A longtime mystery for Western buffs has centered on the whereabouts of Harry Carey Jr. in
Rio Bravo
, billed eleventh as a man named Harold, but no one has ever been able to spot him in the picture.
Carey explained, “I really messed myself up with him. I was a full-fledged drinker when they called me over to do
Rio Bravo
. It would have been a ten-week job for me.” Cast as one of the local citizens whose help Wayne’s sheriff refuses in fighting off Burdette’s men, Carey arrived in Tucson for the beginning of shooting and met with Hawks and Wayne to do a costume check and rehearse his first
scene. “I was in a cowboy outfit, and Hawks said, ‘I don’t think I want Doby in a cowboy outfit. I want him as a townsperson in a top hat.’ I left for a while and went back to the hotel and had three or four shots of vodka. I was feeling good, and I went back to rehearse the scene with Wayne. I had on a purple-colored cowboy hat, and Duke said, ‘Where’d you get that hat? It’s a good thing we’re just
rehearsing.’ Hawks said, ‘Okay, you get a new hat and we’ll shoot that tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Okay, Howard,’ and I went off. And as I was getting in the car, I heard Duke say, in a very pronounced way, ‘Well, Mr. Hawks … ,’ and I felt awful. It was the only time I called him Howard and it screwed me up with him.”
Carey’s character was pared down to two shooting days, with Wayne’s dialogue rewritten
to say, “We can handle it. Besides, you have a wife and kids.” The scene, along with Carey’s role, was later dropped from the picture,
although the actor’s billing was retained. Harold is never referred to by name, but Chance does glancingly refer to local men with “wife and kids” who would be of no use to him in the stand-off. As Carey pointed out, the
Rio Bravo
cast was full of big drinkers,
led by Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ward Bond, which Hawks didn’t mind as long as it didn’t affect their work. Carey’s familiarity with Hawks probably would have been excused, had it not demonstrated that his drinking could adversely affect his judgment.
Carey quit drinking in 1963 and had his last contact with Hawks in 1976, when Hawks lent Carey a print of
Red River
for a show for schools about
Wayne and John Ford. “He was a strange man, but he treated me like a million bucks,” Carey said, despite the Tucson rupture.
The cast and crew of ninety-one people headed for Arizona in late April, with most staying at the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, and filming began on the planned fifty-five-day shoot on May 1 with scenes of Wheeler and the rest of his men, including Colorado, arriving in town.
The only actor who needed any special preparation for his role was Ricky Nelson. Hawks assigned his daughter Barbara, an expert horsewoman, the job of teaching the teenage idol how to look good in the saddle, even though the riding he had to do in the film was very rudimentary. Realizing that Nelson had no special skills as an actor, Hawks decided to give him something to do with his hands, notably
rubbing the side of his nose with his index finger to show he was thinking, as Clift had done in
Red River
. The director also forced him to roll and smoke cigarettes, which Nelson hated. Ironically, Hawks himself was off cigarettes at the time, in his umpteenth attempt to give them up, and he told Angie Dickinson, “Everybody hates me because I’m so impossible when I’m trying to quit.” Hawks was
skating on thin ice handing such a prominent role to someone so inexperienced, and he just got by thanks to the terse dialogue and his own skill at directing young performers (usually women) to project an insolence more left unspoken than said. Also, the film was so strongly carried by the four other leads that it didn’t particularly need support from Nelson the way
Red River
relied upon Clift
or even the way
El Dorado
derived comic mileage from the relative newcomer James Caan. On May 8, Nelson’s eighteenth birthday, Wayne and Martin gave him a gift of a three-hundred-pound bag of steer manure, then, as a rite of passage, tossed him into it.
Nelson’s awkwardness is evident in the stiff, posed way he stands and his not knowing what to do with his hands, but Hawks felt Nelson did well
enough in the picture and was convinced that his presence added enormously to its box-office draw. The two men did have a major disagreement,
however, over what songs Nelson would perform on-screen. Disliking Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster’s tune “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” Nelson wanted to use a number Johnny Cash had written for him, “Restless Kid.” Nelson recorded the Cash number
as well as another song, “Cindy,” at Capitol Records, but only the latter made it into the film, as Hawks, Tiomkin, and even Ozzie Nelson joined forces and prevailed upon the kid to see things their way. Dean Martin ended up singing “My Rifle” with a little harmonizing from Nelson. Hawks’s decision to have Nelson and Martin sing in the film has often been ridiculed, but Hawks tossed off the objections
simply by saying that the crooning “entertained me.” Hawks also had a song in mind for Feathers, a tune called “The Bull by the Tail” (one of the film’s earlier titles). But when he played it for Angie Dickinson, “I had the balls to tell him I didn’t like it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Everybody “yesses” me all the time,’ and I think he was impressed that I told him what I thought.”
