Still from Rio Bravo
Chris Forrester details how Rio Bravo exemplifies the term of “the hangout film” with its affable characters, softened masculinity, atypical genre tropes, and more.
The films of Howard Hawks offer a sampling of many of the cinema’s great genre pleasures — film noirs, musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies, romances, war films. Were that not enough, many are often touted as high watermarks in their respective categories: His Girl Friday (1940) among the finest screwball comedies ever made, The Big Sleep (1946) one of the best noirs, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) a gem among Technicolor musicals. Much as he was known for his work in any one of those genres, though, Hawks is perhaps more synonymous with the “hangout picture,” which he never did better than Rio Bravo (1959).
Though not literally speaking the first hangout film, even in Hawks’s own filmography, Rio Bravo is the film in reference to which Quentin Tarantino coined the term, and the one most closely associated with it. It’s not hard to see why; only loosely concerned with the events surrounding the arrest and subsequent breakout attempts of a wealthy landowner’s spoiled, murderer younger brother, the film is much more about the bonds that develop among a sheriff (John Wayne,) his deputy (Walter Brennan), his newly re-enlisted colleague (Dean Martin), and a widow whose travels have brought her to town (Angie Dickinson) as they endeavor to uphold the law in their own dusty little slice of the West.
The M.O. of the hangout movie, which transcends, or at least flavors, genre in the same way that the slice-of-life film or hyperlink film might be seen to, is a preference for vibe and character over pure narrative momentum. In the hangout movie, plot is a general roadmap more than a direct route, and the generally lax interactions and camaraderie between characters are more defining of the overall vibe than narrative content. Consider Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993), in which characters meander about town on the last day of school, or Ocean’s Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001), in which a heist motivates a bevy of good times amongst professional robbers; in either case, you’re more likely to come away with a memory of pleasant ambience than an analytical read on plot and theme.
Furthermore, the hangout film has an affinity for certain genres. High school movies, westerns, dramas, and crime films have the higher incidence rates, while you’d be much harder-pressed to find a thriller or horror film that fits the bill. And in a similar way, specific filmmakers have more of an affinity for them than others; Linklater, Soderbergh, Tarantino and the Coens all have multiple films easily characterized as hangout movies, while filmmakers who’ve made just one are harder to come by (David Byrne and True Stories come to mind, but then again…). But undeniably, Hawks was and remains the king of the hangout movie — imitated and channeled by many but equaled by few and surpassed by none.
The hangout movie also tends to skew towards maleness and masculinity. For every The Big Lebowski (Coens, 1998) and Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989), there might only be one Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982) or The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985), and only rarely is there a Bridesmaids (Feig, 2011). In keeping with this, though, the hangout movie is often defined by or even loosely about a specific kind of masculinity. As perhaps is necessitated by its vibe-over-plot ethos, the masculinity of the hangout movie is often much softer than the masculinity of the (non-hangout) crime film or thriller specifically.
Dean Martin as Dude
The primary pursuit of the hangout film seems to be a sort of lax, soothing energy that, even in the face of its characters’ many tribulations (where applicable), generates comforting warmth; the viewer is often compelled to want to join the characters in their hanging out, in spite of any looming threats. As such, its masculinity is often still strong (see John Wayne in Rio Bravo, particularly) but unthreatening to all but the evil-doer. Wayne’s Chance is the polar opposite of the racist murderer he played in Ford’s The Searchers three years prior and indeed also a much calmer iteration of the typical Western hero. His is an inviting machismo, strong and protecting. He forgives Dude (Martin) and nurtures his potential, takes an out-of-towner (Ricky Nelson) under his wing, falls for the girl (Dickinson, a figure of equal calm strength), and ultimately upholds the law under duress from do-no-gooders.
The core tension of the film is thus one between good men and bad men, with an emphasis in both cases on the particular types of masculinity. Each man negotiates his own relationship to his masculinity’s goodness or badness through the course of the film, to varying degrees: Dude begins the film a violent drunkard who strikes Chance (thus inciting the violence that sets the film’s plot in motion), but through his peers’ friendship and belief in him finds the strength to be righteous and sober; opposite him, Joe and his goons resort to violence to thwart the law’s aims toward justice, doubling down on the violent cruelty of his initial crime rather than finding repentance.
John Wayne’s kind, stoic sheriff Chance
And so the film becomes about choosing goodness and, in doing so, filling the drab, sunburnt expanses of the west with camaraderie. The western in particular seems a frequent genre backdrop for the hangout film, in no small part because of its innate focus on man’s inhabiting of spaces where the only warmth is what he brings. Indeed, among Hawks’s own films, the westerns seem to stand out as the most decisively hangout-y; His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes feel more defined by specific genre pleasures (screwball farce, noir-isms and lavish musical numbers, respectively), whereas Red River (1948), Rio Bravo, and El Dorado (1966) each so perfectly encapsulates the hangout film that they might lead a syllabus on the quasi-genre, were there ever cause for one.
Rio Bravo specifically occupies a similar spot in the canon for the western in general — second only to The Searchers and Leone’s famed spaghetti westerns in reputation and significance, though it arguably outpaces them all in terms of pure genre pleasures. And yet as a western specifically it feels decisively atypical, rejecting the grand adventures and dynamic intricacies of other famed genre entries. Such is the beauty of the hangout movie, which so charmingly wields the basic components of its chosen genres not toward rich complexity, but cozy simplicity — and in doing so often finds a delightful purity.
Rio Bravo screens June 15 at 4pm as part of the IU Cinema series Critics’ Pics: Selections from AFI and Sight & Sound.