Classic Westerns: Rio Bravo/ The Searchers/ The Wild Bunch (1956) Rating: Starring: Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, William Holden, Jeffrey Hunter, Ben Johnson, Dean Martin, Vera Miles, Ricky Nelson, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates Director: John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah Category: Classics, Classics, Westerns Studio: Warner Bros. Subtitles: English,Spanish,French,Portuguese Length: 439 mins     Rio Bravo: On one side is an army of gunmen dead-set on springing a murderous sidekick from jail. On the other is Sheriff John T. Chance and his two deputies: one a drunk, the other a cripple. Place your bets. John Wayne is Chance in Rio Bravo, a lean Western classic packing solid heroics and a strong emotional core. He's joined by Dean Martin as the deputy coming off a two-year drunk, Walter Brennan as the old coot whose spirit outmatches his hobbled stride. Ricky Nelson as a youth out to prove himself and Angie Dickinson as the scarlet woman with her eye on Chance. Director Howard Hawks lifted the Western to new heights with Red River. Capturing the legendary West with a stellar cast in peak form, he does it again here. The Searchers: With The Searchers, John Wayne and director John Ford forged an indelible saga of the frontier and the men and women who challenged it. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, and ex-Confederate who sets out to find his niece, captured by Comanches who massacred his family. He won't surrender to hunger, thirst, the elements or loneliness. And in his obsessive quest, Ethan finds something unexpected: his own humanity. One of the most influential movies ever made, The Searchers contains sequences that are "a brilliant fusing of editing, camerawork and performance as filtered through a master director's eyes" (Ted Sennett, Great Hollywood Westerns). The Wild Bunch: By any standard, director Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch, a powerful tale of hang-dog desperados bound by a code of honor, rates as one of the all-time greatest Westerns, perhaps one of the greatest of all films.