The great geriatric Western

Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles were the American directors around whom the director as auteur dogma was built by French critics of the 1950s (who then became the nouvelle vague directors). Hawks was an extraordinarily versatile director. He made the seminal gangster film "Scarface." He discovered Lauren Bacall and cast her with Humphrey Bogart in "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep." His film "Red River" is not only the definitive cattle drive film, but the film that made John Wayne and Montgomery Clift superstars (see Gary Wills's book on John Wayne for the argument that Hawks fashioned the persona of the aging, alpha male that Wayne played to great commercial success in the 1950s and 1960s).

Four of Hawks' last six films starred John Wayne as a grouchy old master gunman. Three of them (Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Lobo) were variations on the theme of friendship between Wayne and a former peer who had become a drunkard in the context of gunfight showdowns in the post-Civil War American West.

In addition to a Marilyn Monroe musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and the many films about tough guys (Only Angels Have Wings, Sergeant York, Red Line 7000 in addition to the Westerns and Bogart classics), Hawks directed many of the best screwball comedies, including Ball of Fire, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and I Was a Male War Bride--the last three of these with Cary Grant). There is a lot of humor in "El Dorado" and in most of Hawks' other melodramas and Westerns, for instance, in the repartee between Bogart and Bacall in "To Have and Have Not."

Hawks' screwball comedies moved (and, especially, talked) very fast. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum were iconic tough guys not noted for being fast-talking or particularly fast-moving, though John Wayne played gunfighters with reputations for being fast on the draw in his films with Hawks. "El Dorado" is overlong and meanders quite a lot during the first hour, but there is quite a lot of repartee between the relatively laconic (strong silent type) stars. And Hawks' discovery (first used in "Red Line 7000") James Caan moves and talks fast (though the Bronx-born actor is playing a Southern river rat/gambler) in the Katherine Hepburn/Rosalind Russell smartass tradition.

There are some women in "El Dorado": a ludicrous tomboy who is overpowered first by Wayne and later by Caan (Michele Cary) and the woman the male leads both love (a very recurrent theme in Hawks' films, the incarnation here is played unmemorably by Charlene Holt), and a Mexican woman played unmemorably by Marina Ghane), but the male leads do not compete for the female prize. Both are courtly and willing to let the other have her (as also in John Ford's 1960s "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"). The male-male relationships matter more. Not just the friendship between the two aging legendary quick-draws (Wayne and Mitchum), but the "professional courtesy" between Wayne and a young gunslinger hired for a job Wayne turned down (Christopher George), the master-apprentice relationship between Wayne and Caan, and the protective older man (the Walter Brennan role, played by Arthur Hunnicutt, because Brennan was not available).

Oh yes, the plot: it's just a pretext for throwing the men together to face danger as a team, but it is the familiar one of an expanding business' owner (Ed Asner, the last dressed in full villain black) hiring thugs to expropriate the most valuable resource in the arid American west, water, from the good family man ((Kevin MacDonald). The latter needs help and the local law enforcement has difficulty providing it. The sheriff played by Mitchum has been on a prolonged bender. Wayne joins the side of the good guys and gets Mitchum functioning again (with Caan producing something like antabuse to make alcohol intolerable to him). There is a lot of action in the last hour though notable more for its wit than its graphic violence. The kid who can't shoot, the drunkard sheriff, the old coot, and the gunslinger who is occasionally immobilized by a bullet against his spine needs and receive some female help.

Plot spoiler

Hawks (on record in Hawks on Hawks) found "High Noon" (with his sometimes star Gary Cooper) "a lot of nonsense" and "made 'Rio Bravo' the exact opposite from 'High Noon' and '3:10 to Yuma.'" "El Dorado" is a variation on "Rio Bravo" (both written by Leigh Brackett, the woman who also wrote "The Empire Strikes Back" and Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" as well as coauthoring the screenplay of "The Big Sleep" with Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner) with Wayne playing the friend of the sheriff rather than the sheriff as in "Rio Bravo." But Mitchum's sheriff is like Cooper in "High Noon" in feeling not up to the challenge of the gang of outlaws, and Wayne is ultimately saved by the shot from a woman as Cooper is by Grace Kelly's in "High Noon."

End of plot spoiler

However, Hawks also said that "El Dorado" was "the opposite" of "Rio Bravo":
"We had a very good boy gunman in Rio Bravo [the charming but not totally convincing Ricky Nelson]; let's make a boy who can't shoot at all [Caan]. In Rio Bravo, Wayne was the sheriff and his deputy [Dean Martin] was a drunk. In El Dorado, Bob Mitchum was the sheriff, and he was the drunk, and deputy was perfectly sober."
Amazingly, he continued, "I don't think there is any connection between the two stories." His view was that "there is a similarity, but it comes from style, it comes from writing, it comes from the fact that it's made in the same part of the country, because the costumes are very much the same."

Well, the two are variations on some very Hawksian themes of male camaraderie, though "El Dorado" is more diffuse (though not lasting as long) and does not seem to lock the audience in the jailhouse under siege to the degree "Rio Bravo" does.

John Wayne is pretty much the same in attitude (bemusement plus determination) in the two films. I think that Mitchum is far more credible a Western sheriff than Dean Martin and is also more credible as a man on a bender (Dino was a professional lush, but usually seeming able to function despite his intake of alcohol). Arthur Hunnicutt does Walter Brennan almost as well as Brennan himself did. Angie Dickinson in "Rio Bravo" makes more of an impression (visually and verbally) than Charlene Holt does in "El Dorado." I have difficulty believing in either Ricky Nelson or Chris George as young top guns. The young James Caan was less a teen heartthrob in 1967 than Nelson was in 1959, but (no surprise) was a better actor. (Seeing either film now one knows Nelson would die young and Caan would become Sonny in "The Godfather"--and that Ed Asner would become the lovable curmudgeon Lou Grant in two award-winning tv series.)

The world is plenty big enough a place for both movies. Both are entertaining as character studies and get around to being successful action flix. If I were packing one Howard Hawks western for a time capsule or a desert island, it would be "Red River" (especially if it could be restored).

I am perplexed by the terrain that is supposed to be Texas. I think there are only saguaro cactus in Arizona (and, I don't like using them as targets, though with James Caan firing at them, the saguaros are safe!). Saguaros are photogenic, though Hawks was far less concerned with picturesque backdrops than John Ford was.