Critics reviews

RIO BRAVO marks the symphonic culmination of themes that Howard Hawks had been developing for most of his directorial career, and the film delivers such a profound sense of coming together that it’s easy to understand why many Hawks fans consider this to be his greatest work.

If Rio Bravo stands out in Hawks' filmography, I'd say it's because it adds to Hawks' more familiar virtues a distinctive command of storytelling, organizing small events within overarching story movements so adroitly that the viewer has few opportunities to check his or her wristwatch during the film's 141 minutes.

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.

By associating each protagonist with their own location: the saloon (Dude) the hotel (Feathers), the sheriff's office (Chance), and the prison (Stumpy), Hawks reprises one of his favorite themes of imprisonment (most obviously exemplified by the museum in Bringing Up Baby and, less figuratively, the pyramid in Land of the Pharaohs) and sets each character on a quest to escape their own.

Psychology, lyricism, photography, explanations: Hawks, this time, has thrown everything overboard, including musical filler. Only a thin and dry guitar underscores, with a few Jansenist chords, a straight-lined production. There seems to be nothing else on the screen. Nothing more than a fantastically played action, served by a black, ferocious humor, nothing more than the broken wire of a spring which expands and vibrates in the blue-gray sky of the forest.