Review of Rio Bravo (1959) by Nikolai E — 23 Sep 2009

The western and I got off on the wrong foot. The genre has been so thoroughly deconstructed, reinvented, mocked and idolized, when I see a straight-shootin' honest-to-goodness western, it looks completely alien to me.

This one in particular is not only conservative, it's actually regressive; a pithy retort to 'High Noon,' it's likely the purest example of the anti-revisionist western movement which sought to jealously preserve the dead-simple morality and cartoonish characters of the genre's infancy.

The plot revolves around holding a man in jail so he can be tried for a single frivolous tavern shooting, and yet to do it, the infallible heroes of our story have need to coolly murder dozens and dozens of people, a fact which is barely even discussed.

And what heroes! We've got Wayne as the unfailing and unquestioned moral compass, Martin as the prodigal son whose 'redemption' comes as easily as flipping a light switch, and Ricky Nelson as the blatantly gay fourteen-year-old serial killer who does nothing but smile blandly and end lives.

Mothers lock up your sons! Of course, the character interplay is entertaining and well-written, except for the atrocious love story, entire scenes of which are lifted wholesale from 'To Have and Have Not.

' Now, I'm not one to object if Hawks wants to rip himself off, but just try and imagine 'To Have' with John Wayne in the Bogey role and you'll understand how wrong it goes. I could say the film is very successful at establishing and drawing out suspense, making it seem as though the heroes are just one misstep away from death, but then the big climax it's all been building toward turns out to have all the tension of a birthday party once you realize the heroes are all impervious to bullets, which might explain why they keep laughing all the time.

I could see all this silliness being intentional if the movie were some kind of farewell gesture to a bygone age, but it's much too earnest for that, so earnest that even laughing at it is unsatisfying.

By 1959, they should have known better.