MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #23 Rio Bravo

Hey pallies,likes on the heels of yester-Dino-day's review of "Bravo" from our pallie Kinezoe's blog..although as related in his Dino-patter, the author of said is his pallie Mr. Francisco Machuca (see Wednesday's Dino-post), ilovedinomartin features yet 'nother essay on this classic Dino-western.

From the flick blog, "MovieRetriever," comes "MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #23 Rio Bravo, an essay by Robin Wood, first published in the flick tome, "International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers." This Wood pallie is obviously a huge fan of "Rio Bravo" and has many many outstandin' thoughts to share.

When it comes to our Dino the accent turns radically provocative when Wood sez....

"The "gay subtext" that many critics have sensed in Hawks's films – their tendency to become (in his own words) "love stories between men" – surfaces quite clearly in the Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson relationship, though it is never allowed expression beyond the exchange of looks and is swiftly "contained" within the group (a progression beautifully enacted in the famous song-sequence).

This is a twist to "Bravo" that I have never heard before, and would be very interested in other pallies' thoughts on Wood's claim.

Probably of all our Dino's screen credits, "Rio Bravo" has engendered more reviews then any other, and likes it is always great to see 'nother pallie spreadin' the word of "Rio Bravo" and thus helpin' more and more pallies to knowin', lovin', and honorin' our beloved Dino.

ilovedinomartin is thanksful to blogs like "MovieRetriever" for helpin' spread the Dino-message and encouragin' us to more Dino-dialogue on possible deeper messages within the flick. To view this in it's original format, likes just clicks on the tagg of this Dino-post. Dino-focused, DMP



100 Greatest Movies

January 26, 2011

MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #23 Rio Bravo

Posted by Turk182 in 100 Greatest Movies

Rio Bravo is one of the supreme achievements (hence justifications) of "classical Hollywood," that complex network of determinants that includes the star system, the studio system, the system of genres and conventions, a highly developed grammar and syntax of shooting and editing, the interaction of which made possible an art at once personal and collaborative, one nourished by a rich and vital tradition: it is an art that belongs now to the past; the period of Rio Bravo was its last flowering.



The film at once is one of the greatest westerns and the most complete statements of the themes of director Howard Hawks. One can distinguish two main currents within the western genre, the "historical" and the "conventional": the western that is concerned with the American past (albeit with its mythology as much as its reality), and the western that plays with and develops a set of conventions, archetypes, "stock" figures. Ford's westerns are the finest examples of the former impulse, and in the westerns of Anthony Mann (for example, Man of the West) the two achieve perfect fusion. Rio Bravo is among the purest of all "conventional" westerns. Here, history and the American past are of no concern, a point amply demonstrated by the fact that the film is a virtual remake (in its thematic pattern, its characters and character relationships, even down to sketches of dialogue) of Hawks's earlier Only Angels Have Wings (set in the Andes mountains) and To Have and Have Not (set on Martinique). Hawks's stylized and anonymous western town is not a microcosm of American civilization at a certain point in its development but an abstract setting within which his recurrent concerns and relationships can be played out. All the characters are on one level "western" archetypes: the infallible sheriff, the fallible friend, the "travelling lady," the garrulous sidekick, the comic Mexican, the evil land-baron. On another level, however, they are Hawksian archetypes: the overlay makes possible the richness of characterization, the detail of the acting, so that here the archetypes (western and Hawksian) achieve their ultimate elaboration. With this goes the remarkable and varied use Hawks makes of actors' personas: Martin, Dickinson, and Brennan have never surpassed (perhaps never equalled) their performances here, and the use of Wayne is extremely subtle and idiosyncratic, at once drawing on his "heroic" status and satirizing its limitations.



The film represents Hawks's most successful transcendence of the chief "binary opposition" of his work, its division into adventure films and comedies. Here the thematic concerns of the action pictures – self-respect, personal integrity, loyalty, stoicism, the interplay of mutual respect and affection – combines with the sexual tensions of the comedies (Wayne's vulnerability to women permitting a fuller development of this than is possible with, for example, Bogart in To Have and Have Not). The ambiguous relationship of Hawks's work to dominant American ideological assumptions (on the one hand the endorsement of individualism and personal initiative, on the other the rejection of established society in favour of the "primitive" male group, the total lack of interest in such central American ideals as marriage, home and family) permeates the whole film. The "gay subtext" that many critics have sensed in Hawks's films – their tendency to become (in his own words) "love stories between men" – surfaces quite clearly in the Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson relationship, though it is never allowed expression beyond the exchange of looks and is swiftly "contained" within the group (a progression beautifully enacted in the famous song-sequence). Within a system necessarily committed, at least on surface level, to reinforcing the status quo, Hawks's cinema continuously suggests the possibility of alternative forms of social and sexual organization.

Essay by Robin Wood

Release Date: 1959
Rating: Unrated

Starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez, Claude Akins, Malcolm Atterbury, Harry Carey, Jr., Bob Steele, Myron Healey, Fred Graham, Tom Monroe, and Riley Hill
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Jules Furthman and Leigh Bracket

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "Rio Bravo." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1024-1026.

**********