By Eric M. Blake. @HardBoiledFilms
“Señor Chance, this is my hotel. And you are a guest under my roof. And I will not be told what I shall do, and what I shall not do, señor.”
WHY IT’S A CONSERVATIVE FILM:
Where to begin?
This is the first in a series of articles on conservative films, and if I had structured these articles as a “Countdown,” Rio Bravo would have been a serious contender for #1. This film is one of the great success stories of conservative cinema—if for no other reason than this: it is the definitive example of an intentionally conservative film, made specifically by conservatives, with a conscious conservative agenda that became a masterpiece. If anyone ever doubted that conservatives can make and have made great art—and great films in particular—Rio Bravo proves them wrong.
With that in mind, it’s important to look at why this movie was made, arguably even more so than analyzing it “as a film unto itself.” To do so, we first have to look at another Western classic, High Noon (which requires me to offer a sincere apology to the great Bill Whittle, who has long championed High Noon as one of his all-time favorite movies. I can only say that I’ve enjoyed some leftist films myself).
You See…
John Wayne had originally been offered the role of Marshal Will Kane (which then went to Gary Cooper) in High Noon. The Duke read the script—written, incidentally, by the Leftist Carl Foreman (more on him later)—and promptly turned it down. Now, much as I would have loved to see the rough, quintessentially macho, bigger-than-life John Wayne paired up with the sweet, refined, and elegantly feminine Grace Kelly, the truth is, I understand why he walked away.
For you see, amid the classic “man alone” story most people focus on, High Noon is, in truth, a militantly Left-wing attack on small-town America, which smears the average American en masse as a hypocritical coward who, for a variety of reasons, would prefer to turn his back on a hero who needs him, rather than help out.
More than that, like so many Leftist smears, it just doesn’t make any sense. Yes, we can point to the Kitty Genovese murder (which brought about the theory of the bystander effect) as well as more contemporary incidents in which people “just didn’t want to get involved.” But those are all modern examples from a culture that has already been deeply corrupted by the Left, a culture that despises the idea of classical masculinity and rejects private-citizen heroism as something to avoid. This is the crux of the whole gun control argument—“Run and hide, and let the cops take care of it all while people die as we wait for them.”
But the America of John Wayne’s time didn’t deserve such a smear—let alone the America of the Old West. As Wayne himself later put it, in explaining just why he’d hated High Noon so much:
“A whole city of people that have come across the plains, and suffered all kinds of hardships, are suddenly afraid to help out a sheriff, because three men are coming into town that are tough?…Then, at the end of the picture, [Will Kane] took the United States marshal badge, threw it down, stepped on it, and walked off! I think those things are just a little bit un-American…Do they strike you as being a true picture of the pioneer West? Or a picture of what Carl Foreman or somebody would like to give our children the impression?”
As Price’s Conservative Guide To Films notes, Marshal Kane “also was meant to be seen as risking his life pointlessly because the townspeople, who represent average Americans, are shown to be cynical, hypocritical, and cowardly. They are not worth defending, nor do they want his help…The message Foreman hoped to impart from this was that there is no place for heroism in Cold-War America and that the American public was not worth defending.”
So What About Carl Foreman?
Well, he wasn’t one of the Hollywood Ten—you know, the original targets of the Blacklist, the Far Lefties who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. But, of course, he was on their side.
It’s worth noting that one of the Ten, Dalton Trumbo, had initially charmed the Committee enough to be let off the hook. But that, of course, didn’t last. The pressure was on, and even the Ten could see the winds changing.
And so could their allies.
That is why Foreman wrote the screenplay to High Noon the way he did. In his mind, he—and the other soon-to-be blacklistees—were the lone heroes, forced to “stand-alone” because everyone around them “abandoned” them to suffer the “evil” of having to work under assumed names. (Meanwhile, as John Wayne was sure to note when these far-Lefties were large and in charge before the Blacklist, they had notoriously engaged in blacklists of their own. And their victims didn’t have the option of cover names).
