Haunted by the Memory of Her Song: Fifty Years of 'Rio Bravo'

The sun is sinking in the west

The cattle go down to the stream

The redwing settles in her nest

It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.”

In his now-famous 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne recalled his own loathing for the film:

Everyone says High Noon was a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. In the picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to church and asks for help and the guys go, “Oh well, oh gee.” And the women stand up and say, “You rats, you rats.” So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I ever saw in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.

Some critics like to nitpick and remind us that Cooper doesn’t actually step on his discarded tin star, but Wayne’s then-twenty-year-old memory is plenty close enough for government work. The conclusion of High Noon (former President Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, natch) has marshal Will Kane casting his badge into the dirt with a sneer, his features oozing contempt for the yellow-bellied townsfolk he defended. “That was like belittling a medal of honor,” Wayne seethed privately to his friends. And even as he graciously did his pal Gary Cooper the favor of stepping up at the 1953 Academy Awards and accepting the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon on Cooper’s behalf, the Duke began thinking about how such a role should have been played, and how he might someday use his superstar clout to craft the same basic story according to his own sensibilities. A story where the town didn’t cringe and run, but instead backed the marshal with their guns and their lives against the black-souled gangsters arrayed against them. A story which would ennoble America, flaws and all, instead of soiling her with a revisionist history at odds with how the brave pioneers of the west really acted.

Hawks agreed and, reinvigorated by the prospect of the film, he commissioned a script from the talented pulp writer Leigh Brackett, with whom he had previously collaborated on The Big Sleep (1946). He was re-invoking cinematic first principles, determined to “go back and try to get a little of the spirit we used to make pictures with.” Instead of High Noon‘s straitjacket of a script, featuring automatons in the service of a preordained ideological payoff, Hawks strove to create characters that threatened to derail the plot with unpredictable and shamelessly entertaining personalities. In the place of a grim, constipated marshal standing alone and without help, Hawks envisioned a good-natured hero whose bacon is saved at every turn by the intervention of his colorful assortment of friends, in between raucous bouts of drinking, smoking, showering, shaving, shooting, kissing and singing — not necessarily in that order.

A big part of Hollywood’s Golden-Age spirit stemmed from the excellent writing to be found in many movies from the 1930s and ’40s. The best of these had wonderfully witty dialogue, spoken by characters so vibrant and alive that they fairly leaped off the screen and into the audience’s hearts. It’s worth remembering that underneath the gunshots and barroom brawls of Bravo is the clever and mischievous mind that once gave audiences hilarious screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Monkey Business (1952). “We used to use comedy whenever we could,” Hawks remembered about his early years in Hollywood, “and then we got too serious about it. So, in Rio Bravo I imagine there are almost as many laughs as if we had started out to make a comedy.”

One of the things modern filmgoers often forget is that movies like Bravo once played on big screens to packed audiences, eliciting massive laughs from scenes that we now watch alone in our living rooms on DVD with scarcely a murmur. Hawks once explained his particular brand of humor thusly:

I like things like — I think it was in Rio Bravo — Wayne went over to a man and said, “So nobody ran in here?” Some man said, “Nobody ran in here.” And Wayne went like this and hit him right across here with a gun so blood was coming all over his face. And Dean Martin said, “Take it easy, Chance.” And Wayne turned and said, “I’m not going to hurt him.” The audience laughed so at that.

Howard Hawks is often cited for his unobtrusive nature, his lack of a palpable style compared to other great directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. But this is a gross underestimation of a man that contributed far more to his films than he is given credit for. Rather than use the camera for an assortment of clever movements designed to catch the Academy’s attention come Oscar-time, Hawks used a minimalist compositional palette that refused to pan, crane or dolly ostentatiously. The results are often startlingly unique. Under Hawks’ direction, the first four minutes of Rio Bravo became a near-pantomime without a single word of dialogue, an apparent homage to the silent movies he had cut his teeth on so long ago. The next time you watch Bravo pay close attention to the compositions, most of which are medium-wide shots, with the camera at chest level. There are virtually no close-ups in the picture, a gutsy decision at a time when technique was becoming far more elaborate in Hollywood fare. In hindsight, it was a bold choice that enhanced the languorous, easygoing byplay between the film’s charismatic stars. Director Michael Powell once said that Hawks “had a very deep understanding of people, what was inside people.” The relaxed purposefulness of Rio Bravo‘s confident compositions allows a rare richness of character to shine through.

