Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News Service,
Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World, Orlando Magazine
Autoweek Magazine among others. He is the founder and
editor of Movie
Nation
Some
decades back, I interviewed the great Texas writer Larry McMurtry
(Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show) at a cocktail
party thrown in his honour at the University of North Dakota’s
Writers Conference, which that year was focused on Western
lit and film. As an author whose works were being optioned
for movies, the conversation wandered around to “Red
River,” which was showing later that week at the conference,
and a reason large scale Westerns like that (which McMurtry
dabbled in) weren’t on Hollywood’s mind more.
Wide
open spaces were in short supply. Larger than life actors
who looked at home in the saddle were somewhat scarce (this
was pre-“Dances with Wolves”). And there aren’t
enough “Longhorn cattle” to do a decent, historic
cattle drive Western, McMurtry noted. “Damned near went
extinct (as a breed) shortly before ‘Red River’
was made.”
So
no, the 1866 cattle in this 1948 Howard Hawks film didn’t
necessarily ‘look right,’ which bugged McMurtry.
But it’s hard to find many other faults in this Western
masterpiece, an archetypal classic featuring an impressive
cast and one of the great directors of his era perfecting
his Western chops, which he’d use on “Rio Bravo,”
a formula film he loved so much he remade it a couple of times
under other titles (“El Dorado,” “Rio Lobo”)
before hanging up his spurs.
Borden
Chase was a novelist and short story writer (real name Frank
Fowler) who gave us “Winchester ’73,” “Bend
of the River” and a few other Westerns in a career as
eclectic as Hawks, who aside from “Red River”
is best known for comedies like “His Girl Friday”
and “Bringing Up Baby,” horror (“The Thing
from Another World”), Biblical epics and even a Marilyn
Monroe musical (“Gentleman Prefer Blondes”).
“Red
River” is a saga-length epic that follows a fictional
story of the first Chisholm Trail cattle drive after the Civil
War. We see Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leave a wagon train with
his trusty sidekick, the original Groot (Walter Brennan) over
the objections of the wagonmaster, aiming to head South into
Texas. Unsentimental and ornery, Dunson leaves a woman (Coleen
Gray) behind. She is later killed when the wagon train is
attacked by Indians.
Dunson
and Groot survive such an attack of their own, but lose all
but one cow. Luckily, a shell-shocked teen (child actor Mickey
Kuhn, wild-eyed and scary) escaped death in the wagon raid
and he has a heifer. He’s already quick with a pistol,
and Matt is adopted by Dunson.
We
see Dunson take the land his ranch will be built on by gunning
down a hireling of the Spanish Mexican Don Diego. A little
Manifest Destiny rationalizing about who Don Diego ‘took’
that land from, and the “Red River D” ranch is
born.
Fourteen
years later, Matt (Montgomery Clift) has returned from the
Civil War, lean and antsy, unused to seeing Dunson scared.
He’s broke, and the only way his vast herd is worth
anything will be through driving it to a railhead north and
East.
“Take’em
to Missouri, Matt,” are his orders.
On
the thousand mile/”ten miles a day” drive, there’s
a river crossing, Indian attack and stampede, as the ordeal
makes Dunson paranoid and prone to punishing or even executing
those who challenge him.
Some
day, at some point, Matt’s going to have to “be
a man” and step in.
A
movie like “Red River” did wonders for John Wayne’s
acting reputation. He’s mean, playing a rare (soft-edged)
heavy, and holds his own. But Brennan effortlessly upstages
him, young Kuhn crackles in his two scenes, soft and sensitive
Clift puts in the work to prove he wasn’t miscast, and
John Ireland, one of the great character actors of his era,
balances Clift’s soft touch with a gun-slinger’s
swagger as itinerant cowhand-shootist Cherry.
The
two actors allow a hint of the homoerotic to slip into their
first meeting moment, comparing guns, for instance.
“Show
me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
Ireland
even makes Cherry’s more butch follow-up sound like
a come-on.
“There
are only two things more beautiful than a good gun: a Swiss
watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good . . . Swiss
watch?“
Ireland
attended an Old Western Stars convention in Tennessee that
I covered, and after asking him about Kubrick and “Spartacus,”
I queried him about that subtext or not-subtext in the film.
“If
Mr. Hawks put it in there,” he smiled, and left that
hanging.
“Red
River” is a movie of long Old West monologues of Shakespearean
sweep. The Duke never played Hamlet. But he did have this.
“Give
me ten years, and I’ll have that brand on the gates
of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house will be down
by the river, and the corrals and the barns behind it. It’ll
be a good place to live in. Ten years and I’ll have
the Red River D on more cattle than you’ve looked at
anywhere. I’ll have that brand on enough beef to feed
the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make
’em strong, make ’em grow. But it takes work,
and it takes sweat, and it takes time, lots of time. It takes
years.“
Hawks
was famous for his Hawksian women, and Joanne Dru brings fire
and breathless chattiness to Tess Millay, who won’t
shut up even as she meets Matt in the middle of an Indian
raid on her ‘gamblers and women’ wagon train.
Hawks
and Chase invented or perfected most of the tropes of cattle
drive tales with this classic film, which McMurtry leaned
on for “Lonesome Dove.” Images burn into the memory
— the sweep of the San Pedro River Valley, Arizona landscapes,
the flaming arrow that hurtles in out of the darkness at Dunson
and Groot, the “shootin’ contest” between
Matt and Cherry and the epic brawl between tiny Clift and
big’ol John Wayne.
The
way the cattle drive’s beginning is edited — close-ups
of the various hollerin’ cowboys (Hank Worden, Noah
Beery, Paul Fix, etc) — the humour of Groot losing partial
custody of his ‘store bought teeth’ to the Indian
named Quo (Chief Lowachie), the rising paranoia and sadism
of Dunson faced with success or ruin, all put this 1946 film,
released in ’48 because of interference from Howard
Hughes, head and shoulders above most every Western you can
think of, then or more recently.
It’s
got a lot of the things that modern historians and films like
“Unforgiven” have revised in the historical record.
“Don’t leave any of’em (Native Americans)
alive,” the quick turn to deadly violence and gun fetishizing
of this film that has to be one reason the NRA and its Congressional
lackies don’t want gun ownership studied as a mental
health issue.
It’s
faintly racist and genocidal, but also more representational
than most Westerns of the day. Those big speeches are so old
fashioned that they make the movie feel years older than it
is.
IMDb’s
page on “Red River” has a simple error, referring
to Noah Beery, Wallace Beery’s son, as Noah Beery Jr.
And somebody at some point promoted British second unit director
Arthur Rosson to co-director in recent years. Did the DGA
approve this? The Library of Congress apparently didn’t.
I can’t find an origin to this alteration, just a similarly
crowd-sourced credit reference on Rosson’s Wikipedia
entry.
I’d
love to know the story of that, and until I hear a convincing
reason for this demotion of producer-director-auteur Hawks,
I’m calling Bull-s— on that bit of sleight of
hand.
But
as “Red River” has been remade (with James Arness),
re-released at various lengths and even colourized, somebody’s
got to stick up for this American masterpiece by an American
master.
