With his great Western Rio Bravo (1959) Howard Hawks set the template for what could be described as the siege movie genre. It’s a simple enough premise: you have the good guys holed up in a location with a limited amount of weapons and ammunition while outside you have the bad guys trying to get in with a lot more henchmen, guns, and bullets. Hawks himself would make two more variations on this story structure throughout his career, and decades later John Carpenter would use it as an inspiration for Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars . Of course it had to be all-American cowboy John Wayne to be the star of Rio Bravo and start this tradition of holding up against the bad guy no matter what. In yet another rare instance of homework being fun, I discovered this classic while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2009, and wrote an essay on it and The Searchers , another John Wayne classic. I think I got a good grade, but ...