John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [141]
Later, in 1970, Wayne and Hawks would virtually retell the same story in Rio Lobo, and so any suggestion that Hawks remade Rio Bravo twice, let alone once, was met with a strong rebuke.
“I never remade Rio Bravo,” he said. “I stole from Rio Bravo, just like Hemingway always stole from himself. There were a lot of similarities between his stories.
“If a film director has a story that he likes but when he looks at it again he thinks he can do it better, he’ll do it again but in a different way. If I think, I could do that better if I did it again, I’d do it again and keep on doing them. When we made Rio Bravo, we found places where we could go in one direction or another, and we made our choices but made a note of trying the other direction in another picture. We ended up with enough good choices from Rio Bravo to make a whole new picture, so we did El Dorado. I said to my writer
[Leigh] Brackett who had worked on Rio Bravo, ‘We had a boy who 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 264
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was a very good gunman in Rio Bravo, so let’s have a boy who can’t shoot at all in El Dorado. So that wasn’t the same, was it?’
“And in Rio Bravo Wayne was the sheriff and his deputy was the drunk. In El Dorado Mitchum was the sheriff and he was the drunk, and the deputy was stone-cold sober. So we changed a lot. We did everything by opposites. I don’t think there’s any connection between the two stories. There is a similarity, but that comes in style.
I think people who say there is a connection between the two stories of Rio Bravo and El Dorado haven’t actually seen both films.”
Robert Mitchum, however, had a different view from Hawks’s:
“It’s a case of making a successful formula and jumping on your own bandwagon. Normally, it’s other directors who jump on the bandwagon, but Howard’s the only guy I know who jumps on his own.”
Hawks had a high opinion of Mitchum: “Robert Mitchum is one of the few actors who can work with Wayne without Wayne blowing him off the screen. But I don’t think Mitchum has the power Wayne has. He can’t carry a picture as well as Wayne can, and Wayne knows this, which is why I give people like Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum the more interesting characters. Wayne says to me, ‘You give everybody else the fireworks, but I have to carry the damn thing.’ I said to him, ‘That’s right, Duke.’”
Wayne had incredible trust in Hawks, even though they only made four films together. “I never read a script for one of Hawks’s films,”
Duke said. “Mostly he’d say, ‘Duke, do you wanna make a Western?’ and I’d say, ‘Let’s do it.’ I’d get around to asking what the story was later. He’d start telling me the story and I’d say, ‘Don’t tell me. I never like your stories but they always turn out to be good.’ I didn’t need to see his script. We’d get to a scene and I’d say, ‘What do I do?’ and he’d tell me what he wanted. Then I’d take the script, read the lines and learn ’em, and we’d do the scene. It makes working real easy that way. But you can’t work with most directors that way. I don’t always trust directors if I haven’t worked with them before. But Hawks I trust with my life.”
Playing the chief villain was Christopher George. When I interviewed him over the telephone in 1980, he talked of his experience working with Wayne and Hawks. He said, “I liked 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 265
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working with Howard Hawks, and I liked working with Duke Wayne. El Dorado was my first with either of them, and I did a few more with them, but not on the same pictures. With Duke, if he likes you, he’ll make sure you get to work with him again. When we were making El Dorado he said, ‘You know, Chris, you’re supposed to play this mean son of a bitch I want to kill all through the picture, but you play it with such charm that I told Howard that the character I play has to have