\u201cRio Bravo\u201d is supposed to have been made in reaction to the movie \u201cHigh Noon.\u201d\u00a0 In that movie Gary Cooper is a sheriff who can\u2019t find any townsmen to help him stand against an outlaw gang gunning for him.\u00a0 Howard Hawks and John Wayne were so affronted by what they saw as the whiny, \u201cwoe is me\u201d feel of that movie they decided to make Rio Bravo as an alternative.\u00a0 Wayne would play the sheriff but with no angst.\u00a0 Basically, he refuses to deputize a large number of civilians to stand down a gang of outlaws who threaten to kill the sheriff if he doesn\u2019t release the gang leader\u2019s brother.<\/p>\n
Wayne is Sheriff John T. Chance.\u00a0 His sometimes deputy but mostly just alcoholic friend is Dude, played by Dean Martin.\u00a0 They\u2019re joined in their desperate but light hearted stand by Stumpy, a gimpy and hot-tempered old man played by Walter Brennan and Colorado, a resourceful young cowboy with a fast gun hand and a guitar played by Ricky Nelson.\u00a0 And finally, Angie Dickinson is a professional gambler who will be the love interest for Chance.\u00a0 For whatever reason the only name we\u2019re given for her is Feathers.<\/p>\n
The setup is as follows.\u00a0 While involved in an altercation with Dude in the saloon Joe Burdette (played by Claude Akins) kills a man.\u00a0 Chase arrests Joe and has Stumpy keep guard over him basically for the duration of the movie.\u00a0 Meanwhile an old friend of Chance\u2019s, Pat Wheeler (played by Ward Bond) arrives in town with his crew and supplies.\u00a0 When he hears what is going on with Chance, he offers his associate Colorado as a deputy to help Chance hold off the Burdette gang that numbers in the dozens.\u00a0 Chance declines because he doesn\u2019t want to involve Wheeler in the trouble.\u00a0 But Wheeler is murdered that night.\u00a0 After some back and forth in which members of the gang take Chance and Dude hostage more than once, Colorado comes aboard as a deputy.<\/p>\n
As a side story Feathers arrives in town to play poker in the saloon but when a wanted poster shows up that seems to implicate her as a card cheat Chance tells her to leave town.\u00a0 But Colorado defends her saying that another player in the game was cheating.\u00a0 After catching the cheater with several aces up his sleeve, Feathers tells her side of the story.\u00a0 The poster was about her and her late husband.\u00a0 He had gotten into a crooked card game and paid for his crime with his life.\u00a0 For the rest of the movie whenever Chance and Feathers are together, they maintain an odd and annoying sort of awkward bickering cum flirting.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the climax of the movie arrives when Dude is taken hostage by Burdette\u2019s gang and they demand a swap of Joe for Dude.\u00a0 The transfer involves the two men crossing a clearing in opposite directions.\u00a0 Joe is walking away from the barn where Chance, Colorado and Stumpy are holed up and Dude is walking away from the commercial building where the whole Burdette gang is arrayed.\u00a0 But when they reach each other in the middle Dude tackles Joe and forces him into some cover that is somehow much closer to Chance\u2019s building than Burdette\u2019s.\u00a0 After subduing Joe, Chance and his deputies begin a lively gun battle with Burdette\u2019s gang.\u00a0 Eventually Chance\u2019s side gets ahold of some dynamite and he does some fancy shooting to set off the explosives as Stumpy hurls it across the clearing toward the Burdette building.\u00a0 And finally Stumpy ties several sticks together and the final explosion takes most of the building down and the surviving gang members stumble out of the wreckage and surrender.<\/p>\n
All that remains is for Chance and Feathers to complete their awkward courtship and declare their weird and annoying love.<\/p>\n
So, this is a strange movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s part western, part buddy movie and I guess a love story.\u00a0 Mixed into this is the fact that Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson are allowed to sing a few songs.\u00a0 I know I haven\u2019t made it sound like a conventional western but the main story around the Burdettes is done extremely well, especially the action scenes.\u00a0 Wayne, Martin, Brennan and Nelson make for a very interesting team.\u00a0 I have seen this movie many times and still consistently enjoy this part of the plot.\u00a0 Now as for the \u201clove story\u201d I don\u2019t know what to say.\u00a0 It\u2019s just so out of place and unconvincing that I can\u2019t even dislike it.\u00a0 It\u2019s just this bizarro incursion into an otherwise normal movie.\u00a0 All I can do is hope that sometime in the future, technology will allow it to be excised from the movie.<\/p>\n
I can highly recommend this to fans of westerns and John Wayne.\u00a0 Even the songs were very much in the tradition of the Roy Rogers, singing cowboy style.\u00a0 A good western.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cRio Bravo\u201d is supposed to have been made in reaction to the movie \u201cHigh Noon.\u201d\u00a0 In that movie Gary Cooper is a sheriff who can\u2019t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[3437,3435,1570,3218,43,38,1355,3436,3434,97],"class_list":["post-16862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-angie-dickinson","tag-dean-martin","tag-howard-hawkes","tag-john-wayne","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-ricky-nelson","tag-walter-brennan","tag-westerns"],"yoast_head":"\n