Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959): Intro and Outro of Robert Osborne and John Carpenter

N.S.: Rio Bravo should have, and could have been a masterpiece. However, Hawks did a couple of things that he thought were marketing necessities.

One was casting Ricky Nelson in a pivotal role, apparently, to appeal to young people, especially young girls. Although Nelson was a pop star, as a singer, he was a lightweight. When the professionals—John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Nelson—are besieged in the town jail, they kill time, in part, by singing. That’s great for Martin, who gives a lovely performance of a song Dmitri Tiomkin put together out of a theme from 1948's Red River (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”), another at times brilliant mess of a picture by Hawks, but lousy for Nelson. (Hawks was trying to give the audience a little bit of everything.)

The other mistake was in giving Wayne a romantic lead that was too young for him in Angie Dickinson, who was 24 years younger than him, though the two liked each other a great deal. Many years later, when an interviewer asked Dickinson what actor she’d like to be paired with, he expected to hear a name like Robert Redford, but instead heard her say she’d really like to be cast together again with John Wayne.

I think it’s fair to infer from Dickinson’s answer that she had the hots for Wayne.

[Postscript, June 17, 2023: I suspect that that was also a grand gesture by a lady to a man whom she knew was dying.]

Hawks got even worse, in that regard. In 1962’s Hatari, he cast Italian starlet Elsa Martinelli as the female romantic lead. Not only was Martinelli even younger than Dickinson, but she had no talent and radiated stupidity, not at all what one would expect of a Hawks woman. I shut off the picture about 20 minutes in.

This was the beginning of Howard Hawks’ artistic senility, not to be confused with senile dementia. (One of the signs of artistic senility in a director is in exercising poor judgment in ways he never would have done in his prime.)

At this point, John Ford was also declining, both morally (that’s a subject for another time) and creatively, and imitated Hawks by also casting young women as Wayne’s love interests, which embarrassed Wayne (see the last picture they made together, the disaster Donovan’s Reef, which was released in 1963).

Finally, Wayne put his foot down with Otto Preminger, when the Austrian liberal produced and directed the epic war picture, In Harm’s Way (1965). Although Wayne’s romantic interest was Patricia Neal, who was 20 years younger than him, at that point she’d suffered at least one stroke and borne a passel of kids, and thus looked much older than she was. That was fine by Wayne. And Pat Neal could more than hold her own dramatically. Wayne gave a towering performance as a naval captain who was disgraced by the Navy for purely political reasons, at the beginning of The War, but whom ol’ CINCPACII, Chester W. Nimitz (Henry Fonda), gives a chance to redeem himself.

In Rio Bravo, Dino gives the greatest cinematic performance of a drunk I’ve ever seen. He should have won an Oscar for best supporting actor, but wasn’t so much as nominated.

Hawks kept getting new scripts for a Western with Wayne, but each time would end up re-making Rio Bravo. In El Dorado (1967), Robert Mitchum played the drunk. Then, in Rio Lobo (1970), although it had a new script, without a drunken deputy, Wayne immediately sniffed out what was up and asked Hawks, “Do I play the drunk this time, Howard?”

John Carpenter on Rio Bravo
22,536 views Oct 30, 2016

“John Carpenter talks about Rio Bravo (1959) directed by Howard Hawks. Unfortunately it is not the best picture quality."