Irreducible worth

Charles Taylor, in Dissent, celebrates John Wayne in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, about which he concludes "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the idea of America, it would be Rio Bravo." Excerpts:

The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin.

So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn. In other words, it was another of Hawks’s celebrations of the sustaining communities that are at the heart of his best films. [....]

Chance is the heroic figure whose self-sufficiency inspires the others to rise above their shortcomings. But because this is a celebration of democracy, the result isn’t a race of isolated heroes but a community in which the strength of each individual buoys up everyone else. Even Chance, the strongest person in the movie, can’t do without those people. .... He may inspire them to rise to their feet, as he does with Dude, but each one is finally capable of standing alongside him.

Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others. When Chance’s friend, the cattleman Wheeler (the inevitable Ward Bond), derides his deputies by asking, “A bum-legged old man and a drunk—that’s all you’ve got?” Chance answers, “That’s what I’ve got.” It’s the single best line reading of Wayne’s career. There’s a world of respect in the weight he puts on that one word, “what,” an irreducible sense of people’s worth as individuals. [the article]

Thanks to Arts & Letters for the reference.

Dissent Magazine