Product Details

• Released on: 2007-05-22
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Collector's Edition, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC, Import
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Dimensions: 1.20 pounds
• Running time: 141 minutes

Amazon.com Essential Video
When it comes down to naming the best Western of all time, the list usually narrows to three completely different pictures: John Ford's The Searchers, Howard Hawks's Red River, and Hawks's Rio Bravo. About the only thing they all have in common is that they all star John Wayne. But while The Searchers is an epic quest for revenge and Red River is a sweeping cattle-drive drama ("Take 'em to Missouri! Yeeee-hah!"), Rio Bravo is on a much more modest scale. Basically, it comes down to Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), his sobering-up alcoholic friend Dude (Dean Martin), the hotshot new kid Colorado (Ricky Nelson), and deputy-sidekick Stumpy (Walter Brennan), sittin' around in the town jail, drinkin' black cofee, shootin' the breeze, and occasionally, singin' a song. Hawks--who, like his pal Ernest Hemingway, lived by the code of "grace under pressure"--said he made Rio Bravo as a rebuke to High Noon, in which sheriff Gary Cooper begged for townspeople to help him. So, Hawks made Wayne's Sheriff Chance a consummate professional--he may be getting old and fat, but he knows how to do his job, and he doesn't want amateurs getting mixed up in his business; they could get hurt. This most entertaining of movies also achieved some notoriety in the '90s when Quentin Tarantino (director of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown) revealed that he uses it as a litmus test for prospective girlfriends. Oh, and if the configuration of characters sounds familiar, it should: Hawks remade Rio Bravo two more times--as El Dorado in 1967, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan; and as Rio Lobo in 1970, with Wayne, Jack Elam, and Christopher Mitchum. --Jim Emerson

Review
The inspiration behind Rio Bravo originated with the outrage that John Wayne and director/producer Howard Hawks both felt over the 1952 western High Noon -- neither man appreciated that earlier movie's depiction of the town marshal (played by Gary Cooper) and his desperate appeal to the townspeople for help against the band of outlaws headed their way. And so the two of them, in conjunction with screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, set out to do a film in response, and the result was Rio Bravo, which was a complete inversion of High Noon in virtually every detail of its plot and structure. Both movies unfold in strictly linear fashion, but where High Noon takes place in real time, covering the life and death of a western town on a single morning in 85 minutes of screen time, Rio Bravo sets a surprisingly leisurely pace across nearly two and a half hours, telling a story spread across three days. Both movies utilize the services of composer Dimitri Tiomkin; but in contrast to High Noon's use of a central ballad that only the audience could hear, the centerpieces of Rio Bravo's score include a trumpet dirge that is very much in the consciousness of the characters; and the score also contains a pair of songs (one of them, "My Rifle, My Pony, And Me," adapted by Tiomkin from his own main title music for the 1948 Hawks/Wayne film Red River) sung by two of the characters. Finally, beyond its relationship to High Noon, Rio Bravo's most notable aesthetic attribute is its marvelously neat construction. As the opening credits roll, we see the wagons led by Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) toward the Texas border town of Rio Bravo. Those wagons, as we later learn, contain dynamite, a cargo that will play an essential role in resolving the film's central plot conflict; and we glimpse Wheeler himself, whose friendship with Chance and whose offer of help will lead to his murder, an event that will drive the plot for the last two thirds of the movie, right through to the denouement. Rio Bravo was Bond's final film and it was a fitting send-off for Wayne's longtime friend -- his character is essential to the structure of the movie, introducing the town of Rio Bravo under the credits and providing the means by which Wayne can explain what is going on and why he and his deputies have to do this job alone. "Joe Burdette isn't worth one of those that would get killed," Chance tells Wheeler, who ends up the only man on the side of the law who is killed. The care with which Brackett and Furthman's screenplay lays out its material -- in what is essentially a moral, literary, and cinematic chess game -- is reflected throughout this "opening." Every key character and plot element is introduced within the first 30 minutes, along with the relationships that drive them, leading inexorably, move after move (not without some surprise twists) to the violent denouement. Rio Bravo was one of Wayne and Hawks's most successful and satisfying vehicles, which may help explain why they liked it so much and were so impressed with its potential for further exploration, that they remade it twice, once as El Dorado and once as Rio Lobo. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

On the DVD
Disc 1:
Newly restored picture and audio
Commentary by director John Carpenter and historian/critic Richard Schickel
John Wayne Westerns trailer gallery
Subtitles: English, Fran�ais, Portugu�s & Korean (feature film only)

Disc 2:
Career profile The Men Who Made the Movies: HOward Hawks
2 all-new featurettes:
Commemoration: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo
Old Tuscon: Where the Legends Walked

Customer Reviews

Rio Bravo [blu-ray]
The quality of the transfer is much better than the regular DVD, in particular the colour benefits from 1080. There are a couple of scenes which are still a bit grainy, but that may be from the original film quality. It is well worth the price to upgrade to the 1080 version.

review of Ultimate Collector's edition(movie =3/5.5, collection=4/5
i really like this Western.it stars John Wayne,Ricky Nelson,Dean martin
and Angie Dickinson,to name a few.the acting is superb in this
movie.but what i really like is the dialogue and the unique mix of
characters.the story is also good.it's straightforward and
simple.Unlike The Searchers,another John Wayne movie.Rio bravo is not a
sweeping,grand epic.it takes place in basically one town.nevertheless,i
found it engaging and compelling.this edition contains a raft of
extras,including two documentaries and a short featurette.Like the
Ultimate edition of The Searchers,here is also a reproduction of the
1959 Dell comic book,a reproduction of the original press book from
1959,and 8 full colour lobby cards.as for the movie itself,i think it's
pretty well done,and deserves a 3.5/5.the collection is definitely worth
having,and i give that a 4/5

Bravo, Rio Bravo
One of the best westerns made at the time. Others have been made more recently that use modern technical skill, but for the time and place, Rio Bravo was the epitome of the western genre and still holds up today. Period!