With the script
long since in very fine shape and the majority of the cast and crew utterly in its element, the production proceeded in a very relaxed, smooth manner. From the beginning, Hawks needed very few takes to get what he wanted, often just one. Unlike on
Land of the Pharaohs
, he knew just how all these characters should talk, but he obliged Wayne, Brennan, and the others when they wanted to alter their
dialogue a bit to make themselves more comfortable. He let scenes run to indulge his whims and tastes, such as showing Wayne make a long approach toward Ward Bond just because he liked the star’s inimitable “big cat” walk. Hawks needed to give Wayne only the minimum indication of how he wanted a scene to be played, and the actor always came on time, prepared and able to memorize new dialogue within
minutes. Even more than he had twelve years earlier, Hawks loved working with Wayne. “He never squawks about anything,” the director said. In the role of John T. Chance, Wayne wore his customary neckerchief and the Red River D belt buckle Hawks had made for him. Through most of the story, he also carried with him, almost as if it was part of his anatomy, the unique pump-action rifle he had first
used in
Hondo
.
Hawks was pleased when Dean Martin justified his faith in him. As he later did with Robert Mitchum, Hawks saw through the actor’s nonchalance and could tell that he really was taking his work seriously. Martin privately was advised by his
Young Lions
costar Marlon Brando on how to get to the bottom of his character, and Hawks gave the actor some critical direction that set him
unerringly on track: initially afraid that Martin was
going to do a sort of “nightclub drunk,” Hawks told him he “knew a guy with a hangover who’d pound his leg trying to hurt himself to try and get some feeling in it.” Martin said he knew exactly what Hawks was talking about and did it right the next time out, without even rehearsing. Making things considerably easier was Wayne, who, as usual,
was generous with his costar. The two men warmed to each other at once, played chess together constantly between scenes, and remained lifelong friends. Hawks was impressed with how hard Martin worked and ended up considering him “a damn good actor, but he also is a fellow who floats through life.… He has to get some kind of a hint, … otherwise, hell, he won’t even rehearse.”
Surprisingly, the
only actor Hawks had any trouble with at all was Walter Brennan, whose work for him had always been pure gold. On the first day, Hawks found the character actor, who was now sixty-three, merely recycling his hokey folksiness from
The Real McCoys
. The director rode him mercilessly until he finally left the set with John Wayne. When they returned, Brennan was so riled that he easily delivered the
“crabby, evil, nasty old man” Hawks was looking for, albeit with an irrepressible vein of eccentric humor.
But Hawks needed to engage in very little of this sort of scene-making. As John Russell observed, “Hawks’s game-playing was mostly with management, not on the set. He loved getting management steamed.” As always, studio brass were not welcome on the set, and Hawks ran a disciplined but relaxed
set that allowed for plenty of extracurricular activities. One weekend, Hawks, Wayne, and the entire inner circle drove across the border to Nogales to watch their director friend Budd Boetticher film a bullfight for a documentary. The director hoped to get shots of Wayne with the great matador Carlos Arruza in the ring for a nice publicity angle, but when Duke went out and doffed his hat to
the crowd, he was, as Boetticher put it, “as bald as Eisenhower”; Wayne had spent the entire weekend so plastered that he’d forgotten to put on his hairpiece. No one else minded, however, as people seemed only to care about seeing Ricky Nelson, who drove the crowd into a frenzy. John Ford, fresh from finishing
The Last Hurrah
, dropped by the location on May 19 to see how the Duke was faring with
Hawks this time out. Unbeknownst to Warner Bros., Ricky Nelson took part in a Tucson Speedway stock-car race the following week, and Hawks even allowed Sheb Wooley, of “Purple People Eater” fame, to play a bit in the opening scene. Dean Martin took off for New York one weekend to participate in his second annual telethon for the City of Hope. Dee and Gregg were around a good deal, and Hawks found
time to help his son with some midgetcar
races. Visiting journalists, of whom there were quite a few, noted that
Rio Bravo
was a real “Big Guy” film: Wayne and John Russell were six foot four, Hawks and Ward Bond were six three, Ricky Nelson was six one, and Dean Martin was six feet.
