Rio Bravo

Actor John Wayne and director Howard Hawks were equally disgusted by the popular 1952 western High Noon. What peeved them most was the premise that the townsfolk of a western community would desert their sheriff at a time when he needed them most--and that said sheriff would be reduced to begging for assistance. In High Noon, only a callow kid, a drunk, and an old man stick by sheriff Gary Cooper when he faces a showdown; this throwaway sequence was supposed to indicate the tremulous Cooper's fall from grace. In response, Wayne, Hawks and screenwriter Leigh Brackett build the whole plot of Rio Bravo around Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne), callow kid Colorado Ryan (Ricky Nelson), drunken ex-deputy Dude (Dean Martin) and toothless old cripple Stumpy (Walter Brennan)--elevating each of the four principals to superhero status. The scene is a Texas border town, held in thrall by land baron Nathan Burdette (John Russell). When Burdette's moronic brother Joe (Claude Akins) commits a murder, Sheriff Chance is obliged to lock the miscreant up until the federal marshal comes to town. Joe is certain that his brother's men will bust him out. Chance, realizing that the odds against his holding Joe (and staying alive) are slim, casts about for a few deputies. He refuses to endanger the townsfolk by pulling his assistants from their ranks: nor will he prevail upon his old friend, trail boss Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) for help, reasoning that Wheeler isn't fast enough with a gun to stave off Burdette. Instead, Chance enlists the aid of Wheeler's cocksure new hand Colorado, the sobered-up Dude, and the garrulous but reliable Stumpy. The rest of the film consists of the long, long wait for Burdette to strike, with various comical and dead-serious intermissions involving the likes of dance-hall girl Angie Dickinson and Mexican family man Gonzales Gonzales. Roundly panned as just another western in 1959, Rio Bravo is nowadays rightly acknowledged as a classic of its genre. Director Hawks liked it so much he remade it (more or less) on two occasions, first as El Dorado in 1965, then as Rio Lobo in 1969; both films also starred Duke Wayne. Filmmaker John Carpenter acknowledged his debt to Rio Bravo by restaging the central situation in an urban setting in his 1976 feature Assault on Precinct 13.