El Dorado

1967. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by Leigh Brackett. With Robert Mitchum, James Caan. This last great Hawks film forms a kind of coda to the era of classic Hollywood. It is, in a sense, a remake of Rio Bravo (1959), but it is perhaps the best and most deeply felt remake in film history. The aging Hawks and Wayne (like Wayne and Mitchum in the film) had "traveled some together," and their professionalism in spite of the debilities of old age make El Dorado the elegiac equal to Ford and Wayne's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). 126 min.