Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Vulnerability and Rio Bravo

2014; Issue: 73 Linguagem: Inglês

1449-857X

Leland Poague,

Cinema and Media Studies

For viewers who've come of age in the twenty-first century, the Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo (1959) most likely functions as a barely recognised textual allusion or spectral trace. Maybe it's a televisual blur in the background of the shot while Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) constructs a comfort-food sundae in Season 4, Episode 1 of The Sopranos ('For All Debts Public and Private', 2002). Or maybe there's an Ethan Hawke fan somewhere who admires (as well she might) his gritty star turn as a guilt- and drug-racked Detroit police sergeant tasked to secure the safe custody of a drug lord in an almost-shut-down and inexplicably besieged industrial-district precinct house in Jean-Fran ois Richet's Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), itself a remake of John Carpenter's 1976 recasting of the film Hawks directed and produced under the auspices of Warner Bros. in 1957 and 1958. (Would she know that the addict lawman in the Hawks original was played by the professional inebriate Dean Martin, who appears on the soundtrack of the latest version singing his classic pop hits while the Hawke character and his cast-off cohorts, one of them played by Sopranos regular Drea de Matteo, celebrate New Year's Eve?).