El Dorado

Director: Howard Hawks

1967 / 126min / DCP

Seven years after Rio Bravo, Hawks re-teamed with that film’s lumbering star (John Wayne) and co-screenwriter (Leigh Brackett) for another oater concerning a gunslinger teaming up with a booze-pickled sidekick (Robert Mitchum, in what was previously Dean Martin’s role) and a young hothead (James Caan, replacing Ricky Nelson) to take up arms against a sea of enemies. A “hysterical, modernist refraction” [The New Yorker] of its more subdued classicist predecessor giving Caan—previously seen in Hawks’s 1965 Red Line 7000—one of his earliest substantive roles as a saddle tramp with the fastest throwing knife in the west.