#105: Rio Bravo
Part of the Top 150 Films series
“Three great scenes, no bad ones.” So said Howard Hawks about what constitutes a good movie, and he definitely followed his own advice with Rio Bravo. The plot sounds like any other Western of the period: a sheriff arrests the brother of a powerful local rancher; with the help of a cripple, a drunk and a young gunfighter, they hold off the rancher’s gang. And yet it sings in a way that no other traditional Western of its time did. Everything comes together in a blend of Hawksian magic: the performances (all excellent, but especially Dean Martin), the vivacious script, the snappy editing (it flies by at 141 minutes), even the costumes transcend genre trappings to reveal hidden character depths and take on stories of their own. Orson Welles remarked that a Hawks film was ‘great prose’, but there is real poetry to be found in Rio Bravo.
