From the 1940s: Red River

1948 Western

From United Artists

Directed by Howard Hawks

Starring

John Wayne

Montgomery Clift

Joanne Dru

Walter Brennan

John Ireland

Harry Carey

Noah Beery Jr.

Harry Carey Jr.

Chief Yowlachie

Paul Fix

Mickey Kuhn

Hank Worden

Coleen Gray

A reviewer called it a spectacle of sweeping grandeur.  It is unquestionably considered one of the best westerns ever made and is often lauded as containing one of John Wayne's finest performances.  I agree on all counts and always have.  It is one of those films that got me started on a life-long love of westerns.

Since it's always been considered a big western and stars John Wayne, it is often thought to be directed by John Ford.  The Ford-Wayne relationship is, of course, legendary.  It's not easy to separate them in the great Hollywood lore.  The film even features other actors from the Ford company such as Paul Fix, Hank Worden, Carey father and son and more.  

But Red River belongs to Howard Hawks and it proved to be his most highly-praised western, although some may prefer to drop that compliment on his later Rio Bravo.  He'd already made waves in directing an aviation drama, social satires and one glorious screwball comedy.  So now the western.

Conceived on an epic scale with a story spread over 20 years, the principal action surrounds a cattle drive.  Its source material is apparently records on the first cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail.  The heart of the story... and this is a macho, dusty western but it does have a heart... is the relationship of two men.   The older one is a cynical, bossy, humorless cowboy, played by Wayne, and the other a soft-hearted, strong-minded, educated young man, played first by Mickey Kuhn and then Clift,  The older one took in the younger one as a sort of foster son when he was orphaned at 14.

With crusty old sidekick Walter Brennan in their lives, when Wayne and Clift first meet, one of them has a cow and the other a bull and together they started a cattle empire.  By the time Clift returns from the Civil War, there are 10,000 cattle and they need to get them to market.  That means a journey of around 1,000 miles, from Texas to Missouri.

The cattle drive takes up nearly all of the film and of course the drama comes in the form of a stampede, behavior when the rations get short, bad weather, river crossings, Indians and dealing with Wayne's bullying, distrust, stubborn, tyrannical ways.  The father-son relationship is ruptured when the easy-going, sharp-shooting Clift feels Wayne has gone too far.

Clift and crew manage to take the giant herd away from Wayne and they get it to market as had been planned all along.  But Wayne has sworn vengeance... he's gonna kill him.

Of course, the ending is that meeting.  We in the audience are looking forward to it... the finale, the excitement, how will it work out?   In the writing of the source material, one of the cowhands, played here by John Ireland, kills the Wayne character.  In a Wayne movie, however, dying was usually not on the table.  For an actor driven by his image, it was odd that he chose to play a character who is not particularly heroic.  He didn't often do that.  And perhaps it's that very thing that made John Ford say after seeing the movie... I didn't know the big s.o.b. could act.

I applaud, of course, Hawks's examination of male friendship or bonding.  Some of his films are marked with careful examination of  those friendships and the relationship of father and foster son is laid out nicely as I see it.  

Clift having a rare laugh over rolling a cigarette

Then something happens that hijacks the story a bit and that is Joanne Dru.  No, no, not this beautiful actress that I've always put on a pedestal but the character she plays.  I just don't think she needed to be there.  The story changed and I didn't want it to.  To be fair, had it been another male character, I would have felt largely the same because, dammit, I wanted to continue focusing on Wayne-Clift... even after their characters separated.

But in Movieland, we always need to take a break for some lovin'.  Ticket-buyers need their lovin'.  She meets up with each of the two men at different times.  She and Clift fall in love but he leaves to continue the drive.  In her meeting with Wayne, Dru fails to convince him to not pursue Clift but he takes her along and allows her to spend the night in the cattle town with Clift before Wayne comes in.

 Clift and Joanne Dru

I thought the finale was a little too Hollywood B Movie... corny and not befitting the seriousness we've been part of for nearly two hours.  Dru  is mostly what's wrong with that ending, too.  Her character, looking beautiful and fashionably-cowgirl attired, breaks up the two men brawling, fires a gun to get their attention and reminds them of how much they really love one another.  The pair, faces sweaty and covered with dirt, look at one another and smile.  Fini.

Onscreen there are a lot of people not seeing eye-to-eye and the same might be said about off the screen as well.  This was probably on no one's list of fun-to-make.  

It was well before CGI so all those cows are real.  I'm not suggesting there were really the 10,000 the story called for but that was one helluva lot of beef.  I suspect no western is fun to make with that many animals.  Filming a cattle drive is dirty, hot and boring and animals don't often do what one wants.  This fact alone put a lot of folks in bad moods.  