And so, as his big “F You, America” before going underground, Foreman wrote what basically amounted to a revenge piece, where small-town Americans are weak and cowardly, and the ideals of the West—and the nation—are deconstructed and shown as hollow and false. And for the most part, he got away with it—increasingly so as the years go by, with many a Conservative today singing the praises of the film as a monumental testament to individuality and standing alone, regardless of the context.
Well, John Wayne hated it. And so did a certain director.
An Underrated Legend:
Howard Hawks is sometimes called “the greatest filmmaker you’ve never heard of.” I’d imagine precious few folks today would even know his name if it weren’t for his two biggest living fans—filmmaking legends John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino. At any rate, he directed the original Scarface (yes, the Al Pacino version is actually a remake!), Sgt. York, the Humphrey Bogart classics To Have And Have Not (which introduced Bogie to his soon-to-be wife, Lauren Bacall) and The Big Sleep, and, most importantly to the current subject, Red River.
That Western was Hawks’s first in the genre—and his first project with John Wayne. Famously, The Duke’s performance in that film (the closest he ever came to playing the villain, by the way) caused none other than John Ford—the guy who’d made Wayne a star—to remark, “I didn’t know the big S.O.B. could act!”
And, incidentally, Howard Hawks, like John Wayne, was a conservative. It turned out he even hated High Noon, too, albeit for a somewhat different reason. As we’ve seen, Wayne disliked High Noon because of how average Americans were portrayed in the film. Hawks’s problem, on the other hand, was just how unprofessional Marshal Kane was—going around “like a chicken,” begging rank amateurs to help him do his job. (As Hawks put it, about the only redeeming quality of the movie was Dimitri Tiomkin’s beautiful score—including that immortal, tear-jerking theme, “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling”).
Wayne and Hawks’s solution was something Conservatives today ought to take note of. We often complain about how Hollywood ruins a potentially great film by shoving in garbage so as to promote their agenda.
In fact, for every film ruined by a Leftist, every conservative can tell you how he would have done it differently. But Hawks and Wayne actually did it. And the result was Rio Bravo—the conservative alternative to High Noon.
The Conservative Alternative:
In Rio Bravo, the threat isn’t just three or four guys—it’s a whole force of bad guys, hitmen hired by a corrupt rancher, Nathan Burdett, who’s angry because his brother Joe was just put in jail for murder. The town is held under siege by the hitmen, and this time, the townspeople want to help Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) any way they can—as indicated by Carlos, the Hispanic hotel owner who makes up for his shortness with spirit (see the opening quote), and his spicy wife Consuela. (That’s right: To anyone claiming that Conservatives are racist and anti-Hispanic, Hawks counted a Latino couple among the heroes in this film. These are presumably Mexican folks who willingly assimilated into American society, succeeding as business owners, running their own hotel, and counting the sheriff as a close friend.)
Arms merchant Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) also wants to help and goes around rallying people to support the sheriff–even offering help from his own crew. Until that is, Chance pulls the plug on Wheeler’s efforts, explaining:
“Look, anybody that sides in with me right now’s liable to find themselves up to their ears in trouble…Suppose I got ’em, what’d I have? Some well-meaning amateurs—most of them worried about their wives and kids. Burdett has 30 or 40 men, all professionals. Only thing they’re worried about is: earning their pay. No, Pat. All I’d be doing is giving ’em more targets to shoot at. Lot of people would get hurt. Joe Burdett isn’t worth it. He isn’t worth one of those who’d get killed.”
(By the way, as Wheeler notes, Chance’s power team consists of “a game-legged old man, and a drunk.” In High Noon, guess who does offer to help Marshal Kane—only to be turned down?)
Where Men Are Men:
More material for conservatives to love is how Rio Bravo approaches issues of men…and women. Hawks’s favorite subject matter seems to have been “men’s fellowship”: oftentimes, we see the male heroes in his films come in groups—groups of individuals who come together “as men”—devoted to their work and to their own integrity. They build each other up when down and call each other out when need be. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do”—and to Hawks, that often means forming a power team of men, guiding each other without providing crutches. Each has his own strengths, and each has his own weaknesses. They’re all people, and they’re all men, real men. It’s “male bonding” in the best sense of the word.
