The road to El Dorado

Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running appre­ci­ates Howard Hawks’ El Dorado:

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 [Hawks’ bio­graph­er Todd] McCarthy. And today, unmoored from any zeit­geist, it merely looks like one for the ages.

We were taught El Dorado at school (Little Ilford Comprehensive, Film Studies and Photography Dept), largely I think because Hawks was the pro­to­typ­ic­al auteur but also because we had an ana­morph­ic 16mm print of El Dorado that we could watch over and over again. At the time it was con­sidered (and we were told) that El Dorado was a weak, col­our imit­a­tion of Rio Bravo so it’s nice to see it get its due.

Here’s a 10 minute clip:

This video is no longer avail­able due to a copy­right claim by Paramount Pictures Corp..