EL DORADO

A superlative Howard Hawks western and one of his most under-valued films perhaps because most critics saw it as something of a rehash of his masterpiece "Rio Bravo" with Robert Mitchum in the Dean Martin role, Arthur Hunnicutt in the Walter Brennan part and James Caan standing in for Ricky Nelson. There are certainly many similarities but there are classic sequences as well. Hawks' philosophy seems to be, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

This is an old-fashioned movie in the very best of the term somewhat out of sync with most American cinema of the period but there are few directors working in any genre who could master a sequence like the church shoot-out and its immediate aftermath in the saloon with such effectiveness and such an economy of style as Hawks. (The saloon sequence is lifted directly from "Rio Bravo", by the way, and some of the dialogue is identical). Not quite a masterpiece, then, but some kind of classic nevertheless.