7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 4.3 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.1 |
A rancher helps his friend, a drunken sheriff, redeem his reputation.
Starring: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Paul FixWestern | 100% |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Mono
French: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Having just experienced a rare flop with the racing film Red Line 7000 (1965), director Howard Hawks did not feel like taking chances. Although there are many differences—and the differences are what make it interesting—Hawks raced into production with a loose remake of one his biggest hits, Rio Bravo (1959). His good friend John Wayne was always game to make another picture with Hawks, one of the two directors, along with John Ford, who firmly established the Duke's status as a Western icon. The script was freely (very freely) adapted by Hawks's regular collaborator, Leigh Brackett, from a novel by Harry Brown entitled The Stars in Their Courses, and it had Brackett's trademark tough dialogue. Wayne could always count on Hawks to assemble a solid cast, keep the production firmly under control, and hold the Hollywood suits at bay. Still, no one could miss the fact that Hawks was repeating himself. The obvious similarities between the two films provide the basis for a joke in Get Shorty. Threatened with harm by a gangster who says that "this time it ain't no John Wayne and Dean Martin shooting bad guys in El Dorado", movie buff Chili Palmer insists on correcting him:
That was Rio Bravo. Robert Mitchum played the drunk in El Dorado. Dean Martin played the drunk in Rio Bravo. Basically, it was the same part. Now John Wayne, he did the same in both. He played John Wayne.Chili might have gone on to explain that James Caan played Ricky Nelson's part, Arthur Hunnicutt took over for Walter Brennan and a relative newcomer named Charlene Holt had the unenviable job of filling the high heels of Angie Dickinson. But El Dorado has an entirely different feel from Rio Bravo. It's more loosely constructed, leisurely paced and finds humor at unexpected moments. Pervading the entire affair is an autumnal atmosphere best exemplified by an injury that intereferes with the ability of Wayne's character to live up to his reputation as one of the fastest draws in the West. For a director pushing seventy and a star in his early sixties, that development becomes a commentary on the challenges of aging. The events that lead to the injury anticipate the themes of guilt and regret that would not be fully explored in a major Western until Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.
Howard Hawks lured Oscar-nominated cinematographer Harold Rosson (The Bad Seed) out of retirement to shoot El Dorado, then grew impatient with Rosson's deliberate pace at setting up his shots. Still, Rosson captured some beautiful locations in Old Tucson and Utah, and Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, from a Paramount transfer, provides a decent reproduction of his photography, though not without a few issues. Clarity, sharpness and detail are excellent, and the blacks are generally solid, except for a few nighttime sequences, where Rosson's lighting renders some of the shadows indistinct (as Peter Bogdanovich notes in his commentary, these issues exist in the original photography). Colors are vivid and saturated, including Wayne's trademark red and blue shirts, Maudie's often colorful wardrobe and the greens of the outdoor vegetation. Some grain reduction has been performed on the image, rendering its appearance a little less film-like and somewhat more like a contemporary production finished on a digital intermediate. This isn't to say that there's no grain in the image; it's there if you look closely. But the image has a shine that brings it a little closer to video than film. Any degraining software has been applied with a light hand, resulting in no evident loss of detail and none of the waxy or artificial look that has resulted in a few famous travesties. Also, there is no indication of any artificial sharpening, which, in my experience, frequently creates more serious artifacts than degraining. All but the most critical eyes will probably have no complaints about this presentation, once it is seen in motion. With an average bitrate of 36.98 Mbps, I have to question the extent of Warner's involvement in the mastering of the disc, since I have yet to see Warner offer such a high average bitrate, even when the available space would allow it. Let's just be glad it's there.
Despite the claim on the back cover that the soundtrack is presented in 5.1, the Blu-ray contains the film's original mono mix, presented in lossless Dolby TrueHD 2.0. The track has solid fidelity, with good dynamic range, clear dialogue and sufficient impact for the gunshots to make their point. The musical accompaniment, credited only as "scored and conducted by" Nelson Riddle but with the composer unidentified, has a classic style that's the perfect complement to everything audiences would expect to accompany John Wayne on horseback, even in 1966 when the Western itself was being stolen away from movie theaters by the proliferation of TV shows such as Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
Paramount's initial DVD release of El Dorado in 2000 contained only a trailer. In 2009 the studio re-released the film in a two-disc "Centenntial Collection" with a new collection of extras, which have been ported over to this Blu-ray release.
An interesting but contradictory theme runs through the three film expert commentaries (Schickel, McCarthy and Bogdanovich) on El Dorado. They all think it's a lesser work than Rio Bravo, but they clearly like the film so much that they keep pointing out good things in it. After a while, you end up wondering where the bad parts are. (Schickel does note that the ending is rushed.) Admittedly, Charlene Holt is no Angie Dickinson, but then again Ricky Nelson is no James Caan. In the end, a good case can be made that El Dorado is just as good as Rio Bravo, but in a different way. Chili Palmer was right when he said that John Wayne played himself in both, but he played himself differently—and older. Despite minor video issues, highly recommended, especially with the informative extras.
1965
1971
1970
1969
1966
1985
Limited Edition to 3000 - SOLD OUT
1967
Warner Archive Collection
1950
2K Restoration
1972
1985
50th Anniversary Edition | Shout Select #57
1968
1970
1966
1939
Limited Edition to 3000 - SOLD OUT
1961
2017
1966
1974
1953
1955