With the help of its TV-friendly vibe and the support of high profiles fans like Quentin Tarantino, Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” remains possibly the most popular of all classic-era westerns. The laid back seriocomic oater starred John Wayne as a tough frontier sheriff in conflict with a powerful rancher; Dean Martin as his easygoing deputy ruined by the bottle and a bad woman; teen idol Rick Nelson as a young whippersnapper able to work miracles with a gun; Walter Brennan as a wily coot; and gorgeous newcomer Angie Dickenson as the ultra-sexy female gambler who keeps Wayne guessing throughout. Though the kind of unassuming film that feels like a cult hit, it was actually an immediate success on its original release in 1959.

Five or six years later, however, the classic era was dead, and the title characters of “Bonnie and Clyde” were coming to shoot up the corpse, but older filmmakers for the most part saw no reason to change. Howard Hawks, moreover, had never been had a problem with cannibalizing his past. If something worked once, why not let it work twice? So in the wake of a couple of non-western box-office bombs, he decided that the downbeat western adaptation of a novel by Harry Brown that science fiction novelist and screenwriter Leigh Brackett (“Rio Bravo,” “The Empire Strikes Back”) was drafting would instead become a laidback seriocomic oater. It would star John Wayne as a tough frontier gun-for-hire in conflict with a powerful rancher; Robert Mitchum as an easygoing sheriff ruined by the bottle and a bad woman; James Caan as a young whippersnapper able to work miracles with a knife; character actor Arthur Hunnicut as a wily coot (Walter Brennan was unavailable); and attractive newcomer Charlene Holt as Wayne’s sexy girlfriend, who occasionally confuses him. Hawks denied it was a remake, and for the first third of the film, the plot appears to be leading elsewhere, but by the one-hour mark we’re watching the movie Brackett referred to ruefully as “The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again.”

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Like all character actors, Karl Malden never got quite the same level of attention as costars like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Michael Caine, and George C. Scott. Even the seventies TV series he starred in, “The Streets of San Francisco” found him being overshadowed in the eyes of the teenybopper set by his young punk of a male ingenue costar, Michael Douglas. That was largely because Malden was the kind of performer who understood that acting is a team sport. His best scenes were like great duets with near perfect communication between him and his scene partners. The exception were American Express travelers’ checks; those, he wiped off the screen.

Karl Malden died today at age 97, having been more or less fully retired since appearing in a 2000 episode of “The West Wing.” While he was never precisely an A-lister, he was a go-to actor for secondary leads, president of the Motion Picture Academy, and as far as I can tell a universally respected figure among actors and everyone else associated with the movie industry. He was also married to the same woman for seventy years, a rare enough Holllywood achievement to merit it’s own special Oscar. Not a bad life.

Below the fold is a video tribute I found that, from the misspellings, I gather may come from Serbia. (Malden, whose real name was Mladen Sekulovich, was the son of a Serbian father and a Czechoslovak mother.) The image quality could be better and some of the clips are a little too brief, but it does give you an excellent overview of his truly diverse film career, which included work with some of the greatest Hollywood directors including Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer, and Alfred Hitchcock. It also includes some interesting moments from two oddball spy films, “Murderer’s Row,” which I haven’t seen, and the underrated “Billion Dollar Brain,” which included some pretty amazing scenes between Malden and Michael Caine as his old spy buddy, Harry Palmer, as well as Françoise Dorléac as his treacherous spy girlfriend (though he’s pretty tricky himself).

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Huffpo has the very sad and strange news of the late David Carradine’s apparent suicide. All I can say is that the world lost more than a terrific actor with a dry sense of humor, and a member of one of the nation’s premier acting families, it lost something else too — a real onscreen badass mofo. That means more than being to pull off some martial arts moves, it means presence and Mr. Carradine certainly made those Carradine genetics work for him. He’s even memorable as a soon-to-be-dead drunk in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

My Premium Hollywood/Bullz-Eye colleague/sometime boss Will Harris, who interviewed Carradine, has a personal remembrance and a whole lot more, and Glenn Kenny briefly recalls a few of Carradine’s more interesting mid-career performances, including his work as Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory, all of which I’ve seen…but not for a very long time. (Well, Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg was more recent, but I’ve kind of struck from my memory on purpose…not my, or anyone else’s, favorite Bergman film…but still, isn’t it cool that Carradine worked with Ingmar-f*cking-Bergman?). The invaluable David Hudson also has much more info.

And finally we have a great deleted scene from Kill Bill, Volume II that shows that, even in his late sixties, Carradine still had the badass mofo mojo down and knew how to impress a killer lady, versus no less an opponent than Michael Jai White (Spawn, Black Dynamite). I don’t want to get spiritual here, but Carradine had long ago achieved B-movie nirvana, at least.

Considering that it’s among the most influential of all Hollywood westerns and the last great film directed by the ultimate American classicist, John Ford, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is quirkier and darker than you might expert. It features two great stars playing characters initially decades older, and later decades younger, than their actual ages, and has a moral and political point of view that resonates with the most complex moments in American history, including the one we’re in now. Coming from a director famed for awe-inspiring vistas, it is so small in visual scope that it is often referred to as a “chamber western.” Though it was made at a point where color had become the Hollywood standard, it was shot in black and white – and had to be. For one thing, the nearly absurd age differences between the two male leads, and their characters throughout the film, would have been ruinously obvious in color – but also because black and white has always somehow been appropriate for portraying films about moral gray areas, and that’s where this tale lives.

Adapted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck from a story by Dorothy Johnson, “Liberty Valence” opens sometime near the turn of the 20th century. The aging and highly distinguished Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), who rose to fame for a now legendary moment of heroism, and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles, “Psycho”), return to the western town of Shinbone. They are there for the funeral of an old friend, a little-known resident who died penniless. After the Senator is accosted by a self-important newspaperman (Denver Pyle) demanding to know the significance of the deceased, the bulk of the film is told in flashback as a much younger Stoddard’s stagecoach is waylaid just outside of Shinbone….

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A nicely student-sweded scene from the film. They don’t have Ford, Stewart, or Marvin, but they’ve got moxie.