Wordfall, by Kaleem Omar

In my book – and it’s a pretty long book, I can tell you – director Howard Hawks’ 1959 movie Rio Bravo is the greatest Western ever made. I’ve seen The Magnificent Seven (another contender for the top spot) eleven times, but I’ve seen Rio Bravo fifty-seven times so far and could happily watch it another fifty-seven times. It’s that good. In fact, it comes as close to perfection as it is possible for a film to be.

I know the whole movie by heart – every line of dialogue, every scene, every camera angle. So whenever I watch it again, I know exactly what’s coming. Yet I still find myself marveling at the effects Hawks has been able to create. Each frame is like a painting, which one could freeze and study for hours for the way in which the lighting has been used to set the mood of the scene and the way in which the colours have been handled to create an atmosphere that makes the film a timeless masterpiece.

It is also a very clever film in terms of structure and character development. The icing on the cake is that it’s also a hugely entertaining film, disproving the conventional wisdom that a movie has to be a grim, monochromatic art film in which nothing happens in order for it to have any chance of being regarded as a classic by highbrow reviewers much given to churning out pretentious critiques of critical criticism. . .

The sets in Rio Bravo are built to 7/8th scale, so that the performers look larger than life – an effect enhanced by the fact that the Hollywood movie stars of the 1950s were the last of that breed of larger-than-life figures one only saw on the big screen, as opposed to today’s scruffily-dressed actors one tends to see spilling their guts about their personal problems on TV shows like Oprah or Larry King Live.

Rio Bravo’s story takes place in and around a small town in Texas and Hawks works hard to create his own universe. For the most part, the movie is filmed indoors, giving it a strong sense of isolationism. This technique, which is a Hawks trademark, forces the viewer to concentrate on characters and situations.

It is interesting that such a character-driven movie doesn’t utilise close-ups, which suggests that Hawks was primarily interested in showing how characters relate to their spaces.

The plot is relatively simple. The sheriff of a small town in southwest Texas must keep in custody a murderer who has gunned down an unarmed man in a saloon on a mere whim. The problem is that the US Marshall for the territory is a week away from taking the murderer off the sheriff’s hands. The murderer’s brother, a powerful rancher, is trying to help him escape. After a friend of the sheriff is killed by the rancher’s hired guns while trying to drum up support for the sheriff from amongst the town’s frightened residents, the sheriff and his deputies – a disgraced drunk and a cantankerous old cripple – must find a way to hold out against the rancher’s hard-case crew until the US Marshal arrives to take the prisoner away. In the meantime, matters are complicated by the presence in town of a young gunslinger – and a mysterious beauty who just came in on the last stage.

John Wayne, the big guy with the battered hat, plays the sheriff, John T. Chance. Dean Martin is the deputy, a ragged woman-wrecked castoff called Dude who used to be very good with a gun until he fell for a woman who was no good. When she left him for a gambler, he fell apart and took to bumming drinks from strangers in saloons who now refer to him derisively as “Borachon” – Spanish for drunk. The marvelous character actor Walter Brennan plays Stumpy, the old cripple who works as a jailer for the sheriff. Teenage pop idol Ricky Nelson plays Colorado Ryan, the baby-faced, guitar-strumming young gunfighter.

Ward Bond plays Pat Wheeler, the sheriff’s friend who is killed by the rancher’s hired guns. Claude Akins plays Joe Burdette, the rancher’s thuggish younger brother. John Russell is Nathan Burdette, the rich rancher determined to spring Joe from jail. Pedro Gonsalez plays Carlos Robante, a wisecracking but well-meaning little Mexican who is the owner of the town hotel. Estelita Rodriguez plays Consuela Robante, the hotel-owner’s wife. Carlos and Consuela are the only townspeople on the sheriff’s side. And then there is the drop-dead gorgeous Angie Dickinson. She plays Feathers – a tough-talking, poker-playing beauty with a mysterious past who arrives on the last stagecoach to make it into town before Nathan Burdette’s men bottle it up.

It was said that Angie Dickinson’s legs were insured for a million dollars (60 million in today’s money), and looking at her in films like Jessica and Rio Bravo, one could well believe it. Born in Kulm, North Dakota in 1931, Angie Dickinson was the daughter of Mr and Mrs I. H. Brown. Her father was the publisher of The Kulm Messenger. The family left North Dakota in 1942 when Angie was 11 years old, moving to Burbank, California. In December 1946, when she was a senior at Bellamarine Jefferson High School in Burbank, she won the sixth annual Bill of Rights Contest.

Being the daughter of a printer, Angie at first had visions of becoming a writer, but gave this up after winning her first beauty contest. After finishing college, she worked as a secretary in a Burbank airplane parts factory for three-and-a-half years. In 1953 she entered the local Miss America contest one day before the deadline and took second place. In August of the same year she was one of five winners in a beauty contest sponsored by NBC and appeared in several TV variety shows.

She got her first bit part in a Warner Brothers’ musical, Lucky Me, in 1954, and toiled in numerous low-budget genre films (including Sam Fuller’s 1957 China Gate), before snagging the femme lead in Rio Bravo, in which she managed to more than hold her own opposite screen legends Dean Martin and John Wayne – a tribute as much to her own talent as it was to director Howard Hawks’ ability to extract top-flight performances from his actors. Her success then spiraled until she became one of America’s top movie stars.

When Angie Dickinson’s Rio Bravo character Feathers – the poker-playing beauty with the mysterious past - arrives in town, the stage is set for the showdown between Nathan Burdette’s score of hired guns and the sheriff, John T. Chance, and his two deputies. Tension in the town slowly mounts, with everyone waiting to see when Nathan Burdette will make his move to get his brother out of jail. “Time” – as a character in the movie remarks – “is running out through bullet holes.”

Howard Hawks directed such classic films as The Dawn Patrol (1930), Scarface (1932); Bringing Up Baby (1938); Only Angels Have Wings (1939); His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell; Sergeant York (1941), starring Gary Cooper; Monkey Business (1952), the film which introduced Marilyn Monroe to the screen; Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), starring Monroe and Jane Russell; and Hatari (1962), starring John Wayne

Another classic he directed was the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in her film debut. One of the all-time great movie lines occurs in this film when the husky-voiced Bacall tells Bogart: “I’m in the room across the hall. If you want me, all you have to do is whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow!”

One of America’s greatest filmmakers, Howard Hawks, ironically, was little celebrated by his peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences during his career. He was a strong believer in good writing, and Rio Bravo is full of great lines – of the sort one seldom hears in today’s movies where screenplays full of bad language seem to have replaced good writing.

John T. Chance to a baddie: “You want that gun, pick it up. I wish you would.”

Chance to his deputy Dude, after Dude has taken a swing at him and then said he was sorry: “Sorry don’t get it done, Dude. That’s the second time you hit me. Don’t ever do it again.”

Pat Wheeler to his friend Chance: “If I ever saw a man holdin’ the bull by the tail, you’re it.”

Wheeler to Colorado Ryan, the young gunslinger who rides shotgun for Wheeler’s crew on a cattle drive, and whom Wheeler now wants to help the sheriff: “ I told him (Chance) you were the best,” to which Colorado says, “Well, I’ll tell you something I’m a lot better at, Mr Wheeler, and that’s minding my own business.”

Dude discussing Colorado’s gun-fighting abilities with Chance: “Is he as good as I used to be? Chance: “It’d be close. I’d hate to live on the difference.”

Feathers to Chance, when he begins to fall for her: “I thought you were never going to say it.” Chance: “Say what?” Feathers: “That you love me.” Chance: “I didn’t say I love you. I said I’d arrest you.” Feathers: “It means the same thing, you know that.”

Feathers takes a room at Robante’s hotel. Her room is across the corridor from Chance’s room. One night, Feathers offers to stand guard with a shotgun outside Chance’s room so that he can catch up on some much needed sleep. Chance nearly has an apoplectic fit and turns down the offer, ordering Feathers to her own room. She then suggests that he sleep in her room, so that the baddies won’t know where he is. Chance rejects that suggestion too. Feathers to Chance: “In case you change your mind, I left my door open. Get a good night’s sleep.” Chance: “You’re not helping any.”

Feathers takes to calling John T. Chance “John T.” “T for trouble,” she says, in her husky voice, giving him a look that would melt even the stoniest heart at twenty paces. That’s when the rough-tough Chance finds himself succumbing to Feathers’ charms. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t, as anybody who saw Angie Dickinson in a movie in her hey day would agree.

Rio Bravo is a sprawling pressure cooker of a movie. The late John Wayne, aka the Duke, was a paradox, and no film better demonstrates why than Rio Bravo. His slow-talking and finely-judged performance parallels the pacing and tenor of the film, reminding one of what Paula Cole said about him in her 1996 hit song “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”

Duke Wayne played the most leading parts (142) of any Hollywood actor ever. Voted the 5th greatest movie star of all time by Entertainment weekly and the 4th greatest by Premiere Magazine, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1974.

Just on his sheer popularity and his prominent political activism, the Republican Party in 1968 asked Wayne to run for President of the United States, even though he had no previous political experience. He turned them down because he did not believe that America would take a movie star running for president seriously.

That, of course, was 12 years before one-time Hollywood ‘B’ movie actor Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 as the Republican Party nominee against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter – and won.

Just before his first TV debate with Carter during the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan was asked in an interview whether he felt nervous about debating policy wonk Carter, a president known for doing his homework and having all the facts about every campaign issue on his fingertips. “Not at all,” drawled the amiable fuddy-duddy Reagan. “Don’t forget I’ve been on the same stage with John Wayne.” Implied in that remark was the question: After John Wayne, who’s Carter?

John Wayne died in 1979, after a long battle with cancer. “I’m going to lick the Big C,” he once remarked, but it was not to be. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President Jimmy Carter. In a 2001 Gallup Poll, Americans selected Wayne as their favourite movie star of all time. In November 2003 he once again commanded a top-ten spot in the annual Harris Poll asking Americans to name their favourite movie star. No other deceased star has ever achieved such a high ranking since Harris began asking the question in 1993.

Wayne, who began appearing in movie in the 1920s and had turned in some highly memorable performances over the years, eventually won the Best Actor Oscar at the 42nd Annual Academy Awards in 1970 for his portrayal of the aging, one-eyed gunfighter Rooster Cogburn in the movie version of Charles Portis’ best selling novel True Grit about the last days of the Old West. Wayne wore an eye-patch in the movie. Accepting his award, he remarked, “If I’d known that was what it was going to take, I’d have put on an eye-patch 40 years ago!”

Wayne publicly criticised director Sam Peckinpah for his gory Western film The Wild Bunch (1969), which the Duke claimed had “destroyed the myth of the Old West.”

That was not something anybody could accuse director Howard Hawks of. He was one of the Hollywood directors who helped create that myth, and Rio Bravo is an outstanding example of it. For many moviegoers (and I include myself in that number), Rio Bravo is the perfect Western.

It is the antithesis of director Fred Zinneman’s Oscar-winning High Noon, the 1953 Western starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly (who plays Cooper’s bride, in her screen debut). Cooper plays a town sheriff who struggles desperately to round up a posse that might help him deal with four baddies arriving on a noon train to kill him. In Hawks’ Rio Bravo, John Wayne is faced with a similar situation but takes on the forces of evil (Nathan Burdette and his hired guns) without ever losing his cool.

Hawks’ tough lawman solves his own problems without going out looking for help. But he welcomes volunteers (Stumpy, the semi-crippled veteran, and Dude, the hopeless drunk with a past ‘fast’ reputation), and in fact depends on them. What is more, he wins by displaying superior skills and quicker wits. The survivors in Hawks’ philosophy are the ones who conduct themselves with the greatest degree of coolness and discipline. Wayne, the ideal choice for the part, always makes us feel that somehow he’ll cope. And cope, of course, he does. He wouldn’t have been the Duke if he hadn’t

The whole point about this cleverly conceived and beautifully controlled film is that this unlikely trio does, in fact, have something to offer when the cards are dealt. Like the sheriff, Stumpy and Dude are professional people, and what Hawks seems to be saying is that whatever the odds, they will always have the courage to face the situation.

This is demonstrated in one inspired sequence which has become a classic. Dude drying out and eager to win back his self-respect, tells Chance, whom he secretly idiolises, that he wants to be the one to chase the wounded killer of Chance’s friend Wheeler into a saloon. Dude says Chance should assume the less dangerous role of backing him up from the back door. When Chance asks Dude whether he thinks he is good enough to go in through the front door (and face down all of Burdette’s hired guns that hanging out in the saloon), Dude says, “We’ll soon find out.”

The wounded killer is hiding in the loft. But Dude notices that a few drops of blood from the killer’s leg-wound are slowly dripping into a glass of whiskey on the bar. In a brilliant bit of gunplay, Dude draws his pistol with lightning speed and shoots the killer dead. As the killer’s body tumbles out of the loft and crashes to the floor, Chance – who has come into the room through the back door and is standing there with his cocked rifle in hand – turns to Dude and drawls, “I guess they’ll let you in through the front door from now!”

John Wayne, who heightened and re-created the mythology of the West, is at his best in Rio Bravo. He perfectly illustrates Howard Hawks’ philosophy of never having his male characters back down from a fight, no matter what the odds.

But there is also tenderness and humour in Rio Bravo. In Hawk’s film, a man is defined by how well he relates to women, how well he handles pressure and how he reacts to danger. Angie Dickinson, who provides the love interest element in the movie, enriches the mixture, with a finely judged performance as the gambling gal Feathers. The veteran character actor Walter Brennan is brilliant as the cantankerous but good-hearted semi-cripple Stumpy, and even the teen pop idol Ricky Nelson (who was only 20 at the time and not exactly known for his acting ability) turns in an excellent performance as the young gunslinger Colorado Ryan, who, when his boss Pat Wheeler is killed, decides to side with the sheriff and his deputies.

Dean Martin is outstanding as Dude, bringing to the role just the right mix of bathos as a former drunk struggling to reform himself and gun-slick toughness as the sheriff’s deputy who – when the chips are down - rediscovers his abilities as a fast gun. “Look,” he says to Chance in one memorable scene, “my hands aren’t shaking anymore. I managed to fill the glass without spilling a single drop.”

Dean Martin was born in Steubenville, Ohio on June 7. 1917 and died of lung cancer in Beverly Hills, California in December1995. Though best known for the 51 films he made, Martin was a prizefighter, steel mill labourer, petrol pump attendant and card shark before the first glimmer of fame. It came when he teamed up with comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946. Films such as At War with the Army (1950) sent the team toward superstardom.

After teaming up with Lewis, Martin – born Dino Paul Crocetti – became a dramatic actor and the star of a long-running television variety show. The duo were to become one of Hollywood’s truly great teams. They lasted 11 years together and starred in 16 movies. They were unstoppable, but personality conflicts broke up the team in 1957. Ironically, their last film together was called Hollywood or Bust.

Few thought that Martin would go on to achieve solo success, but he did, winning critical acclaim for his role in The Young Lions (1958) with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. A succession of films followed for the singer-actor, including the movie version of James Jones’ novel Some Came Running (1958) with Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra.

All would later become members of the legendary “Rat Pack” – a group that included Rat Pack-founder and Hollywood screen legend Humphrey Bogart, his wife Lauren Bacall, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford (John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law), and comedian Joey Bishop. Members of the Rat Pack made several films together, including Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) and Ocean’s Eleven (1960) – one of Martin’s best remembered films in which he played Sam Harmon alongside Rat Pack members Sinatra, Davis, Bishop and Lawford.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, Martin’s movie persona of a boozing playboy prompted a series of films as secret agent Matt Helm and his own television variety show. In 1965 Martin began hosting the highly popular TV series The Dean Martin Show, which lasted until 1973. In 1965 it won a Golden Globe Award. In 1973 he renamed it The Dean Martin Comedy Hour, and from 1974 to 1984 it was renamed again, this time The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts! It became one of the most successful TV series in history, skewering such greats as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame), James Stewart, comedians George Burns and Milton Berle, and American football legend-turned-showbiz personality “Broadway” Joe Namath.

After the 1980s, Martin took it easy – that is, until his son, Dean Paul Martin, died in a plane crash in 1987. Devastated by the loss, from which he never recovered, he walked out on a reunion tour with Sinatra and Davis. The trio had entertained Las Vegas audiences for years in the 1970s and ‘80s, but now it was over. Dean Martin spent his final years in solitude. He died on Christmas Day 1995 – a year after the death of his great pal Frank Sinatra.

Dean Martin is one of the few stars that have received not just one but two stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame: one for Motion Pictures at 6519 Hollywood Boulevard, and one for Television at 6651 Hollywood Boulevard. He has a street named after him in San Antonio, Texas.

As a singer with a honey-smooth crooner’s voice, Dean Martin had 40 hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1951 and 1968. Three went to number one: “That’s Amore” (Capitol Records, 1953), “Memories Are Made of This” (Capitol, 1956), and his signature theme song “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime” (Reprise Records, 1964) – the words written on his tombstone.

His career as a boxer was summed up by Martin as follows: “I won all but 11 of 12 fights.” He fought under the name of Kid Crochet. Much of the “booze” that he drank on stage during his famous Rat Pack performances was really apple juice. His son spilled this secret, after the variety show ended production, stating that his father couldn’t have performed if he’d really drunk that much liquor.

Dude, the character Martin played in Rio Bravo, couldn’t have performed either, nor helped Duke Wayne defeat the baddies if he’d remained on the booze. All the members of the film’s cast are dead now, with the exception of Angie Dickinson. Director Howard Hawks, too, is dead. It would be a foolhardy director, indeed, who were to try to emulate him by making a sequel to Rio Bravo. One shudders at the very idea.