“Nothin’ in his stomach. Nothin’ but guts.”
As Rio Bravo approaches its climax, four enforcers of the law—Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne), drunken deputy Dude (Dean Martin), gimp-legged Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and young sharpshooter Colorado (Ricky Nelson)—all hole up in the jail to keep watch over their prisoner (Claude Akins) while hired guns prowl around the tumbleweed town looking for any sliver of opportunity to enact a jailbreak. In the face of this great peril, Dude and Colorado break out a little cowboy ditty called ‘My Rifle, My Pony, and Me’ to calm their nerves. This is followed up by a ‘Get Along Home, Cindy’ as Stumpy joins in on the harmonica. For some, this may seem a trifling distraction, but for others (and I’d count myself among this group) this sequence is the high point of Howard Hawks’ masterpiece.
John Wayne is the only actor in the scene who isn’t contributing to the music—which is sensible, considering his castmates are primarily known for their musical talents—but he exhibits the scene’s posture of casual righteousness throughout the film. In the moral landscape of Rio Bravo, it is honor and integrity, rather than prowess, that weigh heaviest on the scales of fate. It is with those virtues in mind that Chance willingly locks horns with the wealthy land baron (John Russell) whose brother is being held for murder, despite the fact that his only help comes from a shaky alcoholic, a cranky old cripple with a double-barrel shotgun, and an adolescent gunslinger who only joins up when his boss (Ward Bond) is killed for offering to help the sheriff’s cause.
Though it features enough shootouts and standoffs to satisfy the genre enthusiast, under the aegis of Hawks Rio Bravo takes on the aspect of the director’s taut romantic comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday). Instead of the vast landscapes of John Ford, we take a leisurely glance into the complex dynamics between Chance and his deputies, Chance and the loquacious hotel proprietor (Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez), and Chance and the widow of a wanted gambler (Angie Dickinson). It’s the last of these that proves capable of breaking through his authoritative persona and discovering a softer side to the character. But generally speaking, the constant jawing and ribbing that goes on amongst these distinct personalities is totally sublime. Indeed, Quentin Tarantino lists the film as the essential “hang-out movie,” where pleasure is primarily derived from simply watching well-drawn, amiable characters shoot the breeze.
None of this is subtle or clever—the screenplay from Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett (who had written Hawks’ The Big Sleep along with William Faulkner) is fairly straightforward—but as the script, direction, and performances all come together to underscore the righteous men’s intimacy and solidarity of purpose, Rio Bravo exhibits the finest qualities of Hollywood filmmaking.
As these men hunker down to enjoy a simple cowboy song—an activity that can only happen in a civilized place (and is thus worth fighting for)—and make peace with their stand against the chaos on their doorstep, one can’t help but be refreshed by the clarity Hawks’ vision and the filmmaking virtuosity that brings it to fruition in such a thoroughly entertaining manner. No matter what one thinks of High Noon, one must profusely thank Fred Zinnemann for making it, else we might not have gotten this tour de force from Hawks, which means we’d also be without John Carpenter’s low-budget classic siege film Assault on Precinct 13.