Random film of the day delivered "El Dorado" (1966): a Howard Hawks western with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, TMDB rating 7.36. Looked like standard classic from the "old guys in hats" category. But one glance at the filmography revealed a strangeness impossible to unsee: over eleven years Hawks made the same story three times — "Rio Bravo" (1959), "El Dorado" (1966), and "Rio Lobo" (1970). A sheriff under siege, a drunk partner, a young apprentice gunslinger — all three films built on the same frame, and all three with Wayne in the lead.
In an industry where "shot it like last time" sounds like a death sentence, this wasn't a mistake but the most audacious career strategy in Hollywood history: after box office failures, the director returned to the only recipe guaranteed to work — and re-baked it with corrections. Screenwriter Leigh Brackett called the picture "The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again" with the intonation usually reserved for writing denunciations. And the picture, against all odds, worked. The question that drove the entire investigation: how did a remake of his own masterpiece, shot openly, not turn into an embarrassment — and what did Hawks fix in the second iteration.
It started with material completely wrong for Hawks. He bought Harry Brown's novel "The Stars in Their Courses" — a tragic western retelling of the "Iliad" where everyone died at the end, including Wayne's hero. Leigh Brackett, the director's regular screenwriter (five collaborative films and future co-writer of "The Empire Strikes Back"), wrote an adaptation and called it the best screenplay of her life. "It wasn't tragedy in the pure sense, but it was one of those things where Wayne dies at the end," she recalled.
Hawks read the finished screenplay and delivered a verdict that became the axis of the entire story: "This is going to be one of the worst pictures I ever made. I don't know how to do downbeat." To Brackett's question "what do we do?" he replied matter-of-factly: "Write a new one." They kept exactly one scene from the novel — the accidental shooting of a boy that starts everything. The book's author, according to Hawks, "was very angry and called it a pile of junk."
The danger wasn't just aesthetic. By 1965 Hawks came off two consecutive failures: "Red Line 7000" — a desperate attempt by the 69-year-old director to get younger with race cars and three love stories — and a remake of his own "Bringing Up Baby." Wayne had just undergone surgery to remove an entire lung due to cancer (1964) and was still coming to set hearing his own breathing in the silence. Nobody wanted to shoot a tragedy about a hero's death with a dying Wayne on screen — not the studio, not the audience, not the Duke himself. "El Dorado" became not a new adventure but a strategic retreat to proven ground.
"El Dorado" — the middle part of an unofficial trilogy: "Rio Bravo" (1959) → "El Dorado" (1966) → "Rio Lobo" (1970). The framework is identical everywhere: a lawman under siege, a drinking comrade, youngsters with strange names (Colorado — Mississippi — and again), a saloon girl who's stronger in feelings than in plot decisions. Hawks himself refused to call it a remake, but faces comparing the two films superficially found "practically verbatim" matches — at least, that's what Brackett herself complained.
Yet the films are not twins but a controlled experiment. "Rio Bravo" looks like the dying studio system looked: glossy, comfortable, perfect mechanics. "El Dorado" — already the world after its collapse: more conversational, more internal, psychologically more complex and noticeably less smooth. Between the two dates fits the collapse of old Hollywood — and it's visible in the frames themselves, even if the director didn't believe in it. "Rio Lobo" from 1970 — the final, loosest member of the trilogy, where the formula began to crumble: critics unanimously rank it last, and Hawks never shot again after it.
Worth giving credit to the successor: cult Hawks fan John Carpenter took the same besieged station framework twice — in "Assault on Precinct 13" and later in "Ghosts of Mars." The formula outlived its creator and reassembled at least three genres in other hands.
Hawks called Mitchum with a proposal in signature style: "Bo-o-ob, how about a western with Duke?" To the question "what's the story?" the director gave an answer quoted for forty years: "No story, Bob. Just characters. Stories are boring." Mitchum later agreed: "He was right. It was all about character development."
This sounds like an excuse for laziness, but actually describes a precise mechanism. The plot of courtship and shootouts takes a whole hour to reach the viewer — because an hour is needed for the viewer to know Cole and J.P. as their own. After that, every joke between them reads like an inside meme, understood only by three: Cole, J.P., and you. Pauline Kael hated this construction, by the way: "like walking into a late episode of a TV series." Which is telling — Hawks aimed for exactly that: he consciously built "Rio Bravo" as a response to television westerns, where viewers returned each week for the company, not the events.
The director's philosophy showed up in casting-trolling too. He didn't tell Caan, playing young Mississippi, that his role was comic. The twenty-five-year-old actor played the fumbler with a rifle with absolute seriousness — and the audience howled. After the preview Caan rushed up: "Why didn't you tell me I was playing a comic role?" The answer entered the annals: "You would've ruined it. Started trying to be funny."
The whole set breathed that same freedom. The bath scene where the sheriff is caught in the tub was Mitchum's own idea — and the crew cackled during takes, imagining his embarrassment. And Hawks cut a filmed scene of Mitchum singing entirely — after his own son's verdict: "Dad, the sheriff shouldn't sing."
