EL DORADO. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Ed Asner. Dir. Howard Hawks, Paramount, 1966
Of his work, John Wayne was known to say, "I'm not an actor, I'm a reactor." Various talents have disputed that idea over the years (particularly the late Peter Bogdonovich, whose commentary for El Dorado I just watched this morning.) I happen to love Wayne, in general, & a number of his performances rate particularly high in my pantheon, but I don't know that I'm qualified to say if he's acting or reacting. Whichever, it cannot be disputed that, for Wayne, the quality of director, and the quality of Wayne's relationship with that director, went a long way toward deciding the quality of Wayne's work in the finished project. Of those directors to whom Wayne responded so well, two take precedence: John Ford & Howard Hawks.
Ford more or less discovered Wayne, though Raoul Walsh was the first director to cast him as a leading man in 1930's THE BIG TRAIL (Ford vouched for Wayne to 20th Century) and they ultimately did 14 pictures together with Wayne as leading man, not counting TV shows & Wayne's uncredited roles for Ford in the '30s.
Wayne collaborated with Hawks only five times, on four Westerns & the Africa-set HATARI, but the first of those, 1940's RED RIVER, established the persona on which Wayne would ring changes the rest of his career. Ford's STAGECOACH, from '39, established Wayne as a bankable leading man, but RED RIVER made John Wayne the personality we've celebrated, parodied, and even hated for 80 years.
EL DORADO, from 1966, marks Wayne & Hawks's third Western together, following RED RIVER & 1959's RIO BRAVO. Possibly because both EL DORADO & RIO LOBO offer variations on the plot of RIO BRAVO, neither has fared as well with critics over the years, which is unfortunate, at least where EL DORADO is concerned. Though a near thing, I prefer the latter's emphasis on action & its theme of a professional confronting both his limitations & mortality.
How professionals face crises & deal with life has always been Hawks' prevailing theme, particularly in his Westerns & action-adventure films. By 1966, when principal photography on EL DORADO began, Hawks was nearly 70 & Wayne had already lost one lung to cancer, so it's not unreasonable to see meditations on mortality in Leigh Brackett's screenplay about a gunfighter battling paralysis. Unlike RIO BRAVO, in which Wayne plays an invulnerable hero made mortal by his alcoholic best friend, Hawks gave both his leading men debilitating conditions, Robert Mitchum filling in for Dean Martin's alcoholic deputy (though promoted here to town sheriff.)
The stories of both RIO BRAVO & EL DORADO resemble each other enough that an elaborate plot synopsis - my least favorite part of writing up films - would be redundant. As Hawks allegedly responded when Mitchum asked him the basic story, "No story, just character."
If that's a slight exaggeration, I'll run with it, because the joy of EL DORADO is not in its range-war premise but in those characters & their interactions. Despite the presence of a dynamic leading duo such as Wayne & Mitchum, EL DORADO plays more like an ensemble piece & its cast, if somewhat less name brand than RIO BRAVO, interact like the parts of a complex, well made engine, all of them driving the vehicle forward.
Wayne's in top form, which means his omnipresent anger is given greater emphasis & voice. Often a study in repressed rage and too often in roles where it doesn't make sense for the character, in EL DORADO Wayne's constant simmer feels at times almost an underreaction to the situation. If a wealthy rancher hired a private army headed by one of the top four gunhands in the territory to come after my best friend, laid low by drink, and a family of farmers, but my only aid & succor came in the form of a green kid (Caan), an aged deputy (Arthur Hunnicut), & a local showgirl (Charlene Holt), I'd at least feel a little annoyed. It's the addition of his incipient paralysis - brought on by a bullet pressed against his spine, a wound incurred in the film's opening reel - which gives special focus to the Duke's ire. In 1972's THE COWBOYS & '76's THE SHOOTIST, his final picture, Wayne's character also faces death, and all three films rank among my favorite Wayne performances. Actor or reactor, Wayne's craft possessed too little artifice for him to NOT allow knowledge of his own mortality to inform those outings.
Wayne's well matched, and not just in his co-star. Robert Mitchum's public profile was all about attitude & style, about being a Hollywood outsider who didn't take acting seriously, but Hawks' story & Brackett's finely drawn character give the lie to that affectation, as Mitchum's essay of a professional man fighting through his liabilities in public outdistances Dean Martin's turn in RIO BRAVO, and I think Dino was snubbed by Oscar for that performance. In the end, if Mitchum appears unlikely to best his demons, outright, that more bleak outcome is also more realistic, particularly in an era where alcoholic treatment consisted of temperance pledges & church. I'm not sure I can think of another movie cop who conducts gun battles while detoxing from booze, but that's Mitchum's character, and his performance of it would be wealth enough for most movies. Most movies weren't directed by Howard Hawks, though.
