Howard Hawks, whose 1959 Western “Rio Bravo” I discuss in this clip, came late to the genre—he didn’t make his first Western until 1948, with “Red River.” (He began, but didn’t complete, “The Outlaw” in 1943.) By that time he was more than twenty years into his directing career and already a master of the gangster film, the screwball comedy, the war film, the romantic adventure, the film noir. The Western is an essentially philosophical genre, in its conversion of society’s abstract or bureaucratic functions to direct and physical action. For John Ford, its implications are political; for Hawks, they’re moral and aesthetic (and, for Hawks, the moral and the aesthetic are inseparable). The pressure to take action that has immediate, ineluctible, and irreparable consequences makes the Wild West an exposed grid of existential crises. And the way that Hawks measures the response to crises is with style, which is why it’s apt that two members of his trio of principled lawmen— Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson—are suave singers. Their gunmanship and their wiles are tied to their laid-back elegance—which rubs off on John Wayne, who, in turn, lends them the solidity of his own ineffable command. The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission. Eight years later, Hawks would remake it as “El Dorado,” and push its eccentricities even further.
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