John Wayne

John Wayne movies are a great way to kill an afternoon. In fact instead of watching the Super Bowl along with the other 93 million people in television universe, I curled up, did my homework, and watched John Wayne star in both Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Sure the movies are similar, but they still are better than any other western I've seen in the last five years. They just don't make 'em like they use to. Filmed in 1963, Rio Bravo is a block buster of sorts with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and that crazy character actor from the Real McCoys, I think his name was Walter Brennan. The story is sort of formula with the sherrif holding the brother of a powerful ranch owner for murder and the brother trying to get him out, so he bottles up the whole town and scares or murders every one who would help the Sherrif (John Wayne) out except for the town drunk and former deputy (Martin), a crazy old cripple who has lost his land to the bad guys (Brennan), and a green gunslinger who has a funny way of choosing what is and isn't his business (Nelson). As always, Wayne gets his man, or men, in the end, with an explosive ending, literally. Wayne and Brennan, along with Martin, chuck dynamite at the warehouse and shoot at it in order to get them to surrender.
Eldorado, filmed some time in the late sixties or very early seventies, feature's John Wayne, Robert Mitchem, and James Caan as the principle characters, with Ed Asner as the evil, land grabbing Bart Jason. This story is a bit of a twist to Rio Bravo. This time Wayne plays a gunslinger with a conscience, Cole Thorton, who refuses to help Jason steal the ranch of a hard working family, the MacDonalds. In the mean time, he manages to accidentally kill MacDonald's youngest son, and is then shot by the boy's only sister. He lives (mostly because he's John Wayne) and leaves town to forget. He meets up with a green kid, not unlike Nelson character( Colorado), named Allan Badillian Trauhern, otherwise called Mississippi, played by James Caan. Caan whelds a knife like a Barbary Coast pirate, but he can't fire a gun to save his life. Well he can fire it, he just can't hit the broad side of a barn. Any way, while Wayne is gone the sherrif, J.P. Harra (Mitchem) becomes a drunk just like Martin's character, and is only attend to by a noisy former indian fighter named Bull, who is comparable to Brennan's character of Stumpy. Crazy things and senerios occur, like in Rio Bravo, ending in a gun battle much like Rio Bravo, but without the dynamite.
These movies are great little movies, for all that they are so similar formula stories. I know people say that John Wayne is a old flat actor, but if you watch his movies closely, you can really see the work he put into each character, especially ones like Cole Thorton and Rooster Cogburn, U.S. Marshall.