John Wayne would be the first to admit that not all of his movies were groundbreaking classics. For every Stagecoach and The Searchers, there were Hellfighters and The Conqueror. He had nearly 200 credits to his name by the time he died in 1979, so it’s no surprise that some of them were stinkers.
Duke himself thought that his worst film was the 1957 Soviet-era movie Jet Pilot. Backed by eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, the film was mostly made as a star-making vehicle for various aeroplanes, and Hughes was so fussy about the details that he spent years tinkering with the editing before finally letting the project see the light of day.
If you’d asked Wayne’s frequent collaborator, Howard Hawks, however, he would likely have had a different answer. Hawkes remains one of the greatest directors of all time, having made comedy classics like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday and film noirs like To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. He also made five movies with Wayne: 1948’s Red River, 1959’s Rio Bravo, 1962’s Hatari!, 1966’s El Dorado, and 1970’s Rio Lobo. Of all these films, there is one stone-cold masterpiece and one dud. Interestingly enough, they both tell variations of the same story.
Rio Bravo is that masterpiece. Wayne stars as a sheriff in an Old West town who bands together with an elderly colleague, an alcoholic former deputy, and a young cowboy to defend his precinct against a gang of thugs trying to break a murderer out of jail. Beautifully acted and told with flawless simplicity, it’s a highlight of Wayne’s filmography and even stands out in Hawks’s much more consistent lineup of work.
Rio Lobo is the dud. Made just a little more than a decade after Rio Bravo, it is inferior in every way, a fact which is made all the more glaring by its many similarities. In the film, Wayne plays a Civil War colonel whose gold shipment is hijacked by Confederate soldiers. After the war, he is forced to revisit the incident. Like Rio Bravo and El Dorado, the film features a scene in which the good guys are holed up in a police precinct trying to fend off the baddies.
It was a box office dud, earning back less than its $6million budget. Audiences just weren’t interested in seeing the same story for a third time, and it was 1970. Hollywood was changing, and there were much more exciting films to watch than the recycled material of two icons past their prime.
Hawks felt the same, though he regretted making the film for a different reason. According to an interview he did in 1975, the director wanted two major stars for the film, in the same way that he’d had Dean Martin alongside Wayne in Rio Bravo and Robert Mitchum in El Dorado.
“Rio Lobo was a mistake because they didn’t have the money,” Hawks said. “We needed two good people. Otherwise, my story wasn’t any good. I saved the story and just wrote that damn piece of junk and made it.”
It’s unclear whether it would have made a difference if they’d had Robert Redford or Warren Beatty in one of the lead roles. The main issue with the film is that it feels like a dime-store recreation of Wayne’s earlier work. The fact that it lacks secondary star power is nowhere near the top of its list of problems.