eldorado

John Wayne’s Westerns can run together very easily if you don’t keep a close eye on them. With
titles like “Rio Grande,” “Rio Bravo” and “El Dorado,” and with the Duke in practically the same
outfit every time, don’t blink or you’ll think they’re all the same film.

Well, “El Dorado” is yet another of the Duke’s Westerns. Wayne returns in that salmon colored
shirt to do battle with outlaws yet again. I think Wayne’s charisma kept people coming back to the
theatre and it’s rarely been better than “El Dorado.” Here, Wayne teams up with Robert Mitchum to
do battle with Ed Asner and his band of gunfighters trying to run the McDonald Family out of town.

See, it works like this. Mitchum is the local sheriff and old pals with Wayne. He stops Wayne from
taking the job offered to him by Asner. Since Wayne accidentally killed the McDonalds’ son, the
last thing he wants to do is help Asner run them off. Mitchum, depressed over a woman, has
become a drunkard and Wayne, suffering from an old bullet wound, doesn’t have the reliable fast
draw he used to. Somehow, they have to pull it together to stop Asner’s gang from taking over.

At over two hours in length, director Howard Hawks certainly takes his time telling this tale. There
are some slow moments, grant you. A young James Caan is Wayne’s greenhorn sidekick in the
film, and can’t shoot the broadside of a barn so he carries around a shotgun cut down into a pistol
and he wears a really stupid looking hat. That’s part of the comedy of this light Western adventure.

I looked at this as a kind of “Grumpy Old Men” style Western with Wayne and Mitchum in their
middle years and complaining about their ages and other characters commenting on how they’re
both past their prime as gunfighters.

Asner and his gang are your standard black hat villains without a lot of extraneous character
development. That’s OK, because in the end all that’s important is knowing enough to understand
that Wayne and the boys have ample justification to shoot them.

The real treat of this movie is Mitchum’s deputy sidekick, Bull, played by Western veteran Arthur
Hunnicutt. The old coot is the most dry and cynical comedian of the picture and steals the movie
right out from under the leading men. Every line is a laugh with him.

Incidentally, the female leads played by Michele Carey and Charlene Holt are nice on the eyes and
both Carey and Holt give extremely grounded performances. It’s nice to see that they play strong
characters rather than ditzy screamers. Brings the film a step up from many other pictures in this
vein.

There is a rather funky visual effect, more like a glaring jump cut, in the picture in a scene in which
Caan dives in the way of galloping horses and the passage of time in the film is confusing, with the
small town being swallowed by perpetual night even though it appears our heroes change clothes
more than once, but aside from those nitpicks, “El Dorado” is a lot of fun.