Now, as for the ladies…
The Hawksian Woman:
Whoever thinks conservatism and women’s empowerment are somehow at odds should take a good look at the character type called the Hawksian Woman. As I sometimes noted to classmates while pursuing my Film Studies Master’s, Howard Hawks was feminist before feminism was “cool”. And like so many conservative feminists, he was later accused of misogyny. But I digress.
It’s been a running gag in recent years how badly so many filmmakers botch up the notion of a “strong female character.” In fact, it gets pretty comical. Filmmakers keep falling into one of two traps: either they fill their screenplays with dialogue about how smart/capable a heroine is, only to never show it, or else they create invincible, invulnerable “super-chicks” who can somehow beat the crap out of giant tough guys despite being model-thin, or be the only intelligent person in a room full of dumb guys (who somehow got the title of “scientists” or whatever).
It’s a sad pattern but a predictable one from lefties who refuse to accept some obvious truths about human nature. Men and women are different, and there is value to be found in those differences, in what we shouldn’t be afraid to call “masculinity” and “femininity.” “Femininity” and “strength” are not mutually exclusive because “femininity” is not a construct of the “patriarchy” boogeyman meant to “keep women down.” Just the opposite. As a rule, it’s the pseudo-feminists with chips on their shoulders who are the biggest weaklings of all.
The truth is, third-wave feminism has done more to keep women down than anything else in society today—and until Hollywood realizes that, we’ll continue to see failure after failure regarding “strong female characters.”
Thus, we must look to Howard Hawks, conservative, for the quintessential archetype of a true “strong female character.” And frankly, no one should be surprised: Because a conservative knows to proclaim “vive la différence,” he or she can explore that difference, and the benefits thereof, without any sense of irony or guilt.
The Hawksian woman is rather sexy, to be sure—as played by iconic Hollywood sirens ranging from Katherine Hepburn to Barbara Stanwyck to Lauren Bacall to even Marilyn Monroe—but she truly is intelligent, too, and psychologically so. She can and often does go toe-to-toe with the main hero, keeping up with him in a verbal joust that’s clearly a game played partly for the fun of it. As a rule, by the way, she wins–without making him look like a fool or a weakling. The Hawksian Woman holds her own—she’s confident, and she’s cool.
She’s also quite classy—classically feminine, caring about her beauty and how she wears her dresses and jewelry without acting prissy or spoiled in any way. You’re as likely to see her leaning against a bar as sitting up straight at a card table. She’s comfortable and secure in her beauty and charm, and she lets the hero know it with a mischievous glint in her eye. The go-to pose for the Hawksian woman involves hands on her hips as she slyly lets him know: “I’m hard to get. You have to ask me.”
The Hawksian Woman is, truly, the hero’s equal while at the same time being different. Their strengths and vulnerabilities are different, and that’s what makes them perfect for each other. She’s not “one of the guys”. She is, however, one of the team, and she brings her own skills as a woman to help save the day in her own way.
Such is Feathers, the professional gambler played magnificently by Angie Dickenson in Rio Bravo, one of her first onscreen roles. She doesn’t take part in the gunfights (at least not directly). But she’s there when Sheriff Chance needs her most, giving him the emotional support he’d never realized he needed until now. And she even goes on to give him pointers and call him out on his stubbornness when need be.
For Bonus Points:
The typical trope of the sheriff/marshal banning guns in the town is thankfully done away with in this film. Early on, Sheriff Chance makes it a point to allow The Colorado Kid to keep his guns when the latter makes clear his willingness to comply with the law. No gun control here! The implication is Wayne and Hawks got that it’d just be counter-productive, even in the Old West.
As Ben Shapiro put it, “You can’t beat westerns for conservatism.”
Unless it’s High Noon, of course.
