholic
friend Dude (Dean Martin), the hotshot new kid Colorado (Ricky
Nelson), and deputy-sidekick Stumpy (Walter Brennan), sittin' around
in the town jail, drinkin' black cofee, shootin' the breeze, and
occasionally, singin' a song. Hawks--who, like his pal Ernest
Hemingway, lived by the code of "grace under pressure"--said he made
Rio Bravo as a rebuke to High Noon, in
which sheriff Gary Cooper begged for townspeople to help him. So,
Hawks made Wayne's Sheriff Chance a consummate professional--he may be
getting old and fat, but he knows how to do his job, and he doesn't
want amateurs getting mixed up in his business; they could get hurt.
This most entertaining of movies also achieved some notoriety in the
'90s when Quentin Tarantino (director of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs,
and Jackie
Brown) revealed that he uses it as a litmus test for
prospective girlfriends. Oh, and if the configuration of characters
sounds familiar, it should: Hawks remade Rio Bravo two more
times--as El
Dorado in 1967, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan;
and as Rio Lobo
in 1970, with Wayne, Jack Elam, and Christopher Mitchum. --Jim
Emerson