The only consistent complaint made about
Rio Bravo
is that it dawdles in its storytelling, that it lacks the economy
and snap of Hawks’s best earlier films. But while this was to become a legitimate problem in some of his later films, with
Rio Bravo
the lingering over scenes stemmed directly from Hawks’s desire to elaborate his characters and their relationships as fully as he could. Any rewriting Hawks did on the set was to deepen the sense of group interaction, to give further layers to their exchanges; to
most people’s minds, the resulting richness far outweighs the picture’s casual tempo. For example, Hawks often used the exchange of inanimate objects, notably cigarettes, to communicate feelings between his characters. John Chance’s continual rolling of cigarettes for Dude silently conveyed his willingness to keep helping his friend. At the same time, it is Chance’s need for a light that prompts
Colorado to go into the hotel, thus leaving the sheriff alone and vulnerable to the three gunmen who stick him up. After losing track of it in recent years, Hawks rediscovered his “three-cushioned dialogue” that stated important matters in indirect ways, especially in the relationship between Chance and Feathers.
Indeed, Hawks hadn’t attempted one of his patented sultry girls-with-a-past roles
in well over a decade, and he clearly was stimulated by doing so again. Unlike numerous other films, there could be no pretense here of trying to integrate the female character into the men’s central activity, that of guarding the jail. John Chance literally has to commute between the jail, at one end of the street, and the hotel, at the other, to see Feathers. Once again, the woman is a vague combination
of showgirl, gambler, and quasi-outlaw-prostitute, someone who has clearly been around but simultaneously can fall wholeheartedly and uncynically for the hero.
In Angie Dickinson, Hawks found one of the sexiest actresses who ever starred in one of his films, and he made sure to show her off to tantalizing advantage. Hawks personally supervised every detail of Dickinson’s wardrobe, as, the actress
said, “he wanted the clothes to be not the typical stiff things women from that time usually wore. He wanted soft, flowing, feminine clothes.” The trick was to be able to play up Dickinson’s allure while still pairing her convincingly with Wayne, who almost always seemed a bit awkward, even comical, in romantic scenes. Hawks pulled this off by teasing Wayne through the Feathers character, making
knowing
fun of the actor’s discomfort by building it into the character. This proved so effective here that Hawks carried it to an even greater extreme in
Hatari!
As he had in
Red River
, Hawks again served up a watered-down variation on Bacall’s immortal “It’s even better when you help” line when Feathers, upon finally kissing Chance, says, “I’m glad we tried it a second time. It’s better when
two people do it.” But her comic exasperation works beautifully, compared, for instance, to Joanne Dru’s protestations in
Red River
, and she is given one key scene—throwing a flowerpot through the window when an unarmed Chance is threatened by three badmen, saving the sheriff’s neck.
By the time Dickinson reported for her first day of work on May 19, temperatures coincidentally started to rise
on location, hitting well over one hundred degrees on most days from that point on. Dickinson was only in Tucson for nine working days, as virtually all of her scenes were interiors; in the finished film, her only exterior is at the end of the flowerpot scene. Her first night there, she was given a rite of passage by the men. “They had me join them for dinner,” she recounted, “and they cast me as
the victim by trying me out on mountain oysters, and I loved them. So I passed.” As a fabulously sexy woman on location with a virtually all-male cast and crew, Dickinson was obviously highly conspicuous. But it didn’t bother Dickinson because the situation was essentially the norm in those days. “All films were like that, you rarely had many women around. Wardrobe and hair people were the only
women. But it didn’t ever bother me. I was just so thrilled to be a part of it.” Dickinson spent most of her time on the set with Ricky Nelson, just sort of wandering around the desert location. As far as her feelings for Hawks were concerned, she said, “I felt intimidated and comfortable at the same time. Intimidated, but only properly so, respectfully. After all, he’s the big boss. I wasn’t afraid.”