‘Rio Bravo’ deserves a hallelujah

JOHN WAYNE would be turning 100 on Saturday, and to mark the occasion, studios with Wayne titles in their vaults are in the throes of reissue madness.

Paramount is releasing a 14-film “centennial collection” and a deluxe edition of “True Grit” (1969), which won the Duke his only Oscar. Lionsgate digs into Wayne’s 1940s and ‘50s work with genre house Republic Pictures and emerges with two themed box sets (war flicks and westerns) and six double-feature discs. Warner Bros. is bringing five Wayne films to DVD for the first time, including the Hawaii-set red-scare clunker “Big Jim McLain” (1952) and the 1946 romantic comedy “Without Reservations.”

The standout in the deluge, the film that features Wayne’s greatest performance -- and that is also perhaps the best work of its director, Howard Hawks -- remains the 1959 masterpiece “Rio Bravo,” which Warners is releasing Tuesday in both a two-disc set and a collector’s edition (with lobby cards and comic book). It’s a digitally remastered version that claims greater fidelity to the colors of the original negative than previous restorations; it looks richer and crisper than ever. The new print is also being presented at the Cannes Film Festival this week to mark Wayne’s centenary.

Wayne was more closely identified with John Ford, who directed him in more than a dozen films, but it was Hawks who first coaxed a nuanced performance from the star, in the 1948 western “Red River.” Compared to that first collaboration, “Rio Bravo” is a more austere, economical and even claustrophobic film -- a western that’s practically a chamber piece, with barely a shot of the open skies -- but it feels every bit as expansive, thanks to its gallant optimism and generous spirit.

With Wayne at its moral center as a beleaguered sheriff defending his town against an outlaw gang and its hired killers, “Rio Bravo” is so clear and simple in its basic construction that it verges on elemental. It’s set exclusively in the familiar locales of Old West townships (saloon, hotel, jailhouse) and populated with a cast of stock characters: the upstanding lawman, the fallible sidekick, the shady temptress, various comic-relief bit players. What’s remarkable is how fully these conventions are enriched. Each actor is given room to breathe and unexpected dimensions to plumb.

Hawks once described “Rio Bravo” as a response to Fred Zinnemann’s “High Noon” (1952), a film that both he and Wayne deemed insufficiently tough -- Hawks likened Gary Cooper’s embattled sheriff to a “chicken with his head off asking for help.” But “Rio Bravo” is a more mature and humane film than that macho talk suggests. Wayne’s headstrong Sheriff Chance, in contrast to Cooper’s, conspicuously rejects or undervalues offers of assistance, but time and again, disasters are averted thanks to the intervention of a friend.

It’s part of Hawks’ point that those friends, judging by appearances, are a trivial, downtrodden lot, all too easy to dismiss. Once a sharp-shooting deputy, Dude (poignantly played by Dean Martin) has turned to drink over a broken heart. Stumpy the jail keeper (Walter Brennan, transcending caricature) is a cranky, bum-legged codger. The new kid in town, Colorado (Ricky Nelson), is suspiciously baby-faced. And the lady gambler who’s passing through (Angie Dickinson) has been bequeathed the undignified nickname of Feathers (she wears a boa).

Hawks was not taken seriously during his commercial prime, but critics and scholars, following the lead of French cinephiles, have since come around. His filmmaker fans are legion. John Carpenter remade “Rio Bravo” as “Assault on Precinct 13” (he provides audio commentary on the new disc, alongside critic Richard Schickel), and Quentin Tarantino has called “Rio Bravo” a litmus test for potential girlfriends.

The critic Robin Wood, a vocal champion of Hawks, once wrote, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be ‘Rio Bravo.’ ”

Alas, the Hollywood mode that Hawks’ best movies exemplified -- a balance of tradition and personality -- appears dormant, if not extinct. “Rio Bravo” today seems a rebuke not to “High Noon” but to what has become of big-budget American filmmaking in the years since.