From there on, the narrative and character lines can be drawn directly back to
Rio Bravo
, with the situations or attributes generally reversed. This time the sheriff is the drunk who needs to be looked after by the gunslinger; the young newcomer on the scene (the novel’s Duke character transformed into James Caan’s Mississippi) can’t shoot
a lick, although he does throw a mean knife; the mercenary outlaw Nelse McLeod is a nonpareil professional whose men are dunces rather than the usual tough customers, and the ending once again involves an exchange of prisoners (Brackett refused to write this unless Hawks promised not to use dynamite again). Hawks also prominently lifted from
The Big Sleep
the scene in which Thornton forces a man
out a door, only to have the man shot by his own men expecting someone else.
Through it all, the focus is on pain, disability, aging, and the fear of losing one’s powers and abilities. Even though Hawks had dealt since his very first film,
The Road to Glory
, with characters’ infirmities, injuries, and fears of not living up to what they once were, the explicit way he confronts issues related
to human frailty and deterioration—from the vantage point of nearly seventy years—is what gives
El Dorado
its special poignance and highly personal feeling. Even if it may not be as accomplished as
Rio Bravo
or several of Hawks’s earlier films, it still comes within shooting distance of what critics, and auteurists in particular, warmly regard as an old-age masterpiece, a summing-up film that
shows that a great director always retains the potential to express himself eloquently. Hawks even threw the highbrows
a bone this time in the form of the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Eldorado,” from which the film draws its title; part of it, as spoken by James Caan in the picture, reads:
“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon
,
Down the Valley of the Shadow
,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied—
“If
you seek for Eldorado.”
The verse has always been interpreted as Hawks’s most concise statement that since there is no El Dorado, with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the key to human endeavor lies not in the goal but in the search itself. Typically, the director discouraged even this modestly intellectual analysis, maintaining that he included the poem, which he knew thanks to a Mexican
jockey who used to recite it, only because he and Brackett liked it.
With a few days off to labor on
Red Line 7000
rewrites, Brackett worked right through the late summer and fall of 1965 on
El Dorado
, trying to give her boss what he wanted. As opposed to how it had been on his last three pictures, the casting fell into place perfectly. Due to receive a flat $750,000 with an additional participation
that would bring his haul to at least $1 million, Wayne was looking forward to working with his old friend again. All the same, the star had undergone the biggest crisis of his life since their adventure in Africa, surviving a battle with cancer and the removal of half of his left lung in September 1964; rebounding with vigor, he then made
The Sons of Katier Elder
and
Cast a Giant Shadow
before
reporting to Hawks.
To play the sheriff, Thornton’s best friend, Hawks could use only someone capable of holding his own with Wayne, a man with something resembling the same physical and charismatic stature. Robert Mitchum is an actor Hawks should have worked with years before, so perfectly does his combination of authority and nonchalance fit into the director’s world. Their paths had crossed,
technically, more than twenty years earlier, when the young Mitchum played a bit in the Hawks-produced
Corvette K-225
, and Hawks had wanted him for
The Big Sky
, only to be double-crossed by Howard Hughes. It is also easy to imagine the actor taking on Matthew Garth in
Red River
, Dude in
Rio Bravo
, or the second lead in
Hatari!
that Hawks had to split in two. Mitchum said that Hawks simply called
to ask him to be
in the picture. When Mitchum asked what the story was, “He said, ‘There is no story, just you and Duke.’ I said, ‘That’s fine with me. Just tell me when to be there.’” Mitchum signed on for $300,000.
Carrying over from
Red Line 7000
, Hawks knew he wanted to use James Caan as the slightly off-center knife tosser who throws in with Thornton and Harrah, and he intended to give Charlene
Holt, after two warm-ups, her big chance on this picture as the woman fancied by both men. Disappointingly, Walter Brennan was unavailable to reprise his patented old-coot part, so Hawks paged Arthur Hunnicutt, so good in
The Big Sky
, to fill in. Once again drawing from television, he got Johnny Crawford, who had a following from
The Rifleman
, to appear as the young man who kills himself after
having been shot by Thornton. Edward Asner, then just starting his Hollywood career, was cast as the evil rancher Bart Jason, the Western stalwart Paul Fix was the doctor, and a few regulars, such as Robert Donner, John Gabriel, Diane Strom, and Anthony Rogers, also turned up. Hawks put Olaf Wieghorst, whose Western paintings are featured under the opening credits, before the cameras as the Swedish
gunsmith who supplies Mississippi’s shotgun.
