Rio Bravo Quotes

To the powerful masters we repre­sent all that is absurd, negative, irreverent, and disruptive in this America that they so despise and scorn. But on the other hand, to the great mass of the American people (I'm referring to Our America, which is everything south of the Rio Bravo)-these peoples derisively called "mestizos"-we represent everything noble, sincere, and combative.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood’s greatest directors—John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang—while also starring in Jean Renoir’s Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan’s greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars.

love John Wayne. I love his cowboy movies especially, which makes sense I guess. Rio Bravo may be my favorite.

To Rio Bravo, Brennan brought his own brand of realism. He explained his reaction to the script to reporter Steven H. Scheuer: They tell me I’m playing a crippled old man who’s got a rifle built into his crutch. Any time they get rough with him, he shoots them down with his crutch. I think about this for a little while, and then I asked them a simple question. I said, “When this crippled old man picks up his crutch and shoots why doesn’t he fall flat on his doggone back?” They changed the script.

Angie Dickinson has often spoken of her admiration for Brennan, and did so again for this biography: Brennan and I had no scenes together, and therefore rarely crossed paths. On a big set like that, if you don’t work, you don’t just come around and “hang out.” Either for me or for WB. One day we were on the set together in Tucson, and we had a lovely brief chat, and he was so very dear, gentle and calm. But we made no other contact. I can only say that he was a sweet man, and he was brilliant in Rio Bravo, as in everything he did. He was a true ACTOR. And by the way, I regret I did nothing to promote a friendship. . . . However, I think he was a very private man, and one just didn’t do that to a legend like WB. It was so like Brennan to be utterly accessible on a set, but also to draw a sharp distinction between work and his personal life.

Rio Bravo is an answer to the lionization of the lone town marshal, portrayed so powerfully by Gary Cooper in High Noon, but Rio Bravo is also a deft remake of Red River, one that highlights Brennan’s role as a moral authority and a witness to history central to the ethos of Howard Hawks’s Westerns. But heretofore the Brennan persona rarely displaced that of the stars he supported. That would happen when, in the television age, the actor became, like Ward Bond in Wagon Train (1957–61), the locus of the action, the center around which the family and the nation revolved.

We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore.