Cowboys! Country songs! John Wayne's sensitive side!

In this classic western, a stubborn small-town sheriff rounds up a posse, including the town drunk, a young stranger and a disabled old man to keep a criminal in jail, away from the reach of his ruthless rancher brother.

Joining me for this conversation is Will DiGravio, a video essayist and podcaster who brings a very special expertise in Rio Bravo to the table. Listen to our chat to find out more.

Transcript:

00:03:05:22 - 00:03:06:17
Will Webb
Hi Will. How you doing?

00:03:07:03 - 00:03:14:12
Will di Gravio
I'm doing great. Thank you so much. Great to be here and excited to talk Rio Bravo. Excellent. Excellent summary.

00:03:15:10 - 00:03:35:13
Will Webb
Thank you very much. Yeah, it's it's interesting film to summarize, isn't it? Because so much of it is actually short on plot. I think there's not much plot to the film. Not many things happen, which is a real surprise for things commercial as the Western. But before we get into that, I want to talk to you about your like your background and kind of how you come to film.

00:03:35:29 - 00:03:51:04
Will Webb
And the biggest thing that I know about you is that you run the video essay podcast, which is this like in, in what I think is quite a niche subject. Sometimes though, the world of making video essays and it's specifically for making video essays or at least talking about them in ways that are related to the making of them.

00:03:52:18 - 00:03:59:22
Will Webb
If you could tell me about how you came to that and what kind of brought you to video essay or video graphic criticism? As I've newly discovered it's called?

00:04:00:21 - 00:04:24:18
Will di Gravio
Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's great to be here. And I occupy a weird space in the video essay world because I think I'm more associated people. Maybe considering more as an interviewer and podcaster than an actual video essayist, although I am trying to make more and more video essays. The short story is I went to a school called Middlebury College to get my undergraduate degree, which is in the United States in Vermont.

00:04:24:29 - 00:04:45:18
Will di Gravio
It's a small liberal arts college. And there I the idea behind the liberal arts college system is that you're not really supposed to know what you want to study when you go in. They force you to take a bunch of different classes. And so I started off as a political science major and taking some econ classes did terrible in econ, like the worst grades I ever got.

00:04:46:13 - 00:05:01:26
Will di Gravio
Kind of got bored with the political science and was like, you know, maybe I want to be an English major deep down because I started to develop this interest in journalism. So I was like, okay, maybe I should try to become like a better writer. Didn't I like a lot of the classes I took? But then because of the liberal arts, you have to take something in the arts.

00:05:01:26 - 00:05:19:09
Will di Gravio
So I was like, Oh, okay, I like movies. Let's take film class. And then it's kind of like Boom by world changed. First screening was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and I kind of just like sat there with my mouth open and just like, wow, this is like the best thing I'd ever seen. I want to keep doing this.

00:05:19:11 - 00:05:52:27
Will di Gravio
From there, it was kind of off to the races. I was very lucky to study under Jason Martell and Christian Keatley, which if you're familiar with video essays in particular, the academic audio visual essay are two leaders in the field and they run this program for scholars where they essentially train them how to make video essays. As you can imagine, you know, a scholar who's been in the field 20 years, knows a lot about film, can write eloquently about film or TV or whatever moving image, but doesn't might not know how to use Adobe Premiere, which is obviously one of the most important things.

00:05:53:11 - 00:06:12:05
Will di Gravio
And it so that they teach those skills while also advocating for the form itself in the field. And so I was actually working as a journalist at a local newspaper in the town of Middlebury, and Jason invited me to cover this for the newspaper because it was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities here in the United States, the workshop.

00:06:12:05 - 00:06:29:21
Will di Gravio
So it's kind of big deal. A small town with 8000 people in Vermont, right? So I went and covered it. It was kind of like, whoa, this is really cool. So I enrolled in Jason's class the following fall, fell in love with it was like, You know what? Amidst the media, I'm interested in film. I'm just going to become a film major.

