Paul Helmick, who had now been with Hawks for more than twenty years, was back again as associate producer, and John Woodcock was paged for another stint as film editor. To shoot the film, Hawks picked William Clothier, who was nearly as old as Hawks, had shot a dozen of Wayne’s pictures, and was known almost exclusively for his fine work
on Westerns.
The film’s most spectacular sequence would be the opening-reel train robbery and getaway, and shooting it required that the company work in Mexico, after all. A usable vintage train and sufficient track were found at Cuernavaca, not far south of Mexico City. A start date of March 16, 1970, was set; after two weeks, the company would move to the familiar standby, Old Tucson, for twenty-five
days, followed by a week in Nogales. Twenty-two days back at the Cinema Center Studios in the San Fernando Valley would round out the sixty-five-day schedule on the $5 million production.
Although there were no dramatic parallels, the idea of a runaway train actually dated back to a sequence Hawks never got to shoot for his very first film,
The Road to Glory
, forty-five years before. For this
elaborate episode, which involved the holdup, the placement of a sack of hornets inside a car, a skirmish between troops, Wayne’s horseback pursuit of the detached cars down an incline, and the train’s precarious stoppage by a series of ropes strung around trees, Hawks engaged the legendary stuntman and second-unit director Yakima Canutt. Though Hawks habitually delegated second-unit work, he was
present and involved through the entire shooting of this critical scene. Since the only usable track was the heavily traveled line
between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, at times regularly scheduled trains were held on sidings for hours so Hawks could get his shots, resulting in angry words and objects being thrown at the crew.
One day, an accident was averted when an engineer managed to jump on
a rolling train that had lost its brakes and stop it fifty yards from a flatcar on which Hawks and Jorge Rivero were working. The very next day, however, they were back on the flatcar when a car appeared on the tracks, forcing the engineer to jam on the brakes. Hawks was thrown into the camera platform, his left leg cut to the bone, landing him in the Cuernavaca hospital. The seventy-three-year-old
director shrugged off the incident, saying, “I get thrown off my motorcycle about once every three weeks when I go riding cross-country in the Palm Springs desert.” In fact, his leg would be much more seriously injured shortly thereafter when, during a long delay in staging the train sequence, he disappeared for some dirt-bike racing and took a bad spill, shutting production down for nearly a week.
The high altitude at Cuernavaca was not friendly to Wayne, who huffed and puffed and was more reliant than ever upon his longtime double Chuck Roberson to handle the physical scenes; Roberson had exactly the same physique, had long since mastered the star’s walk and movements and was still able to approximate the familiar old Wayne moves. “Hawks and Wayne were really kind of on their last legs
at that point,” John Woodcock observed. Hawks himself was a bit taken aback by how much the Duke had changed since they last worked together more than four years before: “Wayne had a hard time getting on and off his horse; he can’t move like a big cat the way he used to. He has to hold his belly in; he’s a different kind of person.”
But no matter how old Wayne and Hawks were getting, they both
still possessed plenty of authority, and Hawks handled himself the same way he always had. Peter Jason, a young actor cast in the secondary role of Lieutenant Forsythe, maintained that Hawks “was one of the clearest directors I’ve ever worked for, even though I never saw a script—he’d just tell you what to say.… So … you knew exactly what to do. But he left it open for you to do it any way you wanted.
But there was no question in your mind what you were supposed to do.”
Jason was also thoroughly impressed by Wayne, especially in the light of his jingoistic, even racist reputation in some circles. “My first day on the set, when John Wayne arrived, was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Forty people lined up, forty Mexicans, and he walked up to every one of them, shook their hands, and knew
their names—‘Hi, Raoul’—knew their
families, knew everything about all of them. So they’d all obviously worked on many movies together. It was very impressive to watch the real guys do it. As opposed to today, when nobody even knows who the hell’s on the set. It was a great adventure.”
Relieved to get the heavy action and Mexico behind them, the company flew by chartered jet to Tucson at the
end of the month. The Academy Awards ceremony took place on April 7, and when John Wayne, a heavy sentimental favorite for his rambunctious performance as the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit
, was leaving for Los Angeles, Hawks told him, “Don’t come back without it.” He returned, victorious, to find the entire cast and crew of
Rio Lobo
waiting with their backs to him. When they turned around,
Wayne was greeted by the sight of everyone, including his horse, wearing an eye patch.
