Music in 'Rio Bravo'

It's been difficult to write anything for this for the last few weeks for a variety of reasons. Whilst suffering from flu a few weeks back I re watched Howard Hawks' wonderful film Rio Bravo. It's at least the third of fourth time I've seen it by this point. The film which convinced me John Wayne could act, with Angie Dickinson ever ready to puncture his character's self image and granite masculinity. Hawks is one of the reasons why I feel justified in being so sweepingly generalising in dismissing the majority of modern commercial cinema. He made such wonderful films within the popular genres of classical Hollywood cinema. And as David Thomson has pointed out, it's never the one you think you're watching. So, Rio Bravo, which is obviously a western (everyone wears a cowboy hat!) is actually a character comedy. There's very little plot, and much of the film consists of little more than the characters reflecting upon what little plot there is. It's beautifully managed, but what I was most attracted to this time were other things. The interplay between the sets and the real photographed reality in shots of the dusty empty street. And the music. By which I mean the diegtic music, intrinsic to the narrative, not the score.

In an early scene the villain (whose name I forget), pays the band at one of the local taverns to play a Mexican tune continuously in order to unsettle the film's heroes. It plays throughout in the background of a number of scenes, adding a subtle undercurrent of menace to the scenes under which it plays. The title of the tune, translated from the Spanish, is 'Cut Throat'. The implication is clear: violence and depravity is displaced onto the foreign other of Mexico, even though the the narrative seems to involve no Mexican characters. The location of the town is not identified in the film, but the real street scenes would appear to locate it somewhere in the South towards the border. Mexico is simultaneously present and absent. Weirdly it seems to anticipate the films of Leone and Peckinpah of at least a decade hence.

Then, at about the 1 hour, 40 minute mark, there's a wonderfully relaxed scene where the four heroes sit around singing a couple of songs. It serves no narrative purpose (unless it's to put to use the musical talents of Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson), serving only to illustrate a scene of manly companionship. Again, this is underlined by the choice of song, one of which is 'Cindy', a song I've only recently really discovered for myself through Robert Plant's wonderful Band of Joy album. The chorus says it all really:

Get along Cindy, Cindy,

I'll marry you some time

It's a confident image of impregnable masculinity, embodied here in this group of companionable lawmen.

Of course, it isn't impregnable. Dean Martin's character is a recovering alcoholic, as a consequence of his failed relationship with a disreputable women. We never see this lady, one of the ways in which the film silences female voices, and a major element of the film is Dean Martin's rebuilding his masculinity, symbolised by his initial inability to successfully role a cigarette, and which he is finally able to complete in one of the final scenes. But despite his experiences, he remains resolutely convinced about the positive nature of a romantic life and goads Wayne's character into his final confrontation with Angie Dickinson. I still don't quite get that final scene, in which she appears to talk herself into a relationship with him, almost as if she's trying to convince herself as much as him. The endings of Hawks' films often seem to come a little out of nowhere, taking the characters by surprise as much as the audience. Throughout the film Angie Dickinson has appeared to have the measure of Wayne's character, John T. Chance. His masculinity is never quite as secure or comfortable as it would appear in that delightful scene of companionable song.