Director Hawks, who is also the producer, bought the property from writer Borden Chase, who was to execute the screenplay.  But the two men could not get along in addition to Hawks' having a low opinion of  Chase's screenwriting talents.

Gary Cooper was the first choice for the Wayne role but he found the character too mean and unsympathetic.  Oddly Hawks wanted rodeo rider Casey Tibbs for the foster son role and Cary Grant (oh my!) for the part John Ireland nabbed.  Super agent Leland Hayward suggested his client, Clift, despite the fact that he'd never appeared in a film.  It was Hawk's wife (who became Hayward's wife) who cemented the deal.   Hawks appeared uncertain that Clift was right for the role, including questioning whether a New York stage actor could ride a horse and whether he would be right for a part opposite Wayne.  But with Clift's preparation and total immersion into the role (which would always be the case), he was cast.

Dru was another matter.  Hawks had her under a personal contract and saw her as a musical-comedy actress but he hired her for the female lead after a non-actress he was fond of didn't accept.  Hawks always claimed Dru wasn't right for the role.

John Wayne and Walter Brennan

Clift felt he learned a great deal about film acting from Hawks, Wayne and Brennan but he didn't particularly get along with any of them.  When the three signed on in 1959 to make Rio Bravo, they wanted Clift to join them but he declined, saying that working with that trio on Red River was quite enough and Dean Martin got the role.

Wayne, who found Clift arrogant, said he could not imagine that he and Clift would be believable in the fight scene at the end of the film... a slight five foot ten against a full-bodied six foot four.  

Clift shared quarters with Brennan and Beery.  Brennan drove Clift crazy with his corny humor and after a while the two men were only speaking as their characters.  Beery became Clift's good friend on the shoot. 

There was usually a good ol' boy camaraderie on Wayne's film sets... lots of poker playing, drinking, back-slapping, belching and cursing... all of which Clift usually chose to avoid.  He generally kept to himself.  He did, however, come to say that the machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.  Wayne said he thought Clift was a little queer.

For the big fight scene, which Clift hated and said was ludicrous because Joanne Dru settled it, really got going when he found Wayne laughing at him at how he was handling himself.  Clift got so angry, he said, that he threw himself into those punches.  Thirty years later, Hawks said his arm still hurt trying to teach Clift how to throw a punch.

Clift said shortly after seeing a rough cut of the film that he knew he would become a star but that he hated making the film.  It was actually made in 1946 but post production problems (mainly editing) and some legal wrangling with Howard Hughes caused the release date to become 1948.  Meanwhile, Clift had made The Search to great acclaim and it was released before Red River.

Ireland became the focus of Hawks's wrath.  Some would say for good reason and some said it was something else.  Hawks said the problem was Ireland's unprofessionalism which included frequently being drunk, stoned on weed and goofing around.  Others said that both actor and director were making some serious moves on Dru despite the fact that all three were married.  Whatever the reason, Hawks hacked away at Ireland's screen time and beefed up Brennan's part.  A year after the film was released, Ireland and Dru married.

There are those who have long said that there's a gay undercurrent that runs throughout the film.  Hawks said it was nonsense but critics have pointed it out for years and bolster their claims by saying it's there in a few of Hawks's other films as well.  When the two young cowpokes first meet, Ireland says that's a good-looking gun.  Can I see it?  When Clift hands over his gun, Ireland says and you'd like to see mine?

Handling the gun Ireland says nice, awful nice.  Then focusing intently on Clift, Ireland offers you know there are only two things more beautiful than a good gun... a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.  You ever had a good Swiss watch?

After the boys have a shooting contest, Brennan observes they was having some fun... peculiar kind of fun... sizing each other up for the future.  And later Clift accuses Wayne of wanting to put a brand on every rump in the state of Texas except mine.

Western lovers enjoyed seeing oldtime character actor Harry Carey come in late in the proceedings as the cattle buyer and his son Harry Carey Jr. plays one of the crew who dies in the stampede early on.  It is their only film together, although they share no scenes.  The senior Carey would be dead before the film's release.  Carey Jr. was also the son-in-law of Paul Fix.

Dimitri Tiomkin expertly handles the musical score... big, bold, manly... just as he would eight years later for another Texas saga, Giant.

For awhile The Chisholm Trail was considered as a title and that would have been more fitting than Red River which has only a incidental relevance to the story.  Chase's original story was titled Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail.  He called it Mutiny on the Bounty with saddles and stirrups.

Seen today Red River still resonates as the exciting, mega-western it's always been.  It has glorious performances from Clift and Wayne.  The American Film Institute considered it one of the 10 best westerns ever and the film was selected into by the National  Film Registry as being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

Here's the trailer:

Next posting: 

A dancer's passing