As we continue our trip through the Sight and Sound Top 250 Movies of All Time list, we come to #67, Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo. And as always I’ll note that for those just joining us, you can find a full introduction to what the Sight and Sound Top 250 list is, and a look at the complete list of the movies on it, along with links to the ones I’ve already written about here. And, if you want to be sure not to miss any of these posts, just head on over to the Facebook page and give it a “like”or follow me on Twitter (both of those links are also in the sidebar) where I post anytime one of these – or anything else on the blog, along with just random other links and thoughts that may not make it into full posts – goes up. Trust me, if you’re not following one or the other (or both), you’re not getting the full Durmoose Movies experience..
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Okay, I’m going to be right upfront here and say that any western that stars Dean Martin has my attention immediately. Then when you add to that John Wayne and director Howard Hawks, you have a sure-fire hit and possibly an instant classic.
Rio Bravo has all of that, plus teen heartthrob Ricky Nelson and western stalwart Walter Brennan and an early appearance from Angie Dickinson. Sweet spot? Let’s just say if you’re a western fan at all (and I am definitely talking classic westerns here, not the more modern “deconstructed”” style) then you’re definitely going to find that spot licked and nibbled.
Martin, as per his persona, plays a sheriff’s deputy named “Dude” who cannot stay out of the bottle – so much so that he has been given the Spanish nickname “Borrachon” which translates to “Big Drunk”. Wayne is Sheriff John T. Chance who has a history with Dude and remembers what a great gunfighter he used to be. After a confrontation in a saloon leads to Joe Burdette (played by Claude Akin) killing an unarmed bystander, Chance is forced to arrest Burdette who is the brother of Nathan Burdette, the powerful rancher who holds sway over the town,.
Ricky Nelson plays Colorado Ryan, a reluctant gunslinger who is eventually drawn into the upcoming battle with Burdette’s forces. Dickinson is a mysterious drifter named Feathers (yeah, I said “Feathers”) who is introduced winning a card game in which Chance thinks she is cheating, though she soon proves otherwise and fingers the real cheater.
All of this of course leads in the best western tradition to a showdown and shootout between Burdette’s men and Chance’s uneasy allies. It’s not really a spoiler to say that Wayne’s team wins. That’s pretty much a given from the start. Instead this is definitely one of those cases where it’s all about the journey rather than the destination, and with a master like Hawks at the wheel, the journey is definitely a delight.
It’s interesting to see Nelson, who was a hotshot young singer at the time singing along with veteran crooner Martin. Wayne, of course, is completely at home in his role as the embodiment of American western bravado and swagger. And Dickinson shows why she would soon be one of America’s leading actresses
So is Rio Bravo one of the 250 best movies ever made? Possibly. But without doubt it is one of the best classic westerns ever, and definitely worthwhile viewing for anyone who is a fan of the genre, and the type of film who may make fans of those who aren’t.
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Stark.
However, Godard’s innovative shooting style also extended to the editing room, where he decided to cut not only between scenes, but inside them, taking out anything he felt extraneous or boring. This led to what have been called “jump cuts”where the background may change dramatically while conversations may be taking place. These jump cuts also occur during action scenes, often with the camera only focusing on individual objects or quick actions, all of which serves to make the movie move much more quickly an adding an extra layer of intensity.
The film opens with a dedication to film noir house Monogram Pictures, an the reason for that seems to be two-fol. First, the movie is obviously Goard’s riff on the noir genre, including many direct references to classics of the style such as The Maltese Falcon, which is paraphrased in a statement by our protagonist Michel who states that he always falls in love with the wrong woman. For that matter Michel’s American girlfriend Patricia is, despite her outwardly light demeanor, an almost prototypical femme fatale, eventually holding all the cards and becoming the final arbiter of MIchel’s fate.
From the silent era on, Fritz Lang has been one of Germany’s most celebrated and interesting film makers. Most film fans likely know him for his ingenious silent science fiction epic Metropolis, or from his classic Peter Lorre-starring noir M.
The film opens in a noisy print shop where we find disgraced police detective Hofmeister attempting to uncover a criminal conspiracy. After a shoot out with the criminal gang, Hofmeister escapes and calls his former boss, Inspector Lohmann. While he is attempting to explain what he has discovered, Hofmeister’s home is broken into and after shots are exchanged, the detective disappears, only to later turn up in the same asylum as Mabuse, somehow driven inexplicably insane.
Interestingly, it seems that despite the mad doctor’s incarceration, his criminal gang is still active and is still carrying out crimes just as outlined in Mabuse’s writings, a fact noticed by Baum’s colleague, Dr. Kramm when he stumbles upon pages of Mabuse’s writing which he inadvertently knocks from Baum’s desk.
