RIO BRAVO
m.r.leeper
RIO BRAVO
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Classic Western with a very good
reputation but with feet of clay.
This month Cinemax is running the 1959 Howard Hawks Western RIO BRAVO.
The film is a sort of answer to HIGH NOON. John Wayne plays a sheriff about
to have problems, just like Gary Cooper did in HIGH NOON. In the earlier
film Cooper had to face a handful of killers. Hawks's one-ups-manship has
Wayne facing dozens. And how do they react? Cooper spent his time trying
to get someone to help him. The Duke, of course, has more of an image to
live up to. He spends his time trying to discourage people who want to help
him. The question nevers enters his mind that he might not be man enough to
take on any number of people who want him dead. Sure enough Wayne, with a
little help from two or three selected friends, is more than enough to take
on a small army. Of course, Rambo later took on bigger armies in even more
contrived plots, but Wayne was modest and was willing to be equal to only
three or four dozen men in his scripts.
The cast for this film were chosen more for marquee value than for
acting talent. Besides Wayne, who always did the world's best imitation of
John Wayne, there was current heart-throb Ricky Nelson for the teenage girls
in the audience and Dean Martin for their mothers. Neither ever won any
acting awards. Also on hand are Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, and Ward
Bond.
I am not sure where the title came from. There isn't one scene with a
river in it in the entire film. But then, Westerns with Spanish names--you
know, RIO GRANDE, RIO LOBO, EL DORADO, VERA CRUZ, SILVERADO--they all have a
sort of epic feel.
I won't deny that RIO BRAVO has some fun to it. Most critics seem to
like it and it is worth a peek. It has some reasonable humor; most Hawks
films seem to. Also there is a long opening sequence, somewhat
experimental, in which for three or four minutes there is action but no
dialogue. Any Howard Hawks film is worth seeing, but RIO BRAVO is good in
spite of itself. So if it is enjoyable why am I picking holes? Well,
nobody else seems to be doing it. Rate RIO BRAVO a flat 0 on the -4 to +4
scale.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
J.CADLEY
I've just seen Kurosawa's new movie "Ran", and I'd like
to hear some opinions concerning its relation to "King Lear".
I went to the theater expecting a Japanese version of Lear.
The Lear story is clearly in the film. However, Kurosawa seems
to have made some significant modifications. I'm sure he was
aware of what he was doing, so I want to understand his
motivation for making some changes.
This discussion will be easier if we all know the names of the
characters involved. The following is a list of the names I
can recall from the film. Also included are the names of the
Shakespeare equivalents. Please forgive and correct any spelling
errors. Do make additions if you can recall any of the other
Japanese characters.
Great Lord Hidetora King Lear
His sons: His daughters:
Taro ?
Jiro Gonneril
Saburo (unmarried) Cordelia (unmarried)
Hidetora's fool Lear's fool
Tango (a Hidetora vassal) Kent
-no equivalent- Cornwall (married to ?)
Sue (wife to Jiro) Albany (married to Gonneril)
Tsurumaro (brother to Sue) -no equivalent-
? (another Great Lord) King of France
Ayabe (another Great Lord) -no equivalent-
-no equivalent- Glouster (a Lear vassal)
His sons:
-no equivalent- Edgar
Kiede (wife to Taro) Edmund (a bastard)
King Lear plot review: Lear is old. He wants to retire in peace.
He decides to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters.
At the last minute, Lear mistakenly decides Cordelia does't love
him, so he exiles her. Kent objects. He gets exiled too.
Cordelia goes off to marry the King of France. Kent goes into
disguise to continue serving Lear. In order to seize total
power, Gonneril conspires with her sister to banish Lear. Lear
goes mad and disapears into the British plains. Meanwhile, Edmund
conspires against his father and brother. He makes it seem they
support the banished Lear. Edgar escapes, but Cornwall blinds Glouster.
A loyal servant then kills Cornwall. Edmund realy gets ambitious now.
He wants to be king. [?], Cornwall's widow, wants to marry Edmund.
So does Gonneril (she thinks her husband Albany is a wimp). Edmund
decides he'll marry Gonneril if she'll kill Albany. If she doesn't,
then he'll marry [?]. At last, Cordelia returns with a French army to
save her father. Edmund leads the British forces, defeats the French,
and captures Lear and Cordelia. Edmund orders Cordelia to be hung.
She dies. When Lear finds out, he dies. Gonneril poisons [?].
Edmund thinks he's almost king. Suddenly, Edgar shows up. He
accuses Edmund of the conspiracy. Edgar kills Edmund. Gonneril
kills herself. Albany the wimp is the last surviving leader. The
curtain falls.
What's different about Ran? Well, when Jiro kills Taro it is due
to ambition, not love. This is like having Gonneril kill her sister,
thereby making Gonneril the only legitimate heir to the throne.
Shakespeare did not write Lear that way, so it seems to me that
Kurosawa decided to change the story to emphasize the corrupting
effects of ambition. Later, Kiede causes Jiro to kill Sue. This
would be like Edmund convincing Gonneril to kill her husband Albany.
Once again, this is a deviation from Lear. It is different in that
Gonneril did not need external motivation to want to murder her husband,
and it is also different in that Kiede had a "moral" motive for
wanting Sue dead. Kiede wanted to destroy Hidetora's family because
he had destroyed her family when he was fighting to become a Great
Lord. Edmund is completely amoral. All he wants is power for himself.
I think Kurosawa made this change to reinforce his point about
the destructiveness of ambition. It is Hidetora's actions as a young
warlord which bring down his house. Lear's sin was misplaced love.
The complete absence of a Glouster character in Ran further shows
Kurosawa's indifference to Shakespeare's love theme (Glouster is also
punished for not trusting his son, Edgar).
The last difference I saw between Ran and King Lear was in the
resolution of the war. In King Lear, France is defeated and Albany
carries on the line of British kings. In Ran, Hidetora's kingdom
is destroyed by another Great Lord, Ayabe (not the Great Lord Saburo
took refuge with). Pehaps it was just unacceptable in Shakespeare's
time to have France defeat Britain. Maybe Kurosawa was correcting
a flaw in Shakespeare, but I don't think so. I think Kurosawa
was attempting to show that ambition ultimately brings utter
destruction. At the end of Lear we have hope for Britain because
Albany carries on the line. At the end of Ran we know Hidetora's
kingdom is destroyed forever.
Overlaid on the Ran story is a strong anti-war theme, a theme which
is absent from King Lear. I believe there are even allusions to
nuclear war and the MAD doctrine (during the final battle scenes).
All of the above makes me wonder why Kurosawa decided to make this
film. He seems to have taken the story in a completely different
direction than did Shakespeare. This doesn't bother me, but it
does make me very curious as to his motivations. If you've seen the
movie, then please do post or send me your opinions.
John Cadley
AT&T Consumer Products Labs
Neptune, NJ
cha...@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu
When Siskel and Ebert reviewed Ran they said that
Kurosawa was interviewed about halfway through the production.
When asked about the similarities to King Lear he said
something to the effect that he hadn't been aware of any parallels!
Shakespeare reincarnate?
Tom Channic
University of Illinois
ihnp4!pur-ee!uiucdcs!channic
m.r.leeper
>When Siskel and Ebert reviewed Ran they said that Kurosawa
>was interviewed about halfway through the production. When
>asked about the similarities to King Lear he said something
>to the effect that he hadn't been aware of any parallels!
When I reviewed RAN I remembered hearing this, but not where I had
heard it. There has been some discussion on the net about it since
then. I am glad someone else has heard that Kurosawa denied basing RAN
on LEAR. The similarities are really too great to be coincidence.
He did claim it was based on a classic Japanese legend. I think there
may be something of some legend in it, but for a strange reason. The
two ungrateful sons are called Taro and Jiro. Evelyn reminded me that
those names were associated in another film. Those were the names of
the two main sled dogs who became the main characters of ANTARCTICA.
It could be just coincidence, or it could be that ANTARCTICA had a
reference to the same legend. (Yes, I know that Taro and Jiro were
real dogs since ANTARCTICA is a true story, but the real dogs may have
been named for the sons in the legend.)
Mark Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
rei...@ucla-cs.uucp
> RIO BRAVO
> Capsule review: Classic Western with a very good
> reputation but with feet of clay.
>
>
>acting talent. Besides Wayne, who always did the world's best imitation of
>John Wayne, there was current heart-throb Ricky Nelson for the teenage girls
>in the audience and Dean Martin for their mothers. Neither ever won any
>acting awards.
acting works. (Since I know you've seen an awful lot of films and must
know this already, I'll ascribe it either to a rhetorical lapse or a
particular dislike of Wayne.) Some film actors are great actors. Others
are great personalities. In the long run, the performances you'll
probably remember all of your life come from the personalities, not the
actors. The best of the personality actors had reasonable range, but,
when push came to shove, they all relied on who they were and what films
they had done before, not on innate talent.
Wayne was one of the consummate personality actors. He had little range
(though more than many belief: don't forget "The Quiet Man", "The Long
Voyage Home", and "The Searchers"). But what he did he did superbly,
and no one else could do at all. John Wayne *was* a man who would
save your town single-handed, and make you believe it. (Or, to be accurate,
he would save any on-screen town; let's not mix up the actor and man
too much.) He practically reeked of the Old West. Let's put it this way:
if you were doing a remake of "Rio Bravo", who would you cast in the
lead today? Sylvester Stallone? Christopher Reeve? Harrison Ford?
As far as Dean Martin goes, he could be a very good actor, on occasion.
(Most notably, "Some Came Running".) His big problem as an actor was
that he usually didn't take things seriously. (His second biggest
problem was that he knew Frank Sinatra; a close relationship with
Sinatra destroyed several budding acting careers in a hazy glow of
buddyism.) Ricky Nelson was just another young punk actor, one who
didn't make it really big. Some do, some don't.
> I won't deny that RIO BRAVO has some fun to it. Most critics seem to
>like it and it is worth a peek. ... So if it is enjoyable why am I picking
>holes? Well,nobody else seems to be doing it. Rate RIO BRAVO a flat 0 on
>the -4 to +4 scale.
I would put it a bit more strongly than "worth a peak". More like,
"must see". I will admit that I prefer the remake, "El Dorado", mostly
because I prefer Robert Mitchum to Dean Martin, but "Rio Bravo" is a bit
fresher, and both are highly exciting. (In fact, Hawks made the same
film three times. The third remake, and the weakest, is "Rio Lobo".)
Given some of the weak films which you give postive ratings to, giving a
mediocre rating to "Rio Bravo" seems unusual. I suppose that, if one
carefully remembers that your ratings refer to nothing more than your
own opinion, it's not so hard to understand. But, too often, we all tend
to forget that a numerical rating isn't any less subjective than a
prose description, it just has the seductive power of a number, trying
to convince us that, since something has been quantified, some inner
truth has been revealed. That's why I don't like numerical rating
systems.
Picking on a movie because no one else does seems like an odd occupation.
What gets the hatchet next, "Citizen Kane" or "Potemkin"?
--
Peter Reiher
rei...@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU
{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher