Reviews

Another great performance by the vastly underrated Robert Ryan. The entire film has a nuanced and adult tone, completely lacking from Rio Bravo, which seems to be a rip-off by Hawks. This film belongs in the company of High Noon, The Ox-bow Incident and damn few other Westerns for the intelligence and seriousness of the script. Ryan's performance alone makes this film watchable and undated, 50 years after. How many other films can say that? Also worth mentioning are the performances of Virginia Mayo as a hard headed business woman, and Walter Brennan. Brennan with hardly any lines of dialog, manages to do more with a newspaper for a prop, and with looks between him and Ryan, then most actors can do when they're chewing the scenery.

A greatly entertaining Western. However I enjoy it bit less since I came across The Proud Ones by Robert Webb, with Robert Ryan. If you watch both films, you'll see that Hawks more or less stole the plot for The Proud Ones, even though the films allegedly come from different written sources. The Webb film is much more psychologically nuanced, without all the male bonding with which Hawks litters his films. Rio Bravo is still wonderfully shot and acted, but it feels a bit like Hawks was running on empty creatively, as he actually remade this film yet again a few years later. Again with Wayne (older and less funny), but with Mitchum (okay but looking bored) and James Caan (dreadful) this time. Any mention of the Proud Ones and Rio Bravo would be incomplete without mentioning what a great actor Robert Ryan was. He projects confidence and controlled menace, whereas Wayne is all bluster. Just compare the annoying-jokey tone of the Wayne-Brennan scenes in Bravo to the silent knowing exchanges between Ryan-Brennan (old Walter pops up in almost every Western in those days) in the Proud Ones.