Rio Bravo

Director: Howard Hawks

1959 / 141min / 35mm

A dead-proper cowboy movie with “Duke” Wayne and his six guns-a-blazin’…. but what places Rio Bravo in a languorous league of its own is its attention to the long, terribly dull lulls between spurts of fatal action, the lazy-but-anxious back-and-forth of men killing time while sitting around and waiting to kill (or, possibly, die), captured here with all their amiable, offhand, half bored and half terrified qualities. Wayne’s sheriff and Dean Martin’s Dude, an abruptly sobered-up town drunk that Wayne’s character has enlisted as his right-hand man, arrest a local troublemaker, then hole up at the jailhouse with deputies Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson, there to watch and wait for the prisoner’s ornery friends to show up and show their stuff. The law-abiding quartet’s singing of “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” offers proof positive that the Western is an American artistic invention as perfect as the sonnet. Twice semi-remade by Hawks in the years following because, having achieved perfection, what’s left but to improve on it?