Hawks surrounds his stars with the best, if not best-known. Though Hawks gets credit for discovering Angie Dickinson by casting her in RIO BRAVO, Charlene Holt, who already had a long string of roles, mostly in television, did not go on to fame, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She made me think of Lorraine Bracco in & after Goodfellas, conspicuously unrewarded for doing great work. Holt's Maudie embodies the Hawksian Woman (think Lauren Bacall, whom he discovered) and has a warm, easy & naturalistic presence, which may explain her failure to blossom further - she's not a scenery-chewer as Bacall & Dickinson were. Hawks adds a second, even-more-Hawksian-Woman in the character of Josephine "Joey" MacDonald (Michele Carey), a tomboy in buckskin & - unusual for Hawks - ratted, rock'n'roll hair, who provides the bullet to go with John Wayne's spine. Carey, like Holt or Bracco or a too-long line of similar leading-lady wouldbes, went nowhere fast from EL DORADO, despite being both fine & easy on the eyes.
To prevent this meandering blather wandering further afield, I'll cut to Secret Weapons, the couple performances apart from Wayne & Mitchum which I thought in particular power the proceedings. In EL DORADO's case, it's one of the good guys, Arthur Hunnicut, & one of the bad, Christopher George. Hunnicut plays aging town deputy Bull, a veteran of the Indian Wars. Playing the Walter Brennan part from RIO BRAVO, I found myself enjoying Hunnicut's doleful, phlegmatic Bull, a man who personifies the principle of fuck around and find out, more than Brennan's cackling-mother-hen approach. George, best known from TV's RAT PATROL, brings a Ray Liotta energy to his role as gunhand Nelse McLeod, a likability belying his lethality. Both Hunnicut & George were veteran supporting players, and here both argue they deserved better, and more, especially George. Though Ed Asner makes a fine heavy, it's George I can't stop watching.
Which segues nicely into a brief comparison of RIO BRAVO & EL DORADO's visual asthetics (and would segue even nicer if I hadn't called attention to it.) In short, EL DORADO doesn't match RIO BRAVO. Hawks chafed at how long DP Harold Rosson took to light EL DORADO, but indulged him, mistakenly believing the result could bag them an Oscar nod for Best Cinematography. While some scenes linger in the memory, particularly a bit where Robert Mitchum lights a cigarette in jail, some of EL DORADO looks, and sounds, like a high-budget episode of GUNSMOKE as scored by Lalo Schifrin. (There was no Oscar nomination, for DP or anything else.) Both pictures shot at Old Tucson Street studios in Arizona, but Russell Harlan's use of ochre/amber tones and ability to make a bright day look sweltering furthers the impression of being set in different places.
It's not hard to see where/when RIO BRAVO betters EL DORADO, but my knock on RIO BRAVO is structural. It's a hangout western, a movie in which Wayne fights more with Martin, Dickinson, Brennan, & Ricky Nelson than with the ostensible villains (who never struck me as all that threatening.) RIO BRAVO has time for Dino & Ricky Nelson to harmonize on a tune & Wayne&Dickinson to enaçt four acts of a five-act romantic epic. Hawks is known for world building, and maybe that gives EL DORADO an unfair advantage, in that Hawks doesn't have to spend so much time establishing character/story, but it's mostly the characters that give EL DORADO an edge with me, especially Nelson's replacement in the green-kid role, James Caan as Mississippi.
Caan had done one other picture with Hawks, a smaller part, but EL DORADO marks his emergence as a featured-player-on-the-way-up, and it's a solid bow. Caan's presence & performance obliterate most any memory of the amiable, but uninspired, Nelson. It's an un-Hawksian part in many ways, as Mississippi, though lethal with a knife, is useless with a gun, managing to miss a fleeing villain at point blank range with a scattergun. He's sort of a semi-pro, an apprentice, not a minted killer, as even Nelson's Colorado was.
According to Bogdonovich's commentary, EL DORADO differs from Hawks's usual work in not just character but shot composition, particularly his use of closeups and inserts, with which he was known to be sparing. Maybe that's the final, crucial difference for me. Though both films tell versions of the same story, EL DORADO's version, with its greater emphasis on action than talk, its indelible characters, and its darker tone, is the one I prefer.
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