Hawks rewrote as much as, and very likely more than, usual on location, forcing the actors to memorize several pages of dialogue on the spur of the moment just before the cameras rolled. Wayne was long since used to it, but some of the newcomers to the Hawks method had problems, particularly Jorge Rivero, who
“had to translate everything from English to Spanish and back again,” according to the director. But Peter Jason remembered that no matter how many times Hawks instructed Rivero to put some urgency behind his dialogue, “He did it exactly the same every time.” Hawks quickly realized that Rivero “was really too slow, and he didn’t have any authority at all.”
As for his inclination to tinker with
his script right up to the moment it was shot, Hawks explained it to a visitor on the set with great precision: “I don’t change dialogue, I ‘word’ it how I feel it should be read. It’s an instinct, I suppose, but it’s how you tell a story.… To me, the difference between a good director and a bad director is how they tell a story.… My method is to—once I’m into a story—reword it.” Overhearing this,
John Wayne said, “You sure as hell get carried away,” and added that as relaxed as a Hawks shoot seemed, “When the grey fox turns his steely blues on you, you get to work. No messing around.”
Hawks’s way of working and rewording dialogue was illustrated for the public and posterity in a film called
Plimpton! Shoot-out at Rio Lobo
, a promotional documentary that was shown on ABC-TV to coincide
with the feature’s release. It was arranged for George Plimpton, the well-known New York writer, editor, and professional dilettante, to play one of four gang members who come into a bar and threaten the sheriff, John Wayne, and Jennifer O’Neill at gunpoint, only to get mowed down. Plimpton would
have one line: pointing his rifle, he was to say, “This here’s your warrant, mister.” The documentary
shows Plimpton arriving on the set, watching some tests, and, upon doing a few readings for the benefit of Hawks and Wayne, being advised by Hawks to get rid of his Harvard accent if he wanted to keep the line. The easterner is amusingly seen practicing his walk, mounting a horse, riding, and shooting a gun, up to the filming of his big scene. At the last second, Hawks tells Plimpton that after
days of practicing his line as written, Plimpton is to point the gun and say, “I got a warrant right here, Sheriff.” After the general hilarity dies down, Plimpton manages to get out the new line and is then yanked backward by a wire when his character is shot by Jorge Rivero.
For a while, Hawks seemed to get along well with Jennifer O’Neill, as they were seen walking around the set arm in arm
and Hawks seemed to relish telling his stories to her. At a certain point in Tucson, however, Hawks saw the familiar pattern repeating itself, of an inexperienced actress suddenly deciding that she could behave like a star. Furthermore, as he watched dailies, he realized that on-screen she was “dull” and was bringing nothing to the picture. They had a major falling out, and afterward he wouldn’t
even speak her name, always calling her things like “a damn fool” and “stupid dame” in interviews. O’Neill felt compelled to settle some old scores in her autobiography. She claimed that it was apparent from their first meeting that Hawks was “deteriorating fast mentally” and “a bit senile.” In the end, she concluded, “it was rather sad to see this once-renowned director losing his touch.”
In
the event, Hawks responded to O’Neill’s behavior as he had with other actors, by cutting her part down. All through the story, O’Neill’s character acquits herself outstandingly when things are on the line, managing to shoot the gang leader, Whitey, played by Robert Donner, in the bar, and gutsily driving a wagon onto the compound of Jack Elam’s crazy man and figuratively disarming him. By any normal
Hawksian standard, she had proved herself good enough to accompany the men on their big third-act mission. But because Hawks was fed up with his actress, he rewrote the script to give some key climactic action to Sherry Lansing.
“Jennifer O’Neill was supposed to kill the bad guy, but Howard got mad at her so he had me do it,” Sherry Lansing acknowledged. For this reason, Lansing got to share,
with John Wayne, the final scene, and the final shot, of Howard Hawks’s long screen career. “Howard was yelling at me to try to get me to cry for the last scene,” she said. “Duke went up to him later and said, ‘Howard, you should lay off, she’s pretty good. You
should take it easy on her.’ Howard said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, she can take it.’” The climactic scene has Lansing securing revenge by
gunning down the evil sheriff who has scarred her face, then hobbling off with Wayne, who has been shot in the thigh. “Mr. McNally, you … you make a person feel awful … ,” she begins, whereupon Wayne replies, “Please don’t say comfortable.”
