Synopsis
The sheriff of a small town in southwest Texas must keep custody of a murderer whose brother, a powerful rancher, is trying to help him escape. After a friend is killed trying to muster support for him, he and his deputies must find a way to hold out against the rancher's hired guns until the marshal arrives. In the meantime, matters are complicated by the presence of a young gunslinger - and a mysterious beauty who just came in on the last stagecoach.
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Cast
- John WayneJohn Chance
- Dean MartinDude
- Angie DickinsonFeathers
- Walter BrennanStumpy
- Ricky NelsonColorado Ryan
- Ward BondPat Wheeler
- John RussellNathan Burdette
- Pedro Gonzalez GonzalezCarlos Robante
- Estelita RodriguezConsuela Robante
- Claude AkinsJoe Burdette
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Reader
It's American filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin. - 100
Chicago Sun-Times
To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water. - 100
LarsenOnFilm
Directed by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not. - 100
TV Guide Magazine
Rio Bravo is an excellent film featuring strong, proud, but very human characters who fight against their various handicaps and pull together to do a job and do it right. - 100
The A.V. Club
Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian. - 100
Chicago Tribune
Bravo shines with humor and character. [28 Jul 2006, p.C10] - 90
The New Yorker
The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission. - 90
Time Out
Beautifully acted, wonderfully observed, and scripted with enormous wit and generosity, it's the sort of film, in David Thomson's words, which reveals that 'men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world'.
