It’s a game of wits against Death himself. And it’s surprisingly funny. That’s the part that always surprises me.
Maybe it has to be, given the heightened premise of a knight returned from the crusades playing a lengthy game of chess against Death himself during the Black Plague. As serious and dire as the stakes are throughout the film, if there isn’t humor, then the entire concept of the story would seem silly on its own.
There was a line I got via some trickle-down teaching about writing dramatic stories: You need to find places to add some humor, or your audience will find the wrong places and add it themselves.
Maybe the greatest final shot of any Western. Up there with the great final shots of any film.
This is not one my grandfather ever showed me. I should’ve asked why when I had the chance. He had a lot of John Wayne films, but maybe he didn’t like this one. Or maybe he just didn’t think I would like it. It’s not for me to know.
Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is an unambiguous racist. His whole goal in the film is to kill his niece who was taken by Native Americans in a raid. He doesn’t see her as worth saving, being tarnished by association. He’s especially focused on the idea that white women who have (willing or unwilling) sex with Comanches are impure and no longer considered white in his eyes.
He’s a real shitbag. And lest we forget about the man behind the character:
“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them… Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
While it might not be a massive antiracist triumph of a film, I don’t think it’s subtle about one point in particular that refutes Edwards’ racism. In the end, Ethan cannot stay in the domestic space. He’s not welcome there, and returns to wandering.
His skills were useful in reuniting a family, but that’s all he was good for. His violence and hatred serve as a barrier blocking him from finding a place to call home.
It’s not exactly a Hate Has No Home Here sign in the front yard. But there is a story here about a soldier so fueled by hate that he doesn’t know what to do without a war to fight.
This post will not be an argument about this being the real love story in the film (but it could be).
I cannot think about John Wayne without thinking about my grandfather. He’s the one who set me down and got me watching Westerns. Rio Bravo is one of those films that always feels like sitting in his living room and popping in a VHS tape. It’s a movie for me that smells like the woods and campfires and tastes like apple butter and biscuits and sausage gravy.
Part of that is the hangout vibe of the whole film. There’s singing to kill the time (because if you don’t have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing, why are you even putting them in your cast?). There’s lots of hurry-up-and-wait pacing, because the main characters are mostly on the defensive, trying to keep a prisoner from being broken out of the local jail. Despite the danger and the gunplay, there’s a comfortable rhythm for the film that eases you through it.
One of the things that always gets me coming back to this movie is the relationship between Wayne’s John T. Chance and Dean Martin’s Dude. Dude starts off the movie as a shaky alcoholic. A washed up punch line and punching bag for everyone else in town. Chance is disgusted with what Dude has become, but he also knows that there’s an ally in there that needs to come back out. Chance needs Dude, and Dude needs help.
And it’s a movie about human connections. About brotherhood, and in this case, found family. Shared sacrifice and struggle to do what’s right. But it’s also about being unable to articulate the depth of your feelings. There’s a lot of unexamined toxic masculinity with John T. Chance, and it can best be seen in the way that he refuses to allow himself to be vulnerable with the people most important to him. How his love language is verbally abusive and sarcastic in a way that just isn’t what love should look or sound like.
In a lot of ways it’s the antithesis of High Noon, and that was purposeful.
“What a piece of you-know-what [High Noon] was,” he told me. “I think it was popular because of the music. Think about it this way. Here’s a town full of people who have ridden in covered wagons all the way across the plains, fightin’ off Indians and drought and wild animals in order to settle down and make themselves a homestead. And then when three no-good bad guys walk into town and the marshal asks for a little help, everybody in town gets shy. If I’d been the marshal, I would have been so goddamned disgusted with those chicken-livered yellow sons of bitches that I would have just taken my wife and saddled up and rode out of there.”
John Wayne and Howard Hawks made no attempt to hide their disdain for the plot of High Noon. But I think the differences go deeper than the question of who’s going to help the Sheriff. Take a look at this (edited) scene from Rio Bravo and compare it to the moment when Amy Fowler Kane takes up a gun in High Noon:
Both of these moments feature women taking action to protect a male protagonist. But there’s a sharp difference. Feathers gets a flower pot that she’s told to throw by someone else so that he can do the actual killing. Amy picks up the gun to do the job herself. Nobody told her what to do.