The most interesting thing — the diff between films, because it's deliberate. In "Rio Bravo" Dean Martin played a drunk who straightens up and holds it together until the end. In "El Dorado" Mitchum gets the same role but with a 180° turn: his Sheriff J.P. Harrah doesn't quit — he slides down, and the film starts with him already at the bottom, with shaking hands and a puddle in a shack. The arc unfolds in reverse: not redemption but launching repair. This is that very "how radically Hawks reworks the repetition" everyone talks about and almost nobody shows concretely.
The second fix — working with age. In 1959 Wayne played a hero at full strength. In 1966 his Cole Thornton carries a bullet in his back that occasionally paralyzes his right side — and Hawks builds an entire motif around this: the doctor refuses to operate ("I'm not good enough"), Caan chooses a knife because he's "not good enough with a gun," and the whole film constantly explains itself with the refrain "because I'm not good enough." British critic Philip French nearly howled about this — by his count, "every five minutes someone says they're not good enough" — but this is the core: a film about professionals who physically aren't what they were, and continue.
Andrew Sarris in Village Voice formulated it best: "humor and affirmation on the edge of desperation — the poetic ingredients of the Hawksian western." The Time magazine critic summed it up vividly: Wayne and Mitchum "with crutches like canes triumphantly walk past the camera — two old pros who on one good leg between them stand firmer than young stars on two."
And the final engineering touch: a mishap grown into canon. Mitchum during shooting confused which leg to limp on — once switched the crutch to the other side right in frame. Hawks noticed during dailies and, instead of reshooting, wove the error into the finale dialogue: Wayne's character calmly needles his partner that he carries the crutch "under one arm, then under the other." And in the last scene both heroes walk with crutches under the wrong arm — now deliberately. The mistake became the punchline.
James Caan at the time of shooting — 25 years old, a couple of films and TV episodes, one of which, "Red Line 7000," he later called "terrible." Hawks pulled him out of it: after the film's failure the director told the actor "I need you in a western" — and Caan went to Arizona with a man colleagues feared. In interviews Caan recalled details you couldn't make up: between him and the two giants he felt such a height difference that he put three-inch lifts in his cowboy boots so he wouldn't look like a dwarf in wide shots. Wayne meanwhile teased him with "kid" and regularly tested whether this New York upstart could be intimidated; Caan, by his own account, just laughed back — "and fortunately, he respected that."
The incident is doubly useful: it shows both how Wayne usually tested newcomers with pressure, and that Hawks' set allowed youngsters to hold their ground.
For Caan himself this was his first real role on the big screen — the one after which Coppola took him for Sonny Corleone. He played a naive newcomer among two cynical pros — and on screen it read literally, because that's what it was: an actor-surrogate for the viewer, staring at legends point-blank. Hawks, about whom they were already writing "a dying breed," got from this not nostalgia but precise passing of the torch: the young actor physically positioned himself behind Wayne's shoulder in almost all wide shots, and the film analysis on Notebook MUBI calls this arrangement deliberate choreography of succession.
The economics of the venture turned out humane too. Budget — $4.65 million, shooting in Old Tucson (Arizona) and Kanab (Utah) from October 1965 to January 1966. Release was delayed to avoid competing with another Paramount project, and "El Dorado" came out in the US in June 1967 — the same summer as "Bonnie and Clyde," and the year "The Graduate" made bank. A dinosaur with two old guys in leading roles collected $12 million at the box office (rental receipts $5.95 million) — successful, without records.
Ebert gave three and a half stars and one of the best formulations: "tightly directed, funny, thoroughly successful Western that was made, it would appear, almost without effort — by three old pros: Wayne, Mitchum and director Hawks." On Rotten Tomatoes the film now has 96% — more than most "serious" pictures from that year.
The usual Hollywood script looks like this: a director ages, clings to an old formula, the product weakens with each round — "The Godfather Part III" as a genre. Hawks did the opposite: he understood that his formula wasn't the scenery but a method of producing humanity, and therefore could launch it anew with new input data. "I'm much more interested in the story of friendship between two men than a range war," he explained to Joseph McBride. "There's probably no emotion stronger than male friendship." And added cynically-precisely: "When you've got someone of Wayne and Mitchum's caliber, the scenes come out better than in the script."
This is the answer to the question from the hook. A remake of one's own masterpiece fails when the director repeats the surface. Hawks repeated the framework and flipped the contents: the drunk doesn't straighten up but slides down; the hero isn't the strongest but carries a bullet in his spine; the plot isn't a plot but a company. He did what twenty years later would be called auteur-remix — and did it with self-irony, weaving production mistakes into the final dialogue. Hawks' formula formulates completely in one line: not plot but characters; not morals but professionalism; not strength but endurance. On these three pillars you can live a career forty years long — and "El Dorado" proves it better than any manifesto.