John Wayne and Robert Mitchum were two of the biggest Western stars of their day, and their eventual team-up in El Dorado was worth the surprisingly long wait. There exists an unofficial Rio Bravo trilogy, with director Howard Hawks and leading man John Wayne making the same movie three times. Rio Bravo is the original and most acclaimed, where Wayne's Sheriff has only a drunken deputy and a cocky young gunfighter to rely on while defending his besieged jailhouse. The film is a classic, with both John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino labeling it one of their favorites.

Rio Bravo was Wayne's retort to High Noon, with the star detesting the politics of that 1952 Western. Hawks and Wayne liked the basic premise of Rio Bravo so much that they remixed its characters and themes twice more with El Dorado and Rio Lobo. The latter proved to be Hawks' final film, and...