Meanwhile, Inspector Lohmann has become suspicious that Mabuse may somehow be connected to the crime which is running rampant through the city, so he goes to the asylum to see what he can perhaps learn from the doctors or even from Mabuse himself. However, upon arriving, Lohmann is informed that Mabuse died earlier that very morning. Lohmann is shown the body and is assured that Mabuse is not only certainly dead but that there is no way that the body can be any other than that of the doctor.
From this point on, all bets are off as the crime spree continues and the increasingly harried police inspector does his best to figure out exactly what is going on and who can possibly be the master of the criminal gang.
Robert Bresson is one of those film makers I’ve hear a lot of praise for, but I’ve never actually seen any of his movies.
The pair proceed to a local frame shop, where, despite the clerk’s initial hesitance, she takes the bill and gives them change. When the store’s owner arrives, he immediately recognizes the bill as fake and takes her to task for accepting it, whereupon she immediately reminds him that earlier in the week he had also accepted two counterfeit bills. The owner decides that rather then report the incidents to the police he will simply pass all three bills along to some unsuspecting soul.
That “unsuspecting soul” turns out to be Yvon Targe, a young man who presents the shop owner with a bill for delivering heating oil. Unfortunately for Yvon, the bill is recognized as fake by a waiter at a restaurant, and Yvon is arrested for trying to pass counterfeit bills.
Finally, out of desperation, Yvon agrees to be the getaway driver for a bank robbery. The police manage to thwart the robbery, and while he is trying to make his own escape, Yvon is arrested. He is sentenced to three years in prison. During his time in jail, Yvon learns of the death of his daughter, and eventually receives a letter from his wife informing him that she is leaving him and moving on with her life
Bresson has a very interesting visual style that at first can seem a bit off-putting. There are times when he seems to focus more on objects than people, such as the scene where a group of four women in the prison are inspecting letters being sent to he prisoners. Instead of making the faces of the women the focal point of the scene as one might expect, Bresson centers his camera on the plastic bins in which the letters are delivered with the women seated in a circle around it.
Another interesting feature of the film is Bresson’s tendency toward off- screen action. This is especially apparent in the bank robbery scene where the focus throughout remains almost entirely on Yvon waiting in the car as opposed to what is happening inside or outside of the bank. We get just enough of the proceedings to follow what is going on, but the emphasis is on Yvon and his reactions.
Who are we in the world when we are not ourselves? In many ways this is the essential (and existential) question that is at the heart of Krzysztof Kieślowski’
While in Krakow, Weronika visits a friend at a rehearsal for a male choir and finds herself unable to keep from adding a soprano accompaniment to the voices. She is noticed by the director who asks her to audition for a part in an upcoming concert. Unsurprisingly, Weronika wins the part, but on the night of her debut, mid-solo, she collapses onstage and dies, and we are then given a perspective shot of her spirit as it flies above the audience and out of the auditorium.
Veronique, we come to find, is a music teacher, and after an interlude in which she take her students to see a marionette performance, we see her teaching them a passage from the same piece of music that Weronika was singing when she died.
I say somewhat explained because Kieślowski is not so much about explaining the mysteries of life or of death – of solving them. Instead, he is much more interested in embracing the questions and following where ever they might lead. He is also curious about the ways in which his characters (and by that I mean not just the main characters, but also those on the periphery) are, or at least may be, connected. This is a theme he will return to again an again, finally making perhaps his most compelling statement on the subject in the conclusion to his epic Three Colors trilogy, Red.
The 
Paris, Texas isn’t a place on a map, it’s a place in the soul.
Along the road, Travis slowly begins to open up to Walt, and we find out a lot about what has happened to him in the time he has been missing. Upon arriving at Walt and Anne’s house, the relationship between Travis and Hunter is at first strained, but eventually begins to thaw as the two learn to trust each other, and they begin to bond. Eventually Anne reveals to Travis that though they’ve had no contact with Jane since she left, she has been making regular deposits in a bank account for Hunter and that those deposits have been made on the same day each month at a bank in Houston. When Travis decides to go to Houston to try to track her down, Hunter declares that he is coming along too.
I think that’s about as far as I want to go with a plot synopsis, because to go any further, I’d have to give away too many of the twists that lie further along the road.
Probably the most surprisingly good performance in the film comes from young Hunter Carson who plays Travis’s son Hunter. In a role that could have come off as mawkish or annoying, the young actor instead shows just the right amount of self-confidence to be neither.
If there is any nit to be picked with this film, it might be the ending which I can see some as finding too ambiguous for their taste, but in my book strikes just the right note of both hopefulness and loss. Interestingly, according to Wenders, he actually started shooting with only half of a script, with screenwriter Sam Shepherd wanting to see how the main characters played off of each other before he finished the writing.