Lansing chomped at the bit of Hawks’s often stern attitude with her. “I was standing around chatting with one of the grips and he told me, ‘I can’t talk to
you too long or I’ll be fired.’ I think there was an unwritten code that you didn’t fool with Howard’s women.’” She was also put off by the way Hawks “talked glibly about his relationship with Kitty. He was very proud of her and he talked about her all the time, as if they were close,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Despite all this, Lansing valued her experience on the picture,
which was her last as well, because of the glimpse it gave her as to how filmmaking used to be. “It was much more fun,” she insisted. “It wasn’t life and death. He had a bigger-than-life attitude toward movies and life in general. It wasn’t a ‘serious’ business the way it is today.” After the shoot was over, Lansing admitted to herself that she hated acting and quit. “Howard started writing something
else he wanted me to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it, and he started to get fed up with me. He thought I was being silly. He could be very abrupt.” Lansing subsequently went on to become the first woman to run a motion picture studio, and she was saddened by her last encounter with Hawks: “When I got my first executive job at MGM, I called him up to tell him where I was, and all he
said was, ‘You could have been a great actress’ and hung up.”
It was clear to his collaborators that Hawks realized that the film wasn’t working out the way he had hoped. “He knew it wasn’t too good,” the editor, John Woodcock, admitted. “He’d come out of dailies and say, ‘That’s a terrible scene, cut as much of it out as you can.’” Pierre Rissient came from Paris to spend several days on the
Tucson location and reported, “You could feel that Hawks was letting the thing go. There was no intimacy or complicity between him and anyone on
Rio Lobo
. … I’d say he had already given up.” After speaking with the veteran cinematographer at length, Rissient was sure that William Clothier was ready and willing to put considerably more effort and artistry into his work, “but he was made aloof by
Hawks’s attitude.”
Rissient noted that John Wayne “was his own master” on the set, and Peter Bogdanovich, when he visited, was surprised by Hawks’s extremely casual attitude. “Duke would actually direct the other actors some of the
time,” Bogdanovich observed. “And he would say, ‘Isn’t that right, Mr. Hawks?’ And Hawks would say, ‘Sure, Duke.’” Hawks told Bogdanovich of a chilling moment when
John Ford, who had directed his last film in 1965, came to visit the set in Mexico. Bogdanovich recalled Hawks saying, “‘Jack came down and we all had lunch. Everybody left and we were alone, and he just looked at me and said, “You S.O.B.” I said, “What, Jack?” And that’s all he said.’ I think it had to do with the fact that there was Hawks, still directing Wayne, whom Ford had been so associated
with, and Ford couldn’t work anymore.”
Hawks’s lack of evident care shows in the finished film, which has all the visual élan of a TV movie of the time and isn’t even distinctly recognizable stylistically as the work of Hawks. Many shots are lazily and clumsily reframed via zooms, and the camera often seems to readjust in an almost surprised way to the action and characters as they move. The
lighting is not flattering to anyone, and one early-morning campsite scene, with the characters waking up, looks as though it was shot at high noon.
The company finished in Tucson and moved to the Studio Center in the San Fernando Valley. The facility had originally been Republic Studios, where John Wayne had made dozens of B Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s, and when someone asked Duke where
his old dressing room was, he replied, “Dressing room? I didn’t have a dressing room. I had a hook.” Hawks worked out of a makeshift office in a trailer, a far cry from his resplendent bungalow in the old days of Warner Bros. and his spacious quarters, complete with a shower, at Paramount. Hawks gave his young actress friend Sondra Currie a small role as a hooker in the saloon, but she was all but
cut out, visible only fleetingly. With the old censorship codes having broken down since he had last made a film, Hawks staged a repeat of the scene he was forced to cut from
El Dorado
, with Jorge Rivero barging in on a shirtless Sherry Lansing. Again, it was coyly staged, with Lansing strategically wrapping her arms around her breasts throughout the episode, during which she attempts to induce
Rivero, a total stranger, to stay with her.