Howard Hawks'follow-up to Rio Bravo pushes both the humor and the violence of thefirst film to extremes. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum are old comradesonce again allied with a youngster (James Caan) and a saloon girl(Charlene Holt) to defeat the machinations of evil landgrabbers. Thecomedy ranges from the broad-in sheriff Mitchum's prolonged drunk andits bizarre cure, or in James "Mississippi" Caan's ineptitude with agun-to the black, as in the superbly wry finale in which the two agingheroes, temporarily crippled, are carted on a wheelbarrow to the sceneof the showdown. Despite its being among Hawks' funniest and mostflamboyant films, as Robin Wood points out in Howard Hawks, "In ElDorado one feels the men-especially the older men-as standing out inisolation against the darkness.... (There) are scarcely any daytimescenes...one's impression is of perpetual night...and its relation tothe heroes' age is obvious.... The Edgar Allan Poe poem from which thefilm takes its title (functions) in the film...mainly to point bycontrast to the absence of any El Dorado in the characters' lives-ortheir hopes."