For the second female part, of the impetuous MacDonald daughter who puts the bullet in Thornton’s back, Hawks picked a fabulously sexy girl he had originally tested for
Red Line 7000
, only to decide that she wasn’t yet ready to act a part. However, Hawks signed Michele Carey and started grooming her, so that by the time her next chance came around
she could handle it. A child piano prodigy who began modeling in Denver and had done
The Man From U.N.C.L.E
. and a couple of other television roles before auditioning for Hawks, Carey may have looked and sounded very contemporary, but her impetuous attitude and bareback riding in skintight pants definitely added some spice to the picture. As Hawks enthused, “She’s earthy, and girls like that who
can act are hard to find these days.”
As filming drew near, Paramount approved a budget increase to $3.85 million, but production head Howard W. Koch was worried. Knowing Hawks’s reputation for slowness, Koch wrote to the company president, George Weltner, in New York, cautioning that they should by no means count on the picture being ready for release the following summer. After the director’s
substantial overages on his two previous projects for the studio, Koch had imposed a provision giving Paramount the right to take over the picture if Hawks exceeded the budget by 10 percent. Obviously, he admitted, such a move would involve “practical difficulties,” adding that “business judgment would have to be carefully considered if we decide to take over because of the involvement of Wayne
and Mitchum and the
unavailability of substitute directors to complete a picture of this stature.” Koch concluded that he believed in the film, but that Paramount even imagined that Hawks could be pushed off a film at this stage of his career, or that his stars would abide such a move, is incredible.
Russell Harlan was busy on the protracted shoot of
Hawaii
, so to photograph
El Dorado
, Hawks
reached way back into his past, and no one was more surprised than Hal Rosson himself that Hawks wanted him for the job. The lone surviving Rosson brother, he was a year older than Hawks, and had retired in 1958. Many of his contemporaries were still working on top productions, but Rosson, who went all the way back with Hawks to
Quicksands
in 1923 and had also shot
Trent’s Last Case
, really believed
he had put away his light meter for good before Hawks convinced him to return. Rosson recalled that Hawks said, “‘Oh come on, come back,’ and I said, ‘You don’t want me,’ and he said, ‘Yes I do.’ So I went back, and I was out of my mind I ever quit.” As he acknowledged, “I would do anything for Howard Hawks, and I enjoyed doing it. It was fun.”
With Old Tucson redressed once again so it wouldn’t
too closely resemble its appearance in
Rio Bravo
or any other picture, Hawks led the company to Arizona and starting filming on October 11, 1965. Oblivious to the fact that Paramount was watching him closely, he took his own sweet time as usual, and Leigh Brackett was on hand a good deal of the time to supply revisions; as Robert Donner put it, “the script was written in sand.” Johnny Crawford,
accustomed to the eye-on-the-clock rigors of television shoots, was astonished at Hawks’s casual approach. “The atmosphere on this set was totally relaxed and ponderous, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, this is the way I thought it would be.’ I had read stories about powerful filmmakers who were like that.… What a luxury. Also what a cost. But I really enjoyed it.” One day, according to Crawford, when
the company was set to shoot his death scene at a ranch south of Tucson, some clouds moved in about noon. “Hawks looked up at the clouds and said, ‘It looks like the sun’s going to be behind the clouds for quite awhile,’ so he and John Wayne jumped in their car and drove off for Nogales. We spent the rest of the day on location and they never came back.”
To Crawford, Hawks “didn’t seem like a
man who was under any great amount of pressure. He seemed to be a very relaxed, confident, down-to-earth kind of a gentleman. A real gentleman. My first day on the set, Howard Hawks introduced me to Wayne and they invited me to sit with them at lunch. I was just thrilled. They were very interested in me and made me feel very special, asking me questions about
The Rifleman
and Chuck Connors just
like anybody else. There were no airs about them.”
