Relaxin' with Howard Hawks: "El Dorado," 1966/67

Thinking about Hawks for my con­tri­bu­tion to the “Early Hawks Blogathon,” it was the reflec­tion from the late work which helped determ­ine my sub­ject in treat­ing the early work. And that, in turn, led me to look at some of the late work in more detail. What the hell. To do so is cer­tainly more fun than con­tem­plat­ing much of the con­tem­por­ary cine­mat­ic scene. Although I do think I’m gonna go see He’s Not That Into You next week. Looks like a clue­less big-budget remake of Swanberg’s LOL. Hence, I feel I must check it out before launch­ing any contra-Swanberg salvo. So. Anyway…

“No story, just char­ac­ters,” is, accord­ing to some reports, how Howard Hawks described his pro­ject El Dorado to Robert Mitchum when offer­ing him a co-lead in the film. “You and Duke play a couple of old cow­boys.” That’s a fun story, one that inspired Godard, and it may have the bene­fit of actu­ally being true, but watch­ing El Dorado is hardly any­thing like a plot-free exper­i­ence along the lines of Jeanne Dielman. There’s a very def­in­ite story here, and how Hawks tells it show­cases his acute sense, which by this point must have been second nature to him, of dra­mat­ic com­pres­sion and expansion. 

The film is made up of three nar­rat­ive mod­ules, as it were. In the first, we meet gun­man Cole Thornton (John Wayne, the afore­men­tioned “Duke”) and Sheriff J.P. Harrah (Mitchum), old friends who, in typ­ic­al Hawksian mode, have loved the same woman (Charlene Holt’s Maudie). Cole’s in town to enforce for would-be land bar­on Bart Jason (Ed Asner), a typ­ic­al won’t-get-his=hands-dirty-villain, but Harrah tells Cole that Jason isn’t a right guy, and that, if any­one, he ought to take the side of the MacDonald fam­ily, who for years have been work­ing the land Jason wants to grab. A series of mis­un­der­stand­ings cul­min­ates with a young MacDonald dead and Cole with a bul­let dan­ger­ously close to his spine, cour­tesy of would-be aven­ging MacDonald Joey (as in Josephine, played by Michele Carey). Thornton leaves town to seek oth­er work and tend to his wound.

Some time later, Thornton returns to El Dorado, with a young, poetry-spouting, knife-throwing (because he’s so lousy with a gun) would-be adven­turer named Mississippi (née Alan Bourdillion Traherne) in tow. Where he finds J.P. pretty much dead drunk in the jail­house, atten­ded by old coot Bull (Arthur Hunnicutt), and unable to cope with the com­ing storm of Bart Jason’s gun­men. So, okay, here’s a young pup named after a river/state, an alco­hol­ic law­man, a posse of bad guys…sounds like Rio Bravo very redux. According to Hawks bio­graph­er Todd McCarthy, El Dorado’s screen­writer Leigh Brackett (who adap­ted the story from the far dark­er tale The Stars In Their Courses by Harry Brown) called her ini­tial work “the best script I’ve ever writ­ten,” deplored the rework­ing Hawks gave the story, and called the end res­ult The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again.

Because, as McCarthy fur­ther points out, the rework­ing sub­sists largely of self-plagiarism. Not just of Rio Bravo, but of A Girl In Every Port. Not to men­tion The Big Sleep—any­one who recalls the fate of Eddie Mars will know how a par­tic­u­lar ploy of Thornton’s will turn out. 

What of Hawks’ dis­in­clin­a­tion, late in his career, to break new ground with Brackett’s tra­gic script? (The vet­er­an screen­writer Brackett, whose final work was on The Empire Strikes Back, wel­comed the freedoms that New Hollywood ushered in; she loved Altman’s The Long Goodbye because it was the only film that had Terry Lennox get what was com­ing to him.) And what of his cyn­ic­al rejoin­der to those who dis­ap­proved of his recyc­ling: “…the copy made more money than the ori­gin­al, and I was very pleased with it?”

We can make of it what we will, but the proof is in the pud­ding, and El Dorado is an entirely pleas­ur­able view­ing exper­i­ence, one in which Hawks gives some extra leg room to the set pieces (the lop­ing rhythms extend to some fairly tense scenes but don’t com­prom­ise their ten­sion; see, for instance, Thornton’s first encounter with Joey MacDonald) and lets every per­former­’s per­son­al­ity (with the pos­sible excep­tion of Asner, who just gets to glower) have more than a few moments. Wayne has rarely seemed more nat­ur­al, Mitchum more dis­arm­ingly mod­est. Caan (below, with Hunnicutt and Carey) deploys a boy­ish charm that would soon van­ish com­pletely from his act­or’s toolbox. 

And what Manny Farber called Hawks “poet­ic sense of action” is on full dis­play in the film’s centerpiece,the cli­max of the pic­ture’s second nar­rat­ive mod­ule, a long chase and shootout by night in El Dorado, with Wayne’s Thornton repris­ing Rio Bravo’s immor­tal line “let’s make some music!” and then lit­er­ally doing so, chim­ing the church bells in the bel­fry where some of Jason’s goons are hid­ing. The film’s final nar­rat­ive mod­ule sees our her­oes suf­fer a tem­por­ary defeat before re-claiming the town that Caan’s Mississippi keeps spout­ing Poe about.

Nick Tosches has writ­ten of “the one song, ever chan­ging, ever rein­carn­at­ing,” and per­haps we’d prefer to believe that Hawks was work­ing from a belief in that, rather than in Giving The People What They Want, Again. In any case, El Dorado was released in the States (after a late ’66 engage­ment in Japan) in the sum­mer of ’67. The sum­mer of you-know-what, as well as the sum­mer that New Hollywood star­ted knock­ing down the door with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde (a film influ­enced by Godard and Truffaut, who had been influ­enced by…Howard Hawks…). Some revi­sion­ist his­tor­i­ans might have you believe that Hawks’ pic­ture looked like a film out of its time at the time. In fact, it was a pretty big hit—the twelfth biggest pic­ture of the year, accord­ing to McCarthy. And today, unmoored from any zeit­geist, it merely looks like one for the ages. 

UPDATE: Joseph Failla recalls a Hawksian edu­ca­tion, and anoth­er of El Dorado’s per­son­al­it­ies: