El Dorado, USA 1966
I have two favorite westerns. Rio Bravo (1958) and El Dorado (1966). Both were directed by Howard Hawks, both star John Wayne, and both share similar plot lines and characters. Its not surprising that Hawks essentially remade the same movie. The formula was a good one and his casting choices made the film a draw for audiences. Its the story of a small cow town in the post Civil War Texas frontier where the rule of law had yet to be established. Wayne plays a gunfighter who returns to the town of El Dorado to help his old friend, the town sheriff and local drunk, fight off a corrupt local cattle baron. The cast of this movie is fantastic. Robert Mitchum plays the town Sheriff and is by far the most entertaining character. I wouldn't have thought that seeing a man go through the stages of sobriety from fall down drunk to sober ass kicker could be so funny. Dean Martin played a similar role in the earlier film, Rio Bravo, but as much as I love Dean I think that Mitchum's character was an improvement. In one of his first film roles, James Caan plays the knife wielding, poetry spewing, revenge seeking Mississippi. Caan's supporting role does little to advance the plot of the story, but he does offer a pleasant diversion from the movie's darker moments. The thing I like most about his performance is his recitation of the Edgar Allan Poe poem El Dorado throughout the film. (As a side note, I carry the text of that poem on a card in my wallet. It's my favorite.)
Movies like these two don't get made much anymore. First of all, modern westerns are too realistic. As a film viewer, I don't want to see the bleak reality that was the wild west. I want the romantic wild west where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys spit on the floor. Some would criticize these movies for being too melodramatic or for failing to hold up to the expectations of modern audiences. But before we criticize too sharply we should take into account that these films were not made for us. They were made for our parents and grand parents during a time when going to the movies was a rare treat. People didn't have access to movies like we do now. Movies were seldom shown on television, videos and DVDs didn't exist yet, and the notion of being able to re watch a film from the previous decade was unthinkable. I think that one of the reasons that we have become a society of film critics is because watching movies is so easy. Even a pudgy nobody from Kansas has seen more movies in his 31 years than his parents and grandparents saw in their entire lives. Our overexposure has taken away the magic. We've seen what's behind the curtain, and now we think of ourselves as experts. We aren't. I think we all would enjoy the movies more if we took time to watch old movies without expectations, and tried to enjoy them the way we did when movies were new to us.
Ride boldly Ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment