The John Carpenter movie that was secretly a remake of a John Wayne classic: “Death and danger”
It’s no secret that John Carpenter is a lifelong fan of the western, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne standing out as his heroes. In terms of filmmakers, he’s also a huge supporter of Howard Hawks, but during his esteemed directorial career, he never tried his hand at tackling the Old West.
Not in the traditional sense, at least, because Carpenter’s filmography is clearly and obviously indebted to his love of gunslingers, white hats, and dusty plains. Snake Plissken was directly inspired by Eastwood’s contributions to the genre, the uneven Vampires is his ode to the medium with a supernatural spin, and They Live focuses on a drifter wandering into a town and cleaning up the streets, to name but three.
Those influences have always been displayed proudly on his sleeve, but Carpenter was so unsubtle about slyly remaking Rio Bravo as Assault on Precinct 13 that it’s a surprise he wasn’t slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit. It’s something the filmmaker has been known to do himself, having successfully taken sci-fi actioner Lockout to court for ripping off Escape from New York, but he got away with it.
Hawks’ 1959 classic stars Wayne as John T. Chance, who, alongside Dean Martin’s Dude, gets more than they bargained for when a criminal gang threatens to use violent means to extricate his brother from the local jail. Gathering together a motley crew of combatants, ‘The Duke’ and his allies bed in for a battle against the encroaching threat, who make good on their promise to mount a deadly offensive.
In Assault on Precinct 13 – which Carpenter edited himself under the pseudonym of none other than John T. Chance – the story finds a gang seeking revenge on the police after several of their numbers are killed by the cops. Holing up in the local station, the prisoners and police forge an unlikely alliance to combat the Street Thunder gang, who make good on their promise to mount a deadly offensive.
During the climactic scenes of Rio Bravo, Wayne and his crew throw dynamite into a warehouse where their enemies are holed up to draw a line under the skirmish, while in Assault on Precinct 13, Austin Stoker’s Ethan Bishop shoots an oxygen tank to accomplish much the same effect. The similarities are there for all to see, but it’s not as if Carpenter suggested it to be anything else.
Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes, the director named Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo as being among his personal favourites, pointing to how they exist as Hawks’ “vision of adventure stories with male groups, and men and women’s relationships, and life and death and danger.” Again, hardly dissimilar to his 1976 action thriller.
He channelled Wayne’s character in the editing room, Laurie Zimmer’s Leigh is named after Rio Bravo scribe Leigh Brackett, and the shared DNA between the two is apparent in almost every frame, so Carpenter wasn’t exactly trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes and claim Assault on Precinct 13 was a completely original work.
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