El Dorado (1966) on Netflix
Approved19662h 6mDramaRomanceWestern
Cole Thornton, a gunfighter for hire, turns down work from the landowner Bart Jason rather than fight his old friend, Sheriff J.P. Harrah. The MacDonald family fears his arrival in El Dorado.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.5/1033,924 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
The town of El Dorado has a sheriff, J.P. Harrah, and a wealthy landowner named Bart Jason who offers work to a gunfighter for hire, Cole Thornton. Harrah, an old friend of Thornton's, says the offer comes from a man trying to push the MacDonald family off its land, and that the work would mean handling Harrah himself. Thornton refuses the job. Kevin MacDonald and his family learn that the gunfighter is coming and expect trouble, so the youngest son, Luke, is set to keep watch.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about El Dorado (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Leigh Brackett said her first draft of El Dorado was the best script of her career, ending with John Wayne's character dying, but as filming neared she was told to rework it into a repeat of director Howard Hawks's earlier film Rio Bravo, a note she resented.
- Robert Mitchum said Hawks gave him almost no story before shooting El Dorado, filming isolated scenes one at a time with no sense of how they fit together.
- El Dorado was the only film in which John Wayne and Robert Mitchum shared the screen together, even though both actors had separately appeared years earlier in The Longest Day.
- Cinematographer Harold Rosson came out of a 1958 retirement specifically to shoot El Dorado for Hawks, then went straight back into permanent retirement once the film wrapped.
- Filmmakers later reused footage from El Dorado inside the opening montage of John Wayne's final film, The Shootist, to fill in his character's backstory.
