by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Westerns can be a hard sell for audiences this century. I remember going to see James Mangold’s version of 3:10 to Yuma in the theater partially out of the novelty of seeing a real Western theatrically. Logan, also directed by Mangold, is “secretly” a western in a post-apocalyptic superhero setting. No matter how many great smaller indie and arthouse westerns have been made in the last two decades, unless you’re Quentin Tarantino, it’s hard to get butts in seats for cowboys. But that also isn’t true at all. Westerns are all around us, its DNA showing up regularly in thriller, horror, crime, superhero, and other genres (even when not as overt as Logan). Heat, Starship Troopers, Die Hard, Widows, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and Solo: A Star Wars Story are just a few examples that immediately come to my mind as movies that lean on tropes, conventions, and themes developed in the western. One of the figures most important to this proliferation is director John Carpenter and his vocal appreciation of director Howard Hawks, and especially his 1959 western Rio Bravo. 

Rio Bravo stars John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, and Walter Brennan, and the Blu-Ray includes a commentary from Carpenter alongside film historian Richard Shickel. I watched Rio Bravo for the first time for this column, and then again with the commentary track, which is something I wish I always had time for, as it definitely gave added context and perspective for me. On my first watch, I enjoyed the movie a lot, even as I continue to struggle with John Wayne (more on that later), and with the commentary I noticed a lot more about what makes Hawks’ directing work so readily watchable. 

There’s not much plot in Rio Bravo, and it has justifiably been described as a hangout movie. Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), brother to a local land baron, gets arrested for assaulting Dude (Dean Martin), ex-deputy and town drunk, in a saloon. The rest of the story plays out as the sheriff, Chance (Wayne), tries to keep Joe in jail long enough for the U.S. Marshall to arrive, while Joe’s brother and his army plot to free him. Also in the mix is Feathers (Dickinson), a widow and potential card cheat stuck in town due to the lockdown. Like many other hangout movies, including last year’s Licorice Pizza, there’s a bit of an episodic nature to the way that the film plays out, with Chance, Dude, and Stumpy (Walter Brennan) navigating the goings on in and around the town as they duel with Burdette’s men. However, the ticking clock aspect gives it a sense of tension most other movies in this mode lack, which keeps it from feeling aimless. 

Hawks, along with screenwriters Jules Fuhrman (Only Angels Have Wings, The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley) and Leigh Brackkett (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, The Empire Strikes Back) bring sharp dialogue and complex characters to the screen. While Hawks did allow his actors to ad lib, the script still provides a structure and characterization for the entire film. Each interaction is meaningful and filled with acknowledged and unacknowledged emotion, often underlined by Hawks’ camera placement. According to Carpenter, Hawks was a master of camera placement, and points to a scene early in the film where Dude goes to retrieve a coin chucked into a spittoon in order to afford another drink. The camera points down at Dude approaching the spittoon before it is kicked away. A reverse upwards shot reveals a towering John Wayne intervening and (momentarily) saving Dude from his addiction. 

Of course, it’s hard to write about Rio Bravo without also mentioning High Noon. Fred Zinneman’s film from 1952 is a clear allegory for Hollywood blacklisting and McCarthyism. In the picture, the marshal, played by Gary Cooper, is on the verge of marriage and retirement, but a man he put in prison is on his way to town, out for revenge. Cooper’s character seeks help from his allies and friends in town, but they urge him to run away, and so he faces the threat alone. John Wayne was pro-blacklisting, and both he and Howard Hawks felt that High Noon had undercut the western hero by having Cooper’s character nearly begging for help from people who have little to no gunfighting experience, and needing saving by his Quaker wife in the end. Basically, he’s a wuss in their eyes, which I think is the exact opposite lesson to take from High Noon. In Rio Bravo, Wayne’s character refuses help in order to try and limit the scope of violence, and I think that is meant to show the sheriff as more selfless than Cooper’s marshal. However, the two films are about different things. High Noon is about one man doing what he thinks is right in the face of no popular support for those actions–allegorically, not naming names. Rio Bravo is about serving justice to criminals no matter the cost, almost veering into using the ends to justify the means. What pulls Hawks back from the brink of Cold War brinkmanship thinking is that the villain of Rio Bravo is a rich man who believes he and his cadre are above justice. It doesn’t seem quite right to call Rio Bravo a right wing film, but it does have a bit of an old school (even by 1959 standards) conservative streak to it, albeit closer to “silent majority” messaging than John Birch Society. 

Another thing separating the two is the relationship between Chance and Feathers. While the High Noon newlyweds have a decent sense of gender parity for 1950, Rio Bravo gives Feathers all the power in her entanglement with Chance. Feathers is a classic example of the Hawksian woman archetype: always in control, witty, and able to get what she wants from a man. Angie Dickinson’s character here certainly plays John Wayne’s with ease, putting him exactly where she wants him in every interaction in the film. Despite her own toughness, she softens him, and allows Wayne to demonstrate his compassion to her as well as to Dude and Stumpy. 

Rio Bravo most famously informed John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is basically a stealth remake. Precinct 13 is less of a hangout movie and more directly a ‘fortress assault thriller,’ but nicely blends the premise from Rio Bravo with the more exploitation-leaning spaghetti westerns that came later. But Rio Bravo also shows up in other Carpenter films. There is a scene where Chance and Dude chase one of Burdette’s men into a saloon. They aren’t sure which man they are looking for since they were following him in the dark, so they line them all up and check their boots for mud. I was struck by how similar the scene is to the blood test scene in The Thing, showing that this western is a frequent reference point for Carpenter. 

One of the things I hope to achieve with my monthly trek out west is to help other people find a way into the genre. Showing connections to other, more currently popular genres of films is one way to do that. While many other directors of the last fifty years have also been influenced by the genre, Carpenter’s love for westerns–especially those directed by Howard Hawks–has maybe gone the furthest because of how many directors of the upcoming generation were in turn influenced by Carpenter. We’ve been inundated with Carpenter homages over the last few years, and going back to his influences sheds light on his filmography as well as movies like The Guest, Green Room, and more.