Rio Bravo (1959)

Film: Rio Bravo (1959)

Stars: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Ward Bond, as we talked about throughout this month, never really became a leading man on the big screen despite being in classic movies as diverse as It's a Wonderful Life and Gone with the Wind.  He did, however, get a chance to play the leading man on television, starting in 1957 with NBC's Wagon Train.  The show, which had Bond playing wagon master, was inspired by two previous movies, The Big Trail (1930) which is famous for launching the career of John Wayne and Wagon Master (1950), which featured longtime western star Ben Johnson.  Both films also featured Ward Bond, though in supporting parts.  In this series, Bond played Major Seth Adams, who on the trail would meet loads of different famous guest stars from Bond's film days like John Carradine, Ernest Borgnine, Linda Darnell, & Rhonda Fleming.  During this time, though, Bond didn't stop making movies, and he appeared in one major classic during this era, his final film with John Wayne, this time directed by Howard Hawks instead of John Ford: Rio Bravo.

(Spoilers Ahead) Rio Bravo is about Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), who has recently imprisoned the brother of a notorious land baron for murder after getting into a fight with Dude (Martin), a town drunk.  We learn soon after that Dude is a former deputy of Chance's who has fallen on hard times since he took to the bottle, and along with the aging Stumpy (Brennan), is pretty much the entire town's law enforcement.  This becomes a problem when it's clear that the land baron is coming to get his brother out of jail, and so Chance, after initially refusing the help of his old friend Pat Wheeler (Bond), who dies soon after Chance refuses him, starts to take on more help, including Wheeler's apprentice Colorado (Nelson) and a beautiful woman who has just come to town named Feathers (Dickinson).  Together, they overcome the odds to beat the land baron, and in the process Dude gets a second lease on life, and Chances & Feathers become romantically involved.

Rio Bravo was seen in many ways as a rebuttal to the 1952 classic High Noon, which featured Gary Cooper trying to find someone to help him in a town that doesn't want to get involved.  High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, who was eventually blacklisted, and many view it as a metaphor for the blacklisting that happened in Hollywood during this time frame.  John Wayne, of course, was one of the main instigators during the HUAC investigations, and likely didn't take too kindly to his beloved western being used as political metaphor (even though, the further he went in his career, Wayne's finest films generally did slip into liberal metaphor in pictures like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  As a result, Rio Bravo is a movie about unlikely allies coming together for a common cause (the irony of our modern political movement being that both High Noon AND Rio Bravo would be considered to have a "woke" message by today's standards).

The thing both movies have in common is they're both excellent.  Rio Bravo is filled with strong performances.  John Wayne, three years after The Searchers (by pretty much every measure, the pinnacle of his career as an actor), had largely eschewed westerns, but this was his way of acknowledging (after a string of flops) that he would never escape the Wayne persona, and so he'd find new ways to say something about it (Liberty Valance, True Grit, and The Shootist would all fall under this umbrella).  Here we see him having the last major film romance of his career, and honestly it kind of works despite his age difference with Dickinson.  Wayne was a byproduct of the studio system, perhaps one of its best myths, while Dickinson was a quintessentially modern woman for the 1960's...that shoe leather & mini skirt combination works really well in an oil-and-water sort of way, and I liked it.  Throw in a great film score (seriously-some of Dean Martin's most romantic onscreen singing with songs like "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me") and beautiful western cinematography, and you have a true classic.

Bond has only a small part.  True-to-form, Bond's billing is a bit higher than what he was able to achieve, and once again he's just doing his character actor duty.  Bond's time in the sun on Wagon Train was very bright (it was at one point the highest-rated show on television), but brief.  In 1960, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 57; John Wayne, his costar of 22 films, gave the eulogy at his funeral.  Next month, we're going to talk about a contemporary of Bond's, another character actor who made his mark in westerns (including some with Bond himself) but who unlike Bond, would receive critical accolades that would make him far more of a household name before he found his way onto America's TV screens.