When I wrote about 
As proved true with Late Spring, Ozu takes his time with the story and brings a stillness to the work that allows it to become almost meditative. There is very little motion to his camera work, and indeed he allows the camera at times to linger and continue to focus on a location even after the characters and action have left it, thus allowing his audience time to contemplate the actions and scenes that they have just seen along with the words that have been said in a way that I suppose could be extremely off-putting to more modern audiences who are used to being rushed from one scene to another by directors who seem to be hoping that their audiences not think about what they have just witnessed for fear that they might find that the film maker has in some way come up short of his intentions.
Ozu also shows a sense of confidence in his actors by never forcing them to go over the top with either their voices or their actions, instead letting their performances match the moment in the film. This is not to say that their are never harsh words said, nor strong emotions expressed, but they are done so in a way that fits each of the characters and there is a sencse that both types of moments, the quiet and the loud, are there to serve the purpose of the film and in truth it feels like there is rarely an extraneous word spoken nor an undeserved or unearned tear shed.
No one is going to dispute, I think, that Alfred Hitchcock deserves at least one, if not many places on this list. As a matter of fact the problem that most of those who filled out ballots likely had, considering the continued quality and the volume of the master craftsman’s work was limiting the number of Hitch’s films that they voted for.
Second you have the spy vs spy theme which allows Hitchcock to interweave characters and plots and slowly reveal the various layers of machination that are going on to the point that although the audience does have those moments of suspense which are a Hitchcock trademark where the audience knows more than the protagonist, there are still more reveals to come which can easily alter not only our perception of current events, but past ones, and make us question just who the true “good guys” (if there even are any) are and just who is loyal to whom and who we should truly be rooting for.
hen, once you take those themes and add to them the incredible set pieces and action scenes such as the infamous crop-duster scene and the climactic fight on Mount Rushmore along with a number of smaller scenes such as the confrontation at the Rushmore Visitor Center and the escape from Vandamm’s house, and you have that mix of the grandiose and the small moments which make up the best of Hitchcock’s thrillers.
Finally, one has to consider the score by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herman, which, while it may not be one of his most stand-out efforts still works incredibly well within the film and helps both to support the ongoing action when needed and to contrast it when that is what is called for. Nor can one fail to note Robert Burks’s cinematography which plays such an important role in capturing just the right moment in just the right way that it allows the master to truly make the most of the script. There is a reason that Burks was Hitchcock’s cinematographer on twelve of the director’s films, beginning with 1951’s Strangers on a Train right through until 1964’s Marnie. The only Hitchcock film he was not part of during that period was Psycho.
There’s been so much written and said about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, it’s possible interpretations and influences – there’s even been a documentary, Room 237, exploring it’s different possible (though more than a little outlandish) meanings – that it’s tough to really know where to begin with it.
At the same time, I know that there are going to be many out there who, though they may have seen images and clips from the movie, have never actually sat and watched the whole thing. After all, it was made in 1980, which means that an entire generation of movie-goers have been born and come of age since its release, and though foe a long time it seems as though one couldn’t turn on the television without it popping up on one cable channel or another, however, those days, I suspect are long past.
The family arrives at the hotel on closing day and is given a tour. The chef, Dick Hallorann, surprises Danny by telepathically offering him ice cream. To Danny, Dick explains that he and his grandmother shared this telepathic ability, which he calls “shining.” Danny asks if there is anything to be afraid of in the hotel, particularly room 237. Hallorann tells Danny that the hotel has a “shine” to it along with many memories, not all of which are good. He also tells Danny to stay out of room 237.
Wendy later tells Jack that Danny told her a “crazy woman in one of the rooms” tried strangling him. Jack investigates room 237, encountering the ghost of a dead woman, but tells Wendy he saw nothing. Wendy and Jack argue over whether Danny should be removed from the hotel and a furious Jack returns to the Gold Room, filled with ghosts attending a ball. He meets the ghost of Grady who tells Jack that he must “correct” his wife and child and that Danny has reached out to Hallorann using his “talent.” In Florida, Hallorann has a premonition that something is wrong at the hotel and flies back to Colorado. Danny starts calling out “redrum” and goes into a trance, referring to himself as “Tony”.
And in the end, do any of the above possibilities matter? No, not really. Because it is this ambiguity that largely gives the movie it’s power. It is, in large part the not knowing, the continuous pulling the rug out from under the viewer that makes the movie not just frightening but unsettling in a way that so few horror (or actually I would call this a terror movie) movies old or new really seek to be and even fewer actually accomplish. What Kubrick pulls off here is a spot-on definition of the term “masterwork” in that it exemplifies a master of his craft bringing every bit of his skill and everything that he has learned about the art of filmmaking to bear in the telling of what could otherwise have been – as we have seen in so many other films that have come before and since – merely another mundane film about a family (or any other group of people) trapped in a lone place with a killer (or at least potential killer) on the loose.
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