By Scott Ross
While for various reasons Red River has never been one of my favorite Howard Hawks movies (I prefer that nonpareil Hawks Western Rio Bravo) it is has much to recommend it, not the least of those validations the performances of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. I find it fascinating that, however enjoyable Wayne at his most genial can be — Rio Bravo and The Quiet Man are my representative titles for a certain prototypical relaxed John Wayne performance — his most interesting work occurs outside his basic screen persona (Rooster Cogburn in True Grit) and, most particularly, when the roles took on darker, more obsessive, hues: Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and, in Red River, the rancher and trail boss Thomas Dunson. Dunson is a man of utterly implacable will and brooks no contradiction, even from his surrogate son Matthew Garth. And when Matt (played by Clift), as fed up as the trail hands with Dunson’s dictatorial ways, stops him from killing three men, banishes him from the drive and takes away his herd, Dunson announces he will come back, and will murder the young man. Wayne plays this crucial scene quietly, yet with infinite menace. The almost gentle way he says, “I’m gonna kill you, Matt” holds more power, and terror, than if he’d growled or shouted.
Todd McCarthy in his Hawks biography calls the writing of Borden Chase, on whose Saturday Evening Post serial (and subsequent novel) Red River is based, “crude” and “repetitive,” but I beg leave to disagree. The only thing I dislike about the book is its terrible title: Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail was not going to interest anyone for whom pulp novel shoot-em-ups were not already their main literary entertainment. Chase wrote the first draft screenplay, which did not satisfy Hawks, who brought on Charles Schnee (later the writer of The Bad and the Beautiful) to revise it before, as was natural to him, rewriting the rewrites himself. Red River is a somewhat typical Hawks picture, about men engaged in a professional endeavor and one in which — also typically — there is more than a whiff of homoeroticism between them, alleviated by the appearance of a sharp young woman with the behavioral attributes of a guy, in this case the out-of-her-depth Joanne Dru. Those who see a suppressed attraction between Wayne and Montgomery Clift, however, miss the boat by several leagues; theirs is a father/son dynamic lacking only a shared biology. The more suspect relationship is that between Clift as Matt and the wonderfully named Cherry Valance (John Ireland), famously and hilariously exemplified by their comparing firearms… if that’s what they’re doing. What Ireland made of this I wouldn’t scruple to suppose but one suspects that the largely homosexual, Actors Studio-trained Clift caught the subtext; it’s there in the slight smirk he wears off and on during the scene.
Hawks’ strengths and weaknesses are on display throughout Red River, including the apt comic relief — largely by Walter Brennan, in a role much expanded from the novel — that flavors his best work in dramatic genres. Although to give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt I imagine the idiotic manner in which women on the pioneer trail wear full, lush lipstick is a resigned sop to then-current Hollywood studio attitudes and practices, I’m annoyed at irregular intervals by Clift rubbing the side of his nose in imitation of Wayne… but then, Wayne doing it is annoying too, and the sugar-stealing cowboy causing the stampede seems to me utterly contrived. (In Chase’s novel it’s merely an unfortunate accident with a gun.) The much-loved sequence of the drive’s beginning also feels studied and artificial, what with all those close-ups of shouting men edited together so self-consciously. I realize I am speaking heresy, since so many aficionados adore this bit of hokum, including Peter Bogdanovich, who featured it in The Last Picture Show and the makers of City Slickers, who re-created it in their (admittedly much lesser) movie, but hear me out. The moment of the hands (including Matt) giving the fearsome Rebel yell at the start of the trail drive is in Chase’s book. However, the writer gives you context: All of them were lately Confederate soldiers, and the hollering thus becomes a kind of shamanic ritual. In the movie, the only wrangler we know fought in the war is Matt. The Civil War connotation is lost. What actually makes the scene exciting is Dimitri Tiomkin’s rousing music, and even with that those cuts and close-ups are far too formal.
I prefer the longer “pre-release” edition of the picture to its theatrical version (which Hawks was said to favor) not least for the slightly elongated climax of the former. The shots of Matt standing up to Dunson and being clipped across the cheek by one of his surrogate father’s bullets give the sequence greater weight, and suspense, and more fully motivate Wayne throwing down his gun in frustration and decking Matt with his fists. (His snarling “Won’t anything make a man out of ya?” has always struck me as an odd utterