"Rio Lobo" was the last film directed by Howard Hawks and, like his penultimate film "El Dorado", is often regarded as an unacknowledged remake of his "Rio Bravo". All three films star John Wayne and all three were made from a script by Leigh Brackett. All three are Westerns, although at first "Rio Lobo" does not seem like one. It starts with an extended prologue set during the American Civil War in which a group of Confederates, led by Captain Pierre Cordona and Sergeant Tuscarora Phillips, carry out a daring raid on a Union train carrying a valuable cargo of gold bullion.
The main action takes place after the war in the town of Rio Lobo, Texas. Wayne's character, former Union Colonel Cord McNally, is seeking revenge for the death of a close friend killed during the raid on the train." He is not, however, seeking revenge upon the men who carried out the raid, as he regards what they did as a legitimate act of war. The men he is after are the traitors within the Union army who sold information about the bullion shipments to the Confederates. He discovers that these men are now the leaders of a gang of outlaws terrorising the town of Rio Lobo with the assistance of a corrupt sheriff. McNally joins forces with his former enemies Cordona and Tuscarora to lead the fight against the gang.
Anyone with a knowledge of the conventions of the Western, especially the John Wayne Western, will be able to work out how the film progresses. This being a Howard Hawks film there also has to be a strong, determined female character of the sort Hawks loved to include in his films; critics even talked about the "Hawksian woman". Actually, this film contains not one Hawksian woman but three, in the shape of Tuscarora's girlfriend Maria Carmen, her friend Amelita and Shasta Delaney, a young woman seeking revenge for the killing of her lover by the bad guys and who becomes the love interest of the handsome Cordona. (By 1970, Wayne had probably regretfully concluded that he was getting a bit too old to expect a love interest in every movie).
The film was not a great success when first released; the critics generally disliked it, and when the reviewer of the New York Times attempted to defend it the paper received numerous angry letters in protest. Since then, with the virtual canonisation of Wayne as an American icon, its stock has risen, although to my way of thinking it is not quite in the same class as some other late-period Wayne Westerns such as "Chisum" or "True Grit" or the original "Rio Bravo"; it is certainly not in the same class as that great film "The Shootist".
The film has its good points. The attack on the train is well handled and I liked the title sequence in which a guitarist picks out the main theme of Jerry Goldsmith's musical score. On the acting side, however, Wayne is rather left to carry the film on his own, as the other main actors such as Jorge Rivero, Jennifer O'Neill and Christopher Mitchum are not particularly distinguished; in "El Dorado", by contrast, he received good support from Mitchum's better-known father Robert. Brackett does not self-plagiarise his script for "Rio Bravo" quite as blatantly here as he did in "El Dorado", but "Rio Lobo" still suffers from a disadvantage which had affected the earlier film, namely that its storyline is simply a variation on a well-worn standard Western plot which had been so widely used throughout the thirties, forties and fifties that it had become over-familiar. There were a few exceptions such as "The Shootist", but by the seventies it was becoming more and more difficult to say anything new in the Western genre, which partly explains (although there were other factors) its abrupt decline from the second half of the decade onwards. 6/10
The main action takes place after the war in the town of Rio Lobo, Texas. Wayne's character, former Union Colonel Cord McNally, is seeking revenge for the death of a close friend killed during the raid on the train." He is not, however, seeking revenge upon the men who carried out the raid, as he regards what they did as a legitimate act of war. The men he is after are the traitors within the Union army who sold information about the bullion shipments to the Confederates. He discovers that these men are now the leaders of a gang of outlaws terrorising the town of Rio Lobo with the assistance of a corrupt sheriff. McNally joins forces with his former enemies Cordona and Tuscarora to lead the fight against the gang.
Anyone with a knowledge of the conventions of the Western, especially the John Wayne Western, will be able to work out how the film progresses. This being a Howard Hawks film there also has to be a strong, determined female character of the sort Hawks loved to include in his films; critics even talked about the "Hawksian woman". Actually, this film contains not one Hawksian woman but three, in the shape of Tuscarora's girlfriend Maria Carmen, her friend Amelita and Shasta Delaney, a young woman seeking revenge for the killing of her lover by the bad guys and who becomes the love interest of the handsome Cordona. (By 1970, Wayne had probably regretfully concluded that he was getting a bit too old to expect a love interest in every movie).
The film was not a great success when first released; the critics generally disliked it, and when the reviewer of the New York Times attempted to defend it the paper received numerous angry letters in protest. Since then, with the virtual canonisation of Wayne as an American icon, its stock has risen, although to my way of thinking it is not quite in the same class as some other late-period Wayne Westerns such as "Chisum" or "True Grit" or the original "Rio Bravo"; it is certainly not in the same class as that great film "The Shootist".
The film has its good points. The attack on the train is well handled and I liked the title sequence in which a guitarist picks out the main theme of Jerry Goldsmith's musical score. On the acting side, however, Wayne is rather left to carry the film on his own, as the other main actors such as Jorge Rivero, Jennifer O'Neill and Christopher Mitchum are not particularly distinguished; in "El Dorado", by contrast, he received good support from Mitchum's better-known father Robert. Brackett does not self-plagiarise his script for "Rio Bravo" quite as blatantly here as he did in "El Dorado", but "Rio Lobo" still suffers from a disadvantage which had affected the earlier film, namely that its storyline is simply a variation on a well-worn standard Western plot which had been so widely used throughout the thirties, forties and fifties that it had become over-familiar. There were a few exceptions such as "The Shootist", but by the seventies it was becoming more and more difficult to say anything new in the Western genre, which partly explains (although there were other factors) its abrupt decline from the second half of the decade onwards. 6/10