00:06:30:10 - 00:06:48:25
Will di Gravio
And I actually started off declaring a major in film and media because I was interested in, like I said, in journalism, I thought maybe I'll write something on like conservative television or something like that. But then I just started watching these amazing movies. I discovered Hitchcock. I discovered Spike Lee and experimental works like my Darren. And I was like, okay, this is what I want to do.

00:06:48:25 - 00:07:08:20
Will di Gravio
I'm a film studies guy, so that's kind of my origin story. But, you know, growing up, I never really watched a lot of movies. It just wasn't something that I did or my family did. Not a bad way. It's just, you know, people watch it and do certain things. And so I have a lot of gaps in my movie watching and I've been working to fill them for a while.

00:07:09:17 - 00:07:41:12
Will di Gravio
But I did stumble across Rio Bravo at one point, which is very serendipitous, and perhaps you can touch on that later. But yeah, so so for me, ever since 2017, it's been just about trying to engage myself in film studies and videographer criticism I found exciting because it seemed kind of like an untapped terrain, you know, and wanting to think about films and to do film criticism like, you know, you want something like an amazing for the first time, you're like, Oh my God, I'm so excited about this.

00:07:41:12 - 00:07:58:17
Will di Gravio
I want to work with it and do something. And then you go to the library, you go online and there's 100 articles written about it and ten books, and you're like, Oh, maybe there's no video essays. And you think, Oh, well, this is this is my way that I can contribute something new and be fresh and to revisit old films in new ways, which is my passion.

00:07:59:18 - 00:08:13:15
Will di Gravio
And so that's what got me really excited about video criticism. Then the more I kept watching, it was just there was an art to this and that we should be treating video essays in the same way. You know, I really love those books that are like conversations with filmmakers or experimental.

00:08:13:15 - 00:08:15:23
Will Webb
Shows like Little Lynch or something.

00:08:15:24 - 00:08:29:14
Will di Gravio
Yes, exactly. And I was like, there should be something like that for video essayists because I was seeing style across the works of video essayists. And so that was the inspiration for podcast. And now here we are today. I mean.

00:08:29:14 - 00:08:51:13
Will Webb
It's it's a very familiar story to me in some ways because like you, I went to university to do a philosophy degree. And although I was making films, I've never really done any film criticism. And I did a course that was essentially you just had to write an extended piece on a film or a set of films which ended up being on Dario Argento and interpreting how he feels about women through his giallo films.

00:08:51:13 - 00:09:06:28
Will Webb
I don't know if you're familiar with them, but yeah, it's a certainly interesting topic and I was lucky, like you saying about at the time, there wasn't much critical stuff about Giallo that was serious. They were stuck in the liner notes of DVDs, and the Blu ray revolution was just starting to get all those kind of exploitation films.

00:09:07:14 - 00:09:27:12
Will Webb
There's a lot of movies that skipped straight over even getting a VHS, let alone a DVD, and went straight to Blu ray because places like Alamo's releasing House and Arrow as well in the UK kind of got these little films, put them straight into a restoration with a reskin. So that was kind of the moment where I got into film criticism as well as filmmaking too.

00:09:27:13 - 00:09:49:10
Will Webb
And I think you're right that it's a we're a kind of inflection point for video essays in a way, because the technology is now available pretty easy to use. Premiere's relatively cheap, at least when you compare it to like, say, an avid video deck from the early noughties or something. And what it means as well is that it's freeing up people who are not academic video essayists to become video essayists.

00:09:49:10 - 00:10:18:12
Will Webb
And I love that there's this like incredibly rich and very stiff sometimes world of academic video essays. Some of my favorites are from there and some other video assists for those people who play like Rotterdam and the selection there and stuff like that. But I think the proliferation of videos online really focused on very mainstream films and TV, and that's really heartening to me because the main thing I want from criticism is to encourage people to think deeply about and probe into culture no matter what it is that they're engaging with.

00:10:18:12 - 00:10:37:25
Will Webb
And so when I see like a nine hour long video essay series on like Studio Ghibli or something like that or anime in general, it's like, Great. I can't wait to find out what you think about this thing that I'm never going to watch. And there's that iconic two hour long pathologic video essay and the HBO Maggie kind of canon, which comes up a lot in those conversations.

