Rio Bravo Directed by Howard Hawks Starring John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Rematch! Marcia Clark vs. Mark Fuhrman on Fox special Now Showing New video releases for May 5 Y E S T E R D A Y Cheerio, Seinfeld By Joyce Millman Bidding farewell to the greatest sitcom of all time (05/04/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S He Got Game Reviewed by Gary Kamiya Spike Lee's soft-hearted but moving tribute to faith, love and basketball (05/01/98) Les Miserables A high-minded film version of Victor Hugo's epic tale of crime and obsession (05/01/98) Two Girls and a Guy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Tale of a womanizer and the women who confront him has brains and unrestrained eroticism (04/24/98) Sliding Doors Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Gwyneth Paltrow misses her train and forever alters her life in this romantic comedy (04/24/98) Sour Grapes Reviewed by Laura Miller "Seinfeld" co-creator's big-screen dud (04/24/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ] EDITOR'S NOTE | We've all become used to video columns that rehash reviews of movies that opened in theaters six months earlier. With "Home Movies," Salon hopes to do something different. Video stores have arguably become the repertory movie houses of our day and a way that many of us can catch up with our collective movie past. Each week in "Home Movies," Charles Taylor will dip into that past, both recent and distant, to re-view videos you won't find on the "New Releases" wall. Some of these videos may be familiar to you, others you may have heard of vaguely, like a rumor, and others not at all. They could be new releases that didn't play anywhere near you or came and went too fast to be seen, let alone written about. They could be classic films that recent events cast into a new light. They could be performance films or collections of television series recently made available to the home-video market. "Home Movies" aims to provide Salon readers with something more substantial than the capsule reviews in the battered paperback guides chained to the counter at your video store. We hope it will point you toward treasures you might have missed, and encourage you to look at the familiar in a fresh way. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great American Movie HOWARD HAWKS' ODDBALL, INDOOR WESTERN, "RIO BRAVO," CHAMPIONS THE HIDDEN POWERS OF MISFITS AND LOSERS. "We don't have a person to waste." That line, spoken time and again by Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign, was an irresistible bit of political rhetoric. As much as anything else Clinton said (or, later, did), that line promised that the era of Reaganbush -- 12 years predicated on the conviction that certain people were expendable -- was over. When I think of those words these days, it isn't President Clinton that exemplifies them, it's "Rio Bravo." "When you've got some talent, your job is to use it," the film's director, Howard Hawks, said in an interview a few weeks before his death in 1977. Hawks was answering the people who had criticized him for a scene in "Rio Bravo" in which Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin sing. His defense contains the ethics of the whole picture. "Rio Bravo" is a demonstration of democracy in action, a movie about a society that operates on the belief that there really is no one to waste. "Rio Bravo" is the most casual, the most relaxed of movies. A comic western that ambles through its two hours and 21 minutes, it always has time to pause for a joke, a song or banter among the characters. Hawks and his actors seem to forget about the plot for long stretches, the way a group of friends who've gotten together to pitch in on some chore wind up spending most of the afternoon just hanging out, enjoying one another's company. "He's so good he doesn't feel he has to prove it," says John Wayne's sheriff of Nelson's hotshot young gunslinger, and the same is true for the respect and affection the characters share. Their relaxation with each other, their ease with themselves, is the result of that respect. They express it in actions, not words, sometimes as simply as Wayne rolling a cigarette for his deputy, Martin, when the character's drunken shakes get the better of him. Wayne's Chance and Martin's Dude are waiting for the U.S. marshal to take custody of a man they've locked up after he callously murdered an unarmed man in a saloon brawl. The killer, Joe Burdett (Claude Akins), is the brother of Nathan Burdett (John Russell), a rancher rich enough to think the law doesn't apply to him. Burdett's men have bottled up the town, and Chance fears they may try to bust Joe out of jail. But the real danger in "Rio Bravo" doesn't come from the Burdetts. It comes from whatever causes the people allied against them -- Wayne, Martin, Nelson, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson -- to undervalue one another -- or themselves, from anything that shortchanges their shared respect, their instinctive sense of fairness. Hawks made "Rio Bravo" because he couldn't stand "High Noon." N E X T_P A G E _| "That's all you got?" "That's what I got."