I’m neither a fan of John Wayne nor Westerns but I’m trying to watch the work of noted American Directors pre-1960 so here I am. This is my first Western and I found Rio Bravo a bit wooden and lacking a sense of place. Dean Martin’s DTs was a nice touch and he pulled it off although his performance was the only edgy part of the movie about a small town on the edge of civilization. For the story and the setting it all seemed a bit clean to me and perhaps at the age of 45 I now take realism in movies for granted. I thought that the 22 year old Angie Dickinson was smokin’, and the whole, “I’ll leave my bedroom door unlocked,” intriguing. The most memorable and artistic shot, in my opinion, is the silhouette of a cowboy climbing onto a horse in front of a southwestern sunset.