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E. Here’s Hawks describing just one example out of hundreds that he seized on to make the movie what it is:

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin had a bit in which he was required to roll a cigarette. His fingers weren’t equal to it and Wayne kept passing him cigarettes. All of a sudden you realize that they are awfully good friends or he wouldn’t be doing it. That grew out of Martin’s asking me one day, “Well, if my fingers are shaky, how can I roll this thing?” So Wayne said, “Here, I’ll hand you one,” and suddenly we had something going.

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that. The Duke was known to sometimes distrust and argue with lesser directors, but along with John Ford only Howard Hawks commanded his absolute respect. “Hawks I trust with my life,” he once declared, a sentiment amply proven by the fearless bigheartedness of his performance in Rio Bravo. Both star and director were so happy with the way their collaboration went (only their second time working together after Red River eleven years before) that they more or less remade the same plot twice more in later years, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). The relationship was a special one. Long after both Hawks and Wayne had died, Peter Bogdanovich (who knew both) recalled in an interview that “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.”

What they missed — the desideratum of Hawks’ personality and artistry — can be sensed within every frame of Rio Bravo. The film features old friends (Bravo marked the twenty-second and final time that John Wayne and Ward Bond — a delightful character actor and Wayne’s best friend — would appear together in a movie), old props (in Bravo, Wayne wears the same, now-rumpled hat he wore twenty years earlier in his breakout role in Stagecoach [1939]), and old music (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” was created by adding new lyrics to a theme previously used in Red River a decade earlier). Surrounding all of this are seemingly endless moments of pure character-driven pleasure. Wayne scooping up a sleeping Angie Dickinson like a kindly father and carrying her to her room. Ricky Nelson taking a nervous drag on his cigarette and a deep breath of courage before brashly heading out the door to kill or be killed. Dean Martin pouring a glass of booze back into the bottle, hands steady as steel, finally conquering his demons. Wayne kissing Brennan on the top of his head and getting his ass swatted by the business end of a broom in return. And above all, that marvelous singing interlude in the jail, a masterstroke that releases the audience’s built-up tension via a sustained sequence of pure fraternal joy.

If there is a single criticism of Rio Bravo that grates above all others, it is the widely-held idea that the jailhouse duet between Martin and Nelson is a major artistic misstep, superfluous and corny. Nonsense. The memorable scene in question occurs almost two hours in. For much of the film, the audience has endured a mournful and threatening Spanish dirge called “El Degüello” (“a throat-slitting”), rumored to have been played by Santa Anna’s troops to the doomed defenders of the Alamo to weaken their resolve. It’s a song the villains play to signify “no quarter,” and as it begins to grate on the heroes’ nerves in Rio Bravo, we the audience worry right along with them. Then, deep in the movie, in a gripping emotional scene, Dean Martin with great agony renounces the bottle and regains his manhood. Finally, at long last, all four men are united in purpose, their doubts behind them. At that exact moment Hawks gives us a much-needed respite via the relaxed singing in the jailhouse. Coming on the heels of all that dramatic strain, it serves as a massive, cathartic release, a musical sunset after the long storms of the first two acts. It is male bonding on a par with the protagonists of Jaws (1975) comparing scars and warbling “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” It is the cementing of an oath-bound brotherhood between friends.

As Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing, we get lingering reaction shots of Brennan and Wayne appreciating the music — the first relaxed, genuine smiles we’ve seen for a long time. We listen as Dude and Colorado effortlessly merge their voices and complement each other, the beginnings of the teamwork that will become so important in the trials ahead. Stumpy asks Colorado to play something that he can sing along with, and Nelson obliges, bringing Brennan into the emotional core that has formed. This is one of the very few scenes without arguing or bickering of any kind — it’s a peek into the true feelings of a pseudo-family newly formed to confront a daunting menace. By the end of two songs, these disparate personalities have gained a much deeper sense of friendship and fidelity. We the audience have seen them at their most human — not as cardboard cutout plot points, but as people with longings and heartaches and dreams beyond the dusty and dangerous present. It’s the kind of scene that couldn’t possibly exist in a film like High Noon, with its relentless cynicism and sense of betrayal. And that, of course, is the point. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” has become a thematic mirror-image to the sinister “El Degüello,” and it’s no coincidence that, late in the picture, Hawks has the former tune playing on the barroom piano in the hotel, serving as as a subtle, triumphant reminder of which song — and which worldview and moral code — has won the day.

Strangely, Hawks’ potent cinematic iconography seems to be lost on many of Rio Bravo‘s most ardent admirers. Director John Carpenter has called Hawks “the greatest American director,” and he not only made Rio Bravo‘s plot the template for his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), he also remade Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951) as The Thing (1982) starring Kurt Russell. Neo-noir director Quentin Tarantino also reveres Rio Bravo, to the point of using it to screen potential girlfriends — if she doesn’t like Bravo, she’s outta there. And yet while the films of Carpenter and Tarantino possess many shallow Hawksian trademarks — groups of men struggling in environments poised on the razor’s edge of danger, conversations so hectic and colorful they threaten to derail the plot — they seem to pay scant attention to the emotional resonance Hawks strove to achieve. Film critic Robin Wood, who wrote what is by far the single best book-length treatment of Hawks and his films, notes that, “Hawks is not really a modern artist…he is a survivor from the past, whose work has never been afflicted with this disease of self-consciousness. An artist like Hawks can only exist within a strong and vital tradition.” Too often, a “disease of self-consciousness” overwhelms the work of directors like Carpenter and Tarantino, as they mimic the techniques and plot elements of Hawks without capturing (or indeed, hardly seeming aware of) the “strong and vital tradition” that makes his best films worth remembering in the first place.

Modern film critics, on the other hand, often recognize Hawks’ heart and soul, but just as often they tend to dismiss them with jaded cynicism. The late Pauline Kael, long the High Priestess of The New Yorker‘s film criticism department, once sniffed around the edges of Rio Bravo and approvingly declared it a “semi-satiric western pastiche…silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.” Satiric was a favored adjective of Miss Kael’s whenever she felt the need to explain away the pesky traditional mores of a film she otherwise liked. She also judged The Right Stuff (1983) to be “often satiric,” and for films that celebrated conservative values too unambiguously to laugh off — think Dirty Harry (1971) — she’d pull out the critical napalm and call it fascist. Liberals struggling to justify their forbidden love for John Wayne westerns often adopt such views. In Rio Bravo‘s case, the argument usually goes: It’s a cult film, man. A hip film. It’s satiric, dude. Knowingly silly. So determinedly un-cool as to be super-cool.

I beg to differ. Dr. Strangelove (1964) is satiric. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is satiric. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is satiric.

Rio Bravo, in all of its particulars, is sincere.

A full half-century after its release, Howard Hawks’ masterwork still epitomizes the essential qualities that made Hollywood’s Golden Age glitter. It’s a nostalgic old man’s love song to the “spirit we used to make pictures with,” a movie that loves its characters — and through them its audience — with a sincerity that soothes like a shot of whiskey chased by a mouthful of warm apple pie. For fifty years now audiences have loved it back, with an ardor that is equally unabashed and unadorned. The song that haunts Rio Bravo is a elegiac melody celebrating humanity, friendship, honor, and tradition, all treasured parts of the deep, eternal river of memory that ever rolls through the God-fearing American soul.

By the memory of a song,

While the river Rio Bravo flows along….

Haunted by the Memory of Her Song: Fifty Years of 'Rio Bravo'

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