The John Wayne Western John Carpenter Loves So Much, He Remade It Twice

There’s one John Wayne Western that director John Carpenter adores so much, he remade it twice himself. During a 2011 chat with Rotten Tomatoes, Carpenter namechecked several movies he called his “emotional favorites,” meaning they were the films he fell in love with as a child and inspired his love of movies. Among this list was Forbidden Planet, X: The Unknown and The Thing from Another World; he eventually remade the latter as 1982’s The Thing. He also states he got into the movie business to make Westerns as he “Loved Westerns… Loved them. I mean, huge love.”

The tragedy is, that by the time Carpenter entered the movie business during the ’70s, the Western genre was all but dead. That’s why so many John Carpenter movies – including Escape From New York and Vampires – are Westerns in disguise. In the aforementioned interview, he also declares his love for director Howard Hawks, who he believes is the only filmmaker to make a great film in every genre. Hawks also collaborated with Western movie icon John Wayne many times.

John Carpenter Remade John Wayne’s Rio Bravo With 2 Different Movies

Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars remixed Rio Bravo into different genres

Carpenter has cited Wayne’s Rio Bravo as a personal favorite, telling Rotten Tomatoes “Oh, I’ve watched it too many times.” This 1959 Western cast Wayne as a sheriff tasked with holding onto a dangerous prisoner in a small town jail, with a gang of killers circling to break him out. Both Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino adore Rio Bravo, with the latter even once claiming to have shown the movie to prospective girlfriends; if they didn’t like it, he would break off the romance.

It’s possible to see many of the themes Carpenter would bring to his later work in Wayne’s film, including outsiders having to work together against a largely faceless threat. Carpenter would essentially remake Rio Bravo’s siege setup with Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars. The former was released in 1976 and was Carpenter’s second film. This sees a cop and a criminal having to defend an isolated L.A. precinct from a street gang, and there are plenty of Hawkian’s homages throughout, including an overt life from the “dripping blood” scene.

Carpenter also edited Assault on Precinct 13 using the pseudonym “John T. Chance,” which is the name of Wayne’s Rio Bravo character. He later remixed the film again with his 2001 sci-fi actioner Ghosts of Mars, where a cop (Natasha Henstridge) and criminal (Ice Cube) have to defend a police station on Mars from miners possessed by alien spirits. In a sense, Ghosts of Mars combines themes from much of Carpenter’s own filmography, including The Thing, though Ghosts is often cited as one of Carpenter’s weaker outings. Ghosts of Mars was Jason Statham’s first action movie too.

Why John Carpenter Loves Rio Bravo So Much

Rio Bravo is Carpenter’s favorite movie

There’s also an unofficial Rio Bravo trilogy too, since Hawks and Wayne remade their own movie twice. They first reteamed for 1966’s El Dorado, where Wayne works with Robert Mitchum’s drunken sheriff to take on an evil rancher, while Hawks’ last film Rio Lobo was another loose remake. Carpenter has admitted to taking pieces from the latter two films, with the final scene in Ghosts of Mars with the two gun-totting heroes mirroring El Dorado’s ending. Of course, Rio Bravo is Carpenter’s favorite of the three, and over the years he’s given many interviews and even provided an audio commentary for it.

There’s not much about the Wayne Western the filmmaker doesn’t seem to like. He loves the group dynamic between Wayne and his drunken deputy (Dean Martin), he loves the music, the banter, the bizarre singing scene and much more. Carpenter related to the siege element of the story too, and has spoken about feeling “under siege” in the town he grew up in, as he felt out of place there. The siege motif is present in nearly all of Carpenter’s work, including Prince of Darkness.

John Wayne And John Carpenter Almost Made Their Own Western Together

They nearly teamed up for Western drama Blood River

While the genre was waning in the ’70s, Carpenter still tried to mount his own Westerns, which included penning an epic adventure dubbed El Diablo. He also wrote a screenplay called Blood River, where a young gunfighter would be mentored by an old trapper. Wayne became interested in the latter role and Carpenter developed Blood River for him, but the actor’s ill health during this time killed the project. Wayne’s last film would be 1976’s The Shootist, with the star passing away three years later. Blood River itself became a TV movie starring Wilford Brimley in 1991.

Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars might riff on Rio Bravo, but Carpenter still brings his own personality to them. They pay due respect to Hawks and John Wayne’s adventure, but neither film is a xerox of Rio Bravo either. They have a lot more action and scenes of horror, while Carpenter’s characters are more pessimistic and hard-boiled – though they learn they can only survive by working with others, another recurring element from Hawks’ output.