Less than a decade after Leigh Brackett penned Rio Bravo for Howard Hawks, she wrote the remake, EL DORADO (1966). Hawks already did back to back remakes with Ball of Fire and A Song Is Born but this time the remake is excellent.
While the film opens with a song about how some men are driven to wander seeking for El Dorado, that has nothing to do with the story. As with Rio Bravo we have John Wayne as the leader of a motley crew; this time he’s gun for hire Cole Thornton, long-time friend of El Dorado Sheriff Harrah (Robert Mitchum). After a brief shoot out with some thugs in the early scenes, Cole contemplates working for villainous landowner Bart Jason (Ed Asner) decides against it, then meets up with young knife-throwing gambler Mississippi (James Caan, growing since his bad performance in Red Line 7000). They return to El Dorado when Cole learns Jason’s hired dangerous fast gun McLeod (Christopher George) and his crew, and that Mitchum has crawled into the bottle since a woman broke his heart (my friend Ross says when Hawks hired Wayne, the actor’s response was “Can I be the drunk this time?”).
Rather than remake the movie with a mostly different cast, Hawks and Brackett focus less on the plot and more on the connections between Cole and Mississippi, Cole and Harrah and to some extent the professional respect between Cole and McLeod. There’s a lot of humor, from Mississippi having to explain why he wears That Hat to Cole and Harrah at one point getting their crutches mixed up. “Faith can move mountains but it can’t beat a faster draw.”
FRANKENSTEIN (2025) is Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic with Oscar Isaac as the eponymous researcher, a doctor’s son driven by his mother’s death to surpass his unloved father and triumph over death itself. This leads, of course, to creating his Creature (Jacob Elordi), which unsettles both Elizabeth (Mia Goth) and Victor’s financial backer (Christopher Waltz) even before Frankenstein realizes he’s crossed lines that should never be crossed and There Will Be Consequences.
This is great-looking and well acted. I don’t know if it’s particularly faithful (it’s been a long time since I read the novel) but it does include the Creature spying on a family to understand humanity, something many adaptations skips. Worth catching. “Choice is the gift of the soul — the one gift god has given us.”
TYG and I loved PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026) which starts with Ryan Gosling’s Grace waking up on a rocket in interstellar space (“That’s not our sun, is it?”) with no idea how he got there. Slowly he puts together that he’s the last survivor of a mission to stop interstellar microbes from eating the sun; Tau Ceti is the only star we know of that’s surviving the infestation so he and his fellow crew have been sent there on a probable one-way trip as a Hail Mary play … and now everyone else on the ship is dead. In between flashbacks to the project on Earth, Grace arrives at Tau Ceti and finds he’s not alone: Rocky, a stonelike life form from another planet threatened by the astrophages, is already there. Can they team up to save their worlds? Can they even learn to communicate?
This isn’t perfect. Gosling’s a little too charming to believe Grace is as friendless as he’s supposed to be. A bigger problem is that despite not having astronaut training (he was a last minute substitute pick for the mission) Grace is somehow able to operate the ship as if he were Flash Gordon. Despite which, this is first rate (and I was, after all, interviewed in connection with it). “The planet’s name of Tau Ceti E is just the name of the star with E added. That’s very unimaginative.”
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