John Wayne was no stranger to cinematic highs and lows. For every Stagecoach or The Searchers, there was a Hellfighters or The Conqueror lurking in his filmography. With nearly 200 films under his belt by the time of his passing in 1979, it’s only natural that not all of them were masterpieces. Even The Duke himself had a pick for his worst film: the 1957 Cold War misfire, Jet Pilot.
Backed by the ever-meticulous Howard Hughes, the film was less about storytelling and more of a showcase for military aircraft. Hughes, a notorious perfectionist, spent years obsessing over the editing, delaying the release so long that by the time it finally hit theaters, its technology and political relevance had already become outdated. Wayne himself wasn’t exactly proud of it—but if you asked one of his most celebrated collaborators, Howard Hawks, he might have had a different answer.
Hawks, an undisputed Hollywood legend, directed Wayne in five films, including Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966), and Rio Lobo (1970). Among these, one stands as an enduring classic, while another serves as a cautionary tale about Hollywood’s tendency to recycle past successes.
The masterpiece? Rio Bravo. A perfectly executed Western, it follows Wayne as a sheriff forced to defend his town alongside an unlikely team—a grizzled old deputy, an alcoholic former lawman, and a young gunslinger—against a gang determined to break a murderer out of jail. The film was a triumph, beautifully acted and brilliantly simple, marking a high point in both Wayne’s career and Hawks’ filmography.
And then there’s Rio Lobo.
Released in 1970, it played like a bargain-bin retelling of Rio Bravo but with significantly less charm, energy, and originality. This time, Wayne portrayed a Civil War colonel hunting down Confederate raiders who stole a gold shipment. But by the film’s final act, the plot had twisted itself into yet another “heroes barricaded inside a sheriff’s office” scenario, mirroring both Rio Bravo and Hawks’ other Western, El Dorado. Unfortunately, audiences had little patience for a third iteration of the same story, and the film flopped, barely recouping its $6 million budget.
Even Hawks regretted making it. In a 1975 interview, he admitted that his biggest mistake was not securing two major stars to support Wayne, the way Dean Martin had in Rio Bravo and Robert Mitchum in El Dorado.
“Rio Lobo was a mistake because they didn’t have the money,” Hawks lamented. “We needed two good people. Otherwise, my story wasn’t any good. I saved the story and just wrote that damn piece of junk and made it.”
But would bigger names—perhaps a young Robert Redford or Warren Beatty—have saved the film? Unlikely. Rio Lobo’s greatest flaw wasn’t its lack of star power, but the fact that it felt stale, uninspired, and out of step with the rapidly evolving Hollywood of the 1970s.
In the end, the film serves as proof that even the greatest legends can’t outrun the changing tides of cinema.