00:10:37:25 - 00:10:53:21
Will Webb
And again, like punishingly difficult Russian video game that I will never play. But they're out there talking about how great it is and what it means for video game design, stuff like that, which is Fab and I love that you have a focus on older films as well because I think when we talk about Rio Bravo, we are talking about a very commercial film.

00:10:54:05 - 00:11:19:22
Will Webb
It's a genre focused film. Although Howard Hawks is an, I would say, very strong filmmaker and certainly was at this point already recognized by people like his, the cinema, the original, the kind of events, the French New Wave, you know, he's one of their favorites, right? This is a very commercial film, even down to casting not one but two singers as these lead characters, because we have Dean Martin as dude and is it Ricky Nelson, his name?

00:11:20:06 - 00:11:41:28
Will Webb
Yep. This kind of teen heartthrob, country singer. Yeah. And so there's this attempt to make something that's very commercial, but with a real strong artistic sensibility. And my understanding of it is that it's largely a response to another Western right, which is high noon. I should preface this by saying I know very little about Westerns, and in fact, I hadn't seen Rio Bravo, so thanks for recommending it.

00:11:43:15 - 00:12:00:18
Will Webb
High Noon is a film about a sheriff who's in a similar situation and who is convinced by his are the people around him to kind of take on their help. And as far as I understand it, John Wayne and the director of this film, Howard Hawks, felt that a professional sheriff would absolutely not bring citizens into the line of danger like that.

00:12:01:03 - 00:12:12:19
Will Webb
And so this film is largely engaged in how he doesn't want to take on help. Why that's a bad idea. Well, the funny enough, he does end up taking on several people who really aren't good fits and then it just happens to work out. So the magic a film for you.

00:12:12:19 - 00:12:38:19
Will di Gravio
That yeah I think Hawks referred to the sheriff in high noon is Gary Cooper, who plays the sheriff, Will Cain. I think you refer to him as a chicken without a head running around. And for him, the one of the main problems was that, you know, a manly man, a true sheriff, would not go around groveling for help in that way, because in that film, Gary Cooper is bad guys are basically coming back to get their revenge and he's running around being like, Can you help me?

00:12:38:19 - 00:12:50:15
Will di Gravio
I need your help at the top. And they're all kind of like, No, no, no. And so John Wayne and Howard Hawks didn't like that. So there is definitely some of that at play in Rio Bravo, for sure.

00:12:51:05 - 00:13:19:18
Will Webb
And then away from that kind of like they call and response kind of element of the film. It's also a return to form for both director and star, right? John Wayne had built this kind of inexorable image of himself as John Wayne, the cowboy, and kind of got a reputation for playing himself, I think an unfair one. I think he is actually quite a strong actor, as you see in this film, but he went off and tried to do a number of films that played with his image, I guess that had him doing very different things and they mostly sucked or at least they bombed.

00:13:20:06 - 00:13:36:00
Will Webb
And Howard Hawks likewise had had a long period of not making films, and it's longer to him. I think it was four years, which by modern standards isn't bad at all. I think Terrence Malick usually takes about eight between each film. Yeah, he was a very commercial filmmaker and Westerns also were being churned out at this time in history.

00:13:36:14 - 00:13:54:27
Will di Gravio
Yeah, it's funny, he the film he directed, such as Land of the Pharaohs, was considered a huge flop. And he takes some time off. And he's actually he was already you know, people associate with the Western a lot, but he didn't he didn't direct a ton of Westerns as compared to maybe someone like John Ford. And he goes abroad to Europe.

00:13:55:04 - 00:14:18:10
Will di Gravio
I'm forgetting where. And he's watching a lot of American Westerns on television. And this is kind of taking a lot of that in and then eventually decides to reunite with Wayne, as you say, and do this. And I remember in in Roger Ebert's has that great collection of books, the great movies where he writes a bunch of great mov