Rio Bravo

Rio Bravo (1959) is a likable western. I mean, can you ask for anything better than a movie that features Dean Martin manfully purring a country western song while Ricky Nelson plays guitar and sings harmony? The film has that wonderful Howard Hawks feel to it: Hawks was a master at making movies that felt like movies. This Western has a kind of silky, easy-going quality. It's like a polished, funnier, less sentimental episode of Gunsmoke, and the actors are such fun that you're likely to enjoy Rio Bravo even if --like me-- you don't particularly love Westerns.

Of course, there's John Wayne as the sheriff of Rio Bravo, guarding a prisoner whose brother has hired a whole cadre of bandits to help get him out of jail at any cost. Dean Martin plays the drunk deputy who's becoming a laughingstock in town, but who finally finds his courage. Martin feels perfect for this role. Rick Nelson plays a teenager who's quick on his feet and a good shot; Walter Brennan mugs incessantly, as the old croney who guards the jail while the others are out on the town. And then there's Angie Dickinson, the sexy, sultry, jaded, resourceful new girl, who finds herself falling for the Duke.

It was interesting to see Rio Bravo in light of the fact that John Carpenter used this film as the basis for his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which I've seen several times. There's a definite similarity in the two movies, but I was happy to see that Carpenter still managed to make his own movie. Rio Bravo doesn't get as much critical attention as films like The Searchers and The Wild Bunch, but I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than either of those two films. It isn't reaching for anything: it's just out to entertain us.

With Ward Bond, Claude Akins, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, and Estelita Rodriguez. ★★★½

Point Blank

In Point Blank, double-crossed crook Lee Marvin wants his $93,000, and damned if he doesn't kill any man who stands in his way. It becomes a series of repetitive encounters with various head honchos, all of them connected in some way to an ominous organized crime outfit known, blandly, as the Organization. Director John Boorman manages to create some very clever set pieces in this 1967 thriller, which has developed an avid following of fans. One particular scene is lifted from the film noir classic The Big Sleep (1946), where the wrong guy is sent into the path of the hired gun. It's those scenes that may sustain your interest, and may keep you hoping that the movie will really go somewhere. Boorman always seems to pull back just as the film's about to get rolling, and so it never really comes to a head. But it's interesting as a sort of case study of male revenge fantasies, and who better to enact a male revenge fantasy than Lee Marvin, using sex-kitten Angie Dickinson as a pawn in his game of vengeance? The supporting cast includes Keenan Wynn, Lloyd Bochner, John Vernon, Carroll O'Connor, Michael Strong, Sharon Acker, and James Sikking.

Dressed to Kill

Brian De Palma's most lascivious thriller (with the possible exception of Body Double), Dressed to Kill (1980) shamelessly explores the transgressive nature of human sexuality and the propaganda side of horror movies that depict sex as a death wish. One woman's spontaneous tryst gets her slashed to death in an elevator by a platinum blonde murderess, and a high-class prostitute witnesses the slaying, positioning herself as both prime suspect and prospective victim.

De Palma structures the film like a bad dream, pulling the viewer into a voyeuristic session of gender-bending cheap thrills. But the whole thing's an intentional tease: the murderess with her cheap wig and black trenchcoat and shiny razor is a comical fright figure impersonating a truly terrifying menace, and the victim is punished twofold for having an unexpected affair with a stranger she meets in a museum: she finds out he has a venereal disease (too late), and then meets her death minutes later.

De Palma turns the slasher film into an erotic comic melodrama. He borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (particularly the idea of killing off the star early in the movie). De Palma had already ventured into the Hitchcock canon with Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976). Dressed to Kill is his most sustained shocker. It's like the Id of Psycho's Ego, because Psycho, for all its chilling power, holds back in a lot of ways that Dressed to Kill doesn't.

It would be too easy to dismiss De Palma's work entirely as ripping off Hitchcock, because De Palma always explores a different side. He uses similar conventions of plot and theme as Hitchcock but there's always a sort of cinematic irony underneath what he's doing, as though the joke is that he's turning Hitchcock inside out.

The Pino Donaggio score is appropriately grandiose--it's the symphony of a grand love scene, full of highs and lows and subtle ironies and dramatic swellings that punctuate the set pieces, turning them into sudsy, sensationalistic camp. You'll either revel in its majestic hyperbole or feel indifferent to it all.

With Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, and Dennis Franz.