El Dorado (1966)

Film: El Dorado (1966)

Stars: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Paul Fix, Arthur Hunnicutt, Michele Carey, Ed Asner

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're making a pretty big jump today in Wayne's career (particularly given we have two more Saturday's left this month) going from 1949 to 1966.  During that time frame, Wayne started to see a shift in his career.  The Duke had a work ethic that bordered on manic, and throughout the 1950's and early 1960's he worked constantly, and this resulted occasionally in bad decisions by Wayne, giving up several major westerns that we've covered for other actors this season of "Saturdays with the Stars" like The Gunfighter and Seven Men from Now.  But during this time, Wayne began to star in some of the best films of his career, movies that would define his persona.  These include The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and today's film, El Dorado.  We'll talk a little bit more about Wayne's reputation as an actor next week, but it has to be said that this is a really impressive run of movies, and it sometimes gets forgotten with Wayne (who made a lot of crap in his career during this time like The Conqueror) just how many classics he was able to get out.  Gene Autry & Roy Rogers were in dozens of westerns too...but they were never in movies this good, which is why Wayne is the actor synonymous with the western to modern audiences.

(Spoilers Ahead) El Dorado takes place in two acts, the first being between two renowned gunslingers, Sheriff JP Harrah (Mitchum) and his old buddy, gun-for-hire Cole Thornton (Wayne).  Thornton is working, he soon realizes, for the bad guys, a rich landowner named Bart Jason (Asner), who is trying to run the MacDonald family off of their land.  Thornton chooses to not work for Bart Jason, but during the confusion of which side he's on, one of the MacDonald sons, still pretty green about the way of gunfighting, shoots at Thornton, and Thornton mortally wounds him.  Another of the MacDonald's, their daughter Joey (Carey), shoots him, and lodges a bullet in his back, which causes him to have paralysis.  Months later, he still hasn't had this bullet removed, and we pick up the saga with us realizing that JP Harrah has become a drunk, a laughingstock who has let Jason's men run roughshod over El Dorado.  Thornton, along with his new sidekick Mississippi (Caan) have to not only fend off Bart's men once-and-for-all, they also have to find a way to sober up JP Harrah enough for him to gain back the respect of the town (and his own self-worth).

El Dorado is interesting for a variety of reasons.  At this point in Wayne's career, while he would never be "hip" he had found ways to upend the stereotypes of the western that he had established in Stagecoach by playing a hero-turned-villain in The Searchers and showing the pessimistic side of the western legend in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  El Dorado is not doing what these films do.  There is a moment in the middle where it feels like it might.  There's a heartbreaking scene where Mitchum realizes that not only is he a drunk, but he's also a laughingstock, a man who prided himself on a rough reputation has become no different than the men whom he used to laugh at at the saloon.  This could've been groundbreaking, but they largely brush it aside even if Mitchum's clearly willing to give it a go in terms of breaking stereotypes.

But El Dorado is instead one of the last classic westerns.  Mitchum & Wayne are in the mold they set in the 1940's, not the mold they would upend in the 1950's.  This isn't meant as an insult-I love the westerns of the 1940's, and El Dorado is extremely well-structured, well-lensed, and while Wayne isn't breaking new mold, Mitchum's giving a strong performance.  At the time it would've been easy to call it old-fashioned, but with the benefit of time, it plays less as out-of-date and more as a swan song for these two men.  Wayne would continue to act, and we'll get to the how's and why's of that in the next two weeks, but this was a good encapsulation of his career at this point-people didn't want anything new from the actor.  He was still a movie star in 1966, frequently a big one (this was a hit), but the brief bit of trailblazing he'd done in the late 1950's & early 1960's in the western was being done by younger, New Hollywood actors.