El Dorado

Cole Thornton is a gunfighter who arrives in the Texas town of El Dorado and takes a job from a wealthy landowner, Bart Jason. When he learns that the work involves driving a family of ranchers off land the owner wants for its water, and that the local sheriff is an old friend, he turns the offer down. Jason responds by bringing in a band of hired guns, and Thornton, together with the sheriff and a young drifter known as Mississippi, returns to stand with the ranchers.

Howard Hawks directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, and it was released in December 1966. It is the eighteenth of the nineteen features Hawks directed, arriving between Hatari! in 1962 and Rio Lobo in 1970. John Wayne plays Thornton and Robert Mitchum plays Sheriff J.P. Harrah; James Caan appears as Mississippi, with Charlene Holt, Paul Fix and Arthur Hunnicutt among the twenty-eight credited cast members.

Made for about five million dollars, the film took roughly thirteen million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.5 out of 10 from around thirty-three thousand votes, and on TMDB 7.4 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 7.7 from twenty-five reviews places it slightly above the audience scores.