Rio Bravo (1959)

Rio Bravo arrived in 1959 as Howard Hawks's answer to High Noon, a film he judged deficient in the spine department, and it has spent six decades being called one of the greatest Westerns ever assembled. John Wayne plays Sheriff John T. Chance, who jails the brother of a land baron and then waits, alongside a drunk, a limping old deputy, and a young gunslinger, for the marshal to arrive. The plot is thin on purpose. Hawks fills the waiting with songs, card games, and the slow accumulation of mutual respect, which is why Quentin Tarantino treats it as the definitive hangout picture.

The cast includes Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez and Estelita Rodriguez as the Robantes, a Mexican innkeeper and his wife, and they move through the story as ordinary townspeople, not as a statement. Angie Dickinson's Feathers is sharp and self-possessed, though the film has no interest in critiquing the men around her. Dean Martin's Dude shakes through withdrawal, Walter Brennan's Stumpy hobbles about, and neither condition is offered as a lesson about anything. Nathan Burdette is rich, and the film never bothers to resent him for it. The villainy here is personal, not structural.

There is no sermonizing in Rio Bravo, no consciousness-raising, no moment where a character explains to the room what everyone ought to feel. The politics, such as they are, involve a man doing his job and declining help from people he considers unready. This is a traditional Western that neither revises the frontier myth nor interrogates it. It tells its story through action, music, and the pleasure of watching competent people work. Classification: a clean slate. The sommelier swirls the glass and finds nothing.