Rio Bravo is a 1959 American Western film directed and produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, and Ward Bond. Written by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, based on the short story "Rio Bravo" by B. H. McCampbell, the film stars Wayne as a Texan sheriff who arrests the brother of a powerful local rancher for murder and then has to hold the man in jail until a U.S. Marshal can arrive. With the help of a lame old man, a drunk, and a young gunfighter, they hold off the rancher's gang. Rio Bravo was filmed on location at Old Tucson Studios outside Tucson, Arizona, in Eastmancolor, with film processing provided by Technicolor.

Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name." Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material." He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York (1941) and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.