John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [102]
Rio Bravo gave Wayne his best role since The Searchers, playing John T. Chance, the sheriff of border town Rio Bravo who arrests Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) for murder. Joe’s older brother Nathan (John Russell), the most powerful rancher on the border, has his men surround the town to prevent Chance from taking Joe to the U.S.
marshal and to stop any help getting in. Chance shuns help and has to rely on his new drunken deputy, Dude (Dean Martin); a crippled old deputy, Stumpy (Walter Brennan); and a young gunfighter, Colorado (singer Ricky Nelson). Trapped in Rio Bravo is stagecoach passenger Feathers (Angie Dickinson), who becomes Chance’s romantic interest. A final showdown is inevitable.
Hawks said, “I made Rio Bravo because I didn’t like High Noon.
Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good Western. I said that a good marshal would turn around and say to someone, ‘How good are you? Are you good enough to take the best man they’ve got?’ And the fellow would say, ‘No,’ so the marshal would say, ‘Then I’ll just have to take care of you.’ And that scene was in Rio Bravo. It was the exact opposite of High Noon.”
Wayne, who had also disliked High Noon and wanted Rio Bravo to tell the same kind of story “the American way,” was Hawks’s first and only choice for the role of Chance.
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“I just don’t see how you can make a good Western without Wayne,” Hawks told me, which I thought was an overstatement, considering he was talking about a period between 1958 and the late 1960s when good Westerns were made without Wayne ( The Big Country, The Magnificent Seven, Man of the West, just to name a few) but a John Wayne Western was almost a genre of its own.
Hawks continued: “Whenever you get John Wayne in your picture, you better find someone good for him to buck up to. In Rio Bravo we had Dean Martin. Having two good actors like that means that the dialogue and the events that take place between them are easy to work out. I start off with a script, but it will always change. When an actor has a particular quirk, I’ll rewrite the script to bring those quirks in. It’s not so much rewriting as just saying the same thing with different words. The other thing I do is go straight into the scene and film it without rehearsal, because what you often get is so spontaneous, it works better than doing take after take.
“I always feel that there are about thirty plots in all, and they’ve all been done. If you can think of a new way to tell a plot, that’s fine.
My only criteria is that I like to start a picture with a dramatic sequence and then find the place in the story where we start to get some laughs out of it.
“I like to let the characters tell the story for you, and don’t worry about the plot. Movements come from characterization. Dean was a great drinker in real life and we had him play a drunk in Rio Bravo.
We saw Wayne watching his old friend Dean get rehabilitated. And just as he’s getting better, someone tells him, ‘You stink,’ so we catch him taking a bath. I like that kind of storytelling. The characters dictate the way the story develops. If the audience don’t find the characters interesting, they won’t care how clever the story is. But when they like the characters, they’ll just enjoy watching to see what happens to them. Almost all the men in my pictures have gone through some troubles and then they have to be straightened out.
“Dean was fun to work with. All you had to do was tell him something. There’s a scene where Dean has a hangover, and when we first shot it, he didn’t look like he was suffering. So I said to him,
‘I knew a guy with a hangover who’d pound his leg trying to hurt himself to try and get some feeling back into it.’ And Dean said, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 192
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‘Yeah,