As the majority of the story’s action was to be played out at night, Hawks instructed Harold Rosson to study the nocturnal paintings of Frederic Remington, of which the director had several in his collection. In particular, Hawks wanted to catch the slashes of light that the painter often featured pouring out of doors and windows onto the street,
and Rosson used yellow light to accomplish this, making sure to wash the actors with white light to avoid a jaundiced look. Encouraged by his boss’s slow pace, Rosson took ever longer to set his lights, until it finally became too much, even for Hawks. “Trouble was,” he said, “people started talking about an Academy Award, and he got slower and slower and slower and slower until it drove me
crazy.” All the same, Hawks defended Hally, as he called him, against the others’ griping. “He’d say, ‘Hally, you’re doing just fine,’” Robert Donner recalled. “And Howard let it be known that if anybody had any problem, he was the guy to talk to. He was a stand-up guy and if you were his guy, that was it.” After
El Dorado
, Rosson retired for good.
With Stuart Gilmore also tied up on
Hawaii
,
Hawks took his recommendation of an editor, John Woodcock, who began cutting the picture together on location in Tucson. Woodcock said, “Hawks shot in conventional fashion, but when I tried to draw him into a discussion about the editing he gave me the brush-off, indicating that the editorial problems were all mine and to leave him out of it.” Woodcock was also surprised, he said, that while most
of the cast and crew chowed down every night on steak, ribs, chicken, and other meaty fare, “all that I ever saw Howard Hawks eat at any meal was a plate of assorted fresh fruit.”
The camaraderie on the set was mostly casual and friendly, and Hawks and Wayne were buoyed when John Ford, frail and mostly confined to a wheelchair, came to the location for a visit. But relations between Wayne and
newcomers could always be cause for concern. The way James Caan put it, “I was this little punk working with Wayne and Mitchum … Wayne? He’d push you. He was like a twelve-year-old kid. He took a liking to me but I lost it one day and almost took a whack at him. Mitchum broke it up, and from that day on it was fine.” The young actor shortly became Duke’s chess partner during the long waits while
Rosson set up and Hawks retreated to his trailer to tinker with the dialogue. Caan, who had been so displeased about
Red Line 7000
, acted headstrong even with Hawks at times but was basically made to feel that this was a great opportunity for him and he shouldn’t cross the line, so, as he did with Wayne, he advisedly backed off. According to Hawks, Caan never realized his role was supposed to
be funny until he saw the finished film, and when the actor asked him why he hadn’t told him, Hawks supposedly said, “You’d have spoiled it. You’d have tried
to be funny.” The way Caan remembered it, during the first week of shooting “I was playing all this for real and all of a sudden I realized that Jeeze, I’d better start smiling because some of this shit I’ve gotta say is pretty fucking ridiculous.
So I started smiling. Everytime John Wayne would talk, I’d be standing alongside smiling.”
For Caan, his personal relationship with Hawks was ultimately more important than his professional one. “I had a great time with him, I loved him,” the actor reflected. “I don’t remember him so much as a great director, but I do remember him as a great man. I don’t remember him ever giving me direction
as far as the way I should or shouldn’t be feeling, but his writing was so pertinent that you had to be pretty much of a moron not to understand where you’re supposed to be. I never felt Hawks put great importance on any film. It was like, ‘We’re doing a film, for Chrissakes. If they don’t like it, give them their nickel back.’ It wasn’t all that important, we weren’t curing cancer, like a lot of
young people think they’re doing today. You never heard Hawks say, ‘We’re losing the light,’ or ‘Oh, my God, I’m five days over schedule.’ Who cares? It was nothing; it wasn’t the end of the world. What we heard was, ‘I’m hungry. Let’s wrap it for the day. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.’
“He was a guy who just deserved, and got, a lot of respect from everybody,” Caan observed. “At the end of his
career, he did what he liked, he did what would make it enjoyable for him, and for everybody around, pretty much. He had people around him, not necessarily because they were the best, but because they were decent and fun, people that he liked. There was nobody I ever remember that I disliked when I was around Howard. The guy earned the right to do things that he liked and be around people he liked
and I find absolutely no fault with that whatsoever.