Tres rios

All the Chinese were wearing Mao suits in 1980. Under Deng Xiao Ping the country was becoming the tiniest bit capitalistic but remained culturally isolated from the rest of the world. No one I talked with there had heard of John Wayne. Given Hollywood’s global grasp (and perhaps my own provinciality), I thought everyone knew the Duke.

Wayne acted in 175 movies. Three of them began with “rio”: Rio Grande (1950), Rio Bravo (1959), and Rio Lobo (1970). Los tres rios (as the Mexicans would say) are set in Texas, faithful to the powerful persona of the cinematic Wayne and made by Hollywood’s most revered directors of classic Westerns, John Ford and Howard Hawks.

John Ford’s black and white Rio Grande is named for America’s second longest river. It begins on the Continental Divide, 12,000 feet high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, flows through New Mexico, forms the border between Texas and Mexico and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of almost 1,900 miles.

Wayne plays a former Civil War officer now in the Cavalry, Col. Kirby Yorke, who is stationed by the Rio Grande. He is charged with quelling Apache raids but he cannot pursue the troublemakers across the river and into Mexico. To complicate matters, his long unseen but now grown son is assigned to his unit. This brings his fiery, estranged wife (Maureen O’Hara) to the Fort to try and rescue her son.

The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman said that John Ford was the greatest director that ever lived. He won five Academy Awards, more than anyone else.

Ford shows his simple, straightforward stuff in Rio Grande through what he called his “invisible technique” that made viewers forget they are watching a movie. And he provides us with music by the Sons of the Pioneers disguised as Cavalry soldiers.

He also shows us the river. But it isn’t the Rio Grande. It’s the Colorado. The movie was shot around Moab, Utah.

Rio Bravo is the Mexican name for the Rio Grande.

In Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo Wayne is Sheriff John T. Chance. John T. (as he is called by his love interest played by Angie Dickenson) jails the thug brother of the county’s land baron and gets into a lot of trouble as a result.

In typical Hawks fashion, John T. is supported by a sidekick (a drunk played by Dean Martin), an old codger (Walter Brennan), and an up-and-coming young man (Ricky Nelson). They are, again according to the Hawks code, supplied with appropriate nicknames, Dude, Stumpy, and Colorado (for the state, not the river). Angie Dickenson’s character is nicknamed “Feathers” to show that, even though she’s a girl, she’s sort of part of this otherwise male bonding.

Martin and Nelson provide us with some fine go-along music.

But donde es el rio? We never see it.

Rio Bravo is widely regarded as a nearly perfect film. The leader of the French New Wave, director Jean-Luc Godard, said this movie “is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perceptions, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all the others.” Sounds like Ford’s invisible technique, huh?

Hawks himself said: “The best thing to do is to tell a story as though you’re seeing it. Tell it from your eyes. Let the audience see exactly as they would if they were there.”

Hawks made some of the best-known American films and not just Westerns, movies as varied as Scarface, The Big Sleep, I Was a Male War Bride, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He often mixed in a good dose of humor. Perhaps it was the humor that kept his pictures from being taken seriously enough when they first were shown to receive an Academy Award, although Hawks was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1975, two years before he died.

Rio Lobo was Howard Hawks’ last film. John Wayne was in his 60s when he played, once again, a Civil War Colonel, Cord McNally. The plot reprises many of the ideas in Rio Bravo, especially male bonding and the supremacy of the group over the individual.

Rio Lobo opens with a terrific Civil War train hijacking but it’s not as perfect a film as Rio Bravo. When McNally’s group moves on to the Texas town Rio Lobo, it has saguaro cacti around it. Texans can’t boast about the size of their saguaro because the state doesn’t have any.

And in this case there is no river at all.

“Lobo” is the Spanish word for “wolf,” which may or may not have something to do with the movie. The only Lobo River I could find is in Africa where they don’t speak Spanish.