There’s another parallel moment at the end of both films. In both, the protagonist chucks away something meant to be worn, but for different reasons and shown in a different way.
First, High Noon:
Then, Rio Bravo:
With High Noon, it’s a moment of on screen affection between Will and Amy, followed by a look of disdain for the town as he renounces his place. For John T. Chance, it’s an act of control and domination over Feathers, played off as a goofy joke by Dude and Stumpy when they put two and two together as the tights fall from the sky into the path of their nightly patrol.
One is the final statement on how broken a community is. The other is an attempt to suggest that there’s a new, restored order in town, and that everyone has found a place to fit in to the community with an acceptable role.
But unlike the partnership and shared sacrifice of Will and Amy, John T. and Feathers seem stuck at a point of friction and attraction. The whole notion of how they would both still need to change a lot for whatever is developing between them to work.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Wayne and Hawks were so vocal about their disdain for High Noon, I wouldn’t spend so much time thinking about the parallels and commentary between the two films. But that doesn’t mean I see it as one film being superior to the other. They’re parts of a conversation. They’re separate things.
There’s no need to make films into a zero sum game. Like I’ve said before, I like liking things. And with both of these movies, I have my reasons.
Going back to the thought about how everybody has their reasons, every person in this town has some excuse for not helping Will Kane fight the criminals planning to kill him. Kane was the driving force in making this town safe, which gave them the chance to get comfortable.
The west isn’t wild for these people anymore. They expect to be protected and secure. It’s a turning point, and they’d rather Kane leave or stand alone than take on the risk of supporting him.
On my list of films to work through for this series, I know Rio Bravo comes next. I’ll have more to say about High Noon there because they’re such a good point-counterpoint (and they were intended as such).
Grace Kelly’s performance as Amy Fowler Kane is the fulcrum this whole movie turns on. Her religious beliefs demand she remain nonviolent, but when pushed to the point where she either acts or watches as her husband is murdered, she picks up the gun.
When characters have their deepest beliefs challenged and choose to set them aside because of the conflict of the moment, that’s when a story can shine. Maybe it’s finding the exception to the rules, or maybe it’s turning your back on those rules. Maybe it’s a one time thing or a new path. But finding that moment when a character steps out of their patterns and dogma and acts with agency? When it works, when it feels natural and inevitable like it does here, it is a wonderful thing to see.
I have no memory of the first time I watched Singin’ in the Rain. As far as I’m concerned, it’s always been living in my mind, rent free.
I’m thinking in particular of a moment in high school where I was auditioning for a musical and did a dance audition that was heavily influenced by Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’em Laugh,” and I was cut short because it looked to everybody else like I was going to injure myself.
(I super would have. It was for the best.)
I’m a sucker for a backstage musical, but this one has the added bonus of playing with film history and peeking behind the curtain on just how much effort goes into movie magic. There’s enough here to make for a good Intro to Film History initial film screening. Even though this covers only a small portion of 20th century filmmaking, the history of film is the history of wrestling with technological innovation and disruption, over and over.
I love a story that peels back the layers of reality on something, and that plays with what we think we know is happening. For example, as cited here, in the scenes where Debbie Reynolds sings the audio that Jean Hagen’s character will lip sync to, the actual singing was Debbie Reynolds lip syncing to Jean Hagen’s pre-recorded singing. It’s such a meta, inside baseball detail and it makes me love it all the more.
There’s a great trick with the overall story, too. It does a great job of setting up Lockwood & Lamont as filmmaking royalty, then slowly building up cracks in that facade until the transition to talking pictures turns them into bumbling underdogs. It’s not just the industry-wide disruption that drives them, but the seeds of doubt Kathy plants in Don’s mind when she simultaneously rebuffs his sexual advances and his credibility as an artist. There’s both an internal and external push that drives the characters to put their best (dancing) foot forward in this new world of sound cinema.
This Builds Character 
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