RIO BRAVO And ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13: Essential Viewing In Any Order

Back in 2008, I had the opportunity to moderate a Q&A with John Carpenter between screenings of Escape From New York and its sequel, which will probably go down as one of the scariest things I ever did in my life. Carpenter is my hero, and it was actually the first time I had done anything like that (way to start off small!), so while I'm usually pretty laid-back I think you probably could have seen my hands shaking even if you were in the back of the theater. Anyway, to introduce him I told a (probably incoherent) story about how Carpenter's hero was Howard Hawks, and how Hawks was the first director he took note of when he was a young man/budding film enthusiast (and how in turn, that guy for me was John Carpenter), and it was at that moment I realized that I had never really actually seen a Howard Hawks-directed film.

Conspiracy theorists can argue that I have, because of course I have seen Hawks' production of The Thing From Another World, credited to Christian Nyby in what was apparently a Poltergeist-y situation, but that can't really count. And I have plenty of memories of watching John Wayne movies and various Westerns with my dad as a kid, so odds are I had seen plenty of material Hawks had unquestionably directed. But it isn't likely that I ever sat down and watched any of them in their entirety, and even if I did, I would have been like seven or eight years old - any opinion and/or memory of the film would be rather worthless. So on that day I vowed to see more of them, and now, eight years later, I finally have*. Well, one of them; specifically, Rio Bravo. And, staying on brand, it's because I wanted to write about John Carpenter again.

Ever since I saw Assault on Precinct 13 in 1995, I had read (probably in either Leonard Maltin's guide or something along those lines; I didn't have the internet then) that it was a loose retelling of Rio Bravo, Hawks' 1959 film starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. For more than twenty years it's been in the back of my mind that I should watch it, so when the BMD overlords decided this month's theme would be alternative Westerns, I knew A. I'd do a Carpenter movie and B. it was time to fulfill this 20+ year desire to see where he got his ideas. So I ordered Rio Bravo off of Amazon, and giggled like a loon when I discovered that it actually had a John Carpenter commentary on it, because of course it did. Carpenter can barely stay interested in the commentaries for his own films (he actually leaves one of his Masters of Horror ones; you can hear him putting on his coat and everything) so I love that he would sit down for a 140 minute movie he had no involvement with, as if the movie gods wanted to ensure I actually get off my ass and watch it. Because then I could instantly rewind it and watch again so I could hear my man's thoughts.

My biggest surprise with the film is how it lacked the one thing I was pretty sure it had: Wayne teaming up with some scoundrel or crook to protect his jail from an even bigger scoundrel or crook. Somewhere over the past twenty years I learned that the film revolved around Wayne fending off a guy who was trying to spring his brother from jail, and since no one in Assault was trying to free anyone, I guess I just figured that Carpenter was inspired by the idea of two opposing sides of the law having to work together to defeat a common enemy. But no, as far as general ideas go, it's really only the "protect the jail" concept that Carpenter borrowed - everything else is a little more specific and couldn't have been gleaned from a Wiki synopsis. In fact, the most overt references are in the credits - for his editing, Carpenter gave himself the pseudonym "John T. Chance", which is Wayne's character's name, and named one of his characters "Leigh" after Bravo's screenwriter, Leigh Brackett (he'd use her full name in Halloween). Reading basic plot summaries side by side, you'd never know there was much of a relation: Assault concerns a group of prisoners and cops being besieged by a gang hell bent on revenge, whereas Bravo is about Wayne and his deputies trying to keep villainous land-owner Burdette (John Russell) from retrieving his murderous brother (Claude Akins) out of their holding cells.

It's also not very urgent - the movie takes place over several days, as opposed to Assault's roughly 24 hour period. Burdette doesn't even show up until around the halfway point, and he remains off-screen for giant chunks of the film after that - including the big action finale. Wayne, Martin, etc. spend most of the movie just sort of hanging out, waiting for the US Marshal to come collect Akins and making sure no one does anything stupid (the bad guys' options are limited - Martin's deputy character stands near the town's entrance and collects the guns from anyone entering). I knew it wouldn't be a bullet fest, because that sort of thing didn't exist in 1959, but I was kind of taken aback at how casual the whole affair was - most of Burdette's threats are assumed, and only one good guy gets killed as a result of this dilemma (early on, gunned down as he walks down the street).

I hope none of this sounds like a complaint. On the contrary, considering how grim Carpenter's film is ("I wanted vanilla twist!"), I was happily surprised by how rather pleasant the film that inspired it was - half of Rio Bravo is a straight up romantic comedy about Feathers (Angie Dickinson, in her feature breakthrough role) trying to woo the stoic Chance. She is introduced as a possibly card cheat, but despite Chance's suspicious attitude toward her (and refusal to apologize for misjudging her, as it was someone else who was cheating) she somehow becomes quite smitten with him, flirting at every chance and even standing outside his door to make sure Burdette's men didn't try to off him while he slept. And through it all he's flustered and standoffish toward her, clearly uncomfortable by her forwardness - it's wonderful! After a while I honestly didn't even care much about the Burdette business (I was pretty sure John Wayne would come out victorious - spoiler, I was right), but was fully invested in their banter and eventual romance.

Eventually I realized Carpenter was borrowing a bit of this stuff for his film as well. Austin Stoker's character Bishop (introduced in a very western-like manner: a lawman walking out of his home and riding into town, quietly observing the land he is sworn to protect) has some minor flirtations with Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) that recall the Chance/Feathers relationship, and Carpenter has referred to her character as a "Hawksian woman" in interviews and his commentary. But I also realized that if I had seen Rio Bravo before I saw Assault (and knew of the former's influence on the latter), I might have been more surprised at some of Carpenter's narrative decisions. Charles Cyphers' character is kind of set up as a Wayne-like hero, seen as more fair than his peers, and he's also higher ranking than Stoker's lieutenant - if I went into the movie knowing it was inspired by Rio Bravo, I'd assume Cyphers was in the Wayne role and Stoker was standing in for Dean Martin. And thus my mind would have been kind of blown when Cyphers gets killed off almost instantly, leaving Stoker as the guy in charge. Not that it would have changed my opinion of Assault any (it remains my 3rd favorite Carpenter after Halloween and The Thing), but it certainly would have given me a different experience when I first watched it.

Then again, maybe it's better that I waited until I was thirty-five to see Hawks' film, instead of seeing it in the middle of the '90s when I was very much into violent movies (same year I first saw The Killer and Henry, not to mention my then-obsession with the work of one Quentin Tarantino). I would be willing to bet I would have found the movie "boring" (I certainly wouldn't have cared for the romantic stuff then - my rom-com appreciation was still a few years away) and carried a low opinion of it for the past two decades. And I certainly don't regret seeing Assault as a young man; I revisited it for the first time since becoming a father and can only assume my repeated viewings as a youth desensitized me enough to watch the death of the little girl (a scene even Carpenter seems to regret in retrospect) without having a meltdown, because that sort of thing is far too traumatizing to me now. I even have trouble with shitty slasher movies on occasion; I start thinking about the parents of the horny dead teens and get all bummed out - if I hadn't seen this movie and someone told me it included such a scene, I would probably never watch it. So in that respect, I very much appreciated Rio Bravo's relatively G-rated nature - the body count is very low, no one is particularly evil (Chance and Burdette are pretty civil to each other in their one big scene together), and I don't know where Carpenter got the idea to execute some poor ice cream man, but it certainly wasn't here. The bad guys don't even kill Dean Martin when they have a chance - they just steal his hat! Long story short, this over-sensitive dad was quite happy with Rio Bravo's lighthearted charms.

On the Assault on Precinct 13 commentary, Carpenter name-checks a few other influences, both from Hawks' other films (To Have and Have Not, Hatari!) and other filmmakers - Night of the Living Dead being just as big of an influence as Rio Bravo. He also notes a few other Rio Bravo inspirations that I didn't pick up on, like the two cops finding the dead telephone repairman when his blood drips on their car (he was referencing the scene in Bravo where a bad guy's blood drips into a beer, giving away his position), and he never lets the film's "urban western" concept go unmentioned for long. When the gang members start attacking he refers to them as "Indians" (let it slide, PC police) and, in the film itself, he cuts off all communication and electricity, putting our heroes in the same situation as Chance and his pals back in the 1880s - they can't see who's coming, and they can't call for help. And he doesn't mention it if memory serves, but as I rewatched the climax with his voiceover I noticed another shared trait: both Bishop and Chance notice an explosive device (an oxygen tank in Assault, dynamite in Rio Bravo) that could have gone off should a stray bullet have hit it, before deciding to use it against their respective foes.

Hawks went on to unofficially remake the film twice with El Dorado and Rio Lobo, both of which starred Wayne as well. It won't be tomorrow, but it won't take twenty years either: I will check those out and see what else Carpenter borrowed for his film - maybe one of those had that "good guy and bad guy team up against worse guy" plot I was so certain Rio Bravo had. In turn, Carpenter stuck with tradition, taking a cue from Hawks and directing an unofficial remake of Assault on Precinct 13 (which also got an official remake in 2005 - it was OK).That would be his 2001 film Ghosts of Mars, which took place on Mars but otherwise recycled Assault's "cops and bad guys team up against a horde of enemies" concept, casting Natasha Henstridge in the Austin Stoker role and Ice Cube as the charismatic bad guy. Maybe now that I've seen Rio Bravo I can find a little more to like in that one (I only saw it once, during its twelve-second theatrical run, and dubbed it Carpenter's worst ever film), and will speed up plans to give it another chance (plans that first surfaced when Phil defended it a couple years back - told you, I'm really slow to get to these things). But if I never get around to it, I'm glad I at least made good on my Rio Bravo promise - not only is it a great movie in its own right, but it gave me new appreciation for one of my favorite films, which isn't something that happens very often.

*In meager defense of myself, I recorded two of them on Tivo that year - The Big Sleep and El Dorado - but never found time to watch them, probably because I used to watch a horror movie a day. And then the Tivo was retired in favor of an HD cable box DVR, so they remain forever trapped on a hunk of metal in my closet somewhere.