WHY IT’S A GREAT FILM:
Phew, thought I’d never get here, did you? In my defense, this film just oozes conservatism, and intentionally so. But with all that out of the way…
Quentin Tarantino has called Rio Bravo one of the great “hangout” movies. That’s because the biggest element of Rio Bravo’s charm is in the characters. The storyline is very basic: the town’s under siege by bad guys who are waiting for the heroes to try something and vice versa. In the meantime, said heroes relieve the tension on their end through their interactions with one another. The plot is almost incidental—sometimes a plot turn happens, upping the stakes, as if just to remind us the film is going somewhere. But that’s just icing on the cake.
The real flavor is in “hanging out” with Sheriff Chance, The Dude (Dean Martin—yes, that Dean-o), The Colorado Kid (Ricky Nelson—the singer, essentially the Justin Timberlake of his day), Stumpy (Walter “Old Codger Voice” Brennan), Carlos & Consuela, and Feathers. They all have their complexities, wants, and needs, and many of them even have character arcs. Chance has to learn to open up and accept help when it’s offered to him. Dude’s a recovering alcoholic and has to regain his confidence in himself. Colorado enters as a bit of an “it ain’t my business” libertarian and has to learn there are times to stick one’s neck out and intervene. And Feathers has a past she’s trying hard to live down.
Rio Bravo’s appeal, politics or no, comes from “hanging out” with these characters, all so well-crafted that they could almost be our friends. And when we get to that magical moment, where the guys have all come together at last as a power team, well, the moment of fellowship is a joy to behold:
Redemption pulling yourself out of despair to win the day, and individuals, men, and women coming together to triumph over evil. Can’t get any better than that.
By the way, a trivia note: Listen carefully to the mariachi rendition of “Deguello,” featured as a major plot point. Fans of the Clint Eastwood Dollars Trilogy should find it eerily familiar. That’s because, when Sergio Leone first brought on Ennio Morricone to score A Fistful Of Dollars, he told him to listen to Dimitri Tiomkin’s Rio Bravo score for inspiration.
One more thing, just to be clear: the “hangout” element to this film means it’s in no real hurry to move along—it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes. As such, if taut, lean, “thrilling” films are more your cup of tea, and you don’t care for slow-paced “meditative” stuff, this might not be for you. But Hawks and Wayne made sure to account for that by half-remaking the film in 1966 as El Dorado. While the basic themes of Rio Bravo are still present, El Dorado is much more plot-heavy, based as it is on a novel (The Stars In Their Courses, if you’re interested). It’s faster-paced, the comedy is “bigger,” and there are two girls in this one. Also, see James Caan in his younger, pre-Godfather days, Robert Mitchum as John Wayne’s equal (though he himself gets drunk, like Dean-o), and Ed Asner as the bad guy. Oh, and the theme song is pretty awesome, too—I bet you can’t avoid singing along with the chorus by the song’s end.
What’s Not On This List:
High Noon (1952)—for the reasons listed above. I should add, though, that I’m very aware that the historical context of the film is long past and, in the absence of such, High Noon has enjoyed a new image as a monument to the heroic individual who will stand firm against evil, even when no one else will. Alas, context or no, High Noon still undercuts this theme by 1) making clear that the town isn’t worth it and 2) having Marshal Kane throw his badge away and leave in the end.
In other words, what was the point? Why did he stay and fight? If he’s “standing up for what he believes in,” well, what does he believe in? Was Kane just trying to prove something to himself—even if it meant driving his wife away (with no anticipation that she’d change her mind at the last second)? As Price notes, “[Gary] Cooper is the great hero brought low by marriage. He has become cowardly, timid, and conflicted. He only fights because he is too afraid to run away. The message of Cooper’s marshal is that there is no place anymore for individual heroism.”
Again, my apologies to Bill Whittle. But there are other cinematic monuments to individuality and the lone hero—which don’t undercut that heroism.
Buy Rio Bravo here. And stay cultured, my friends.
Any recommendations for films to make the series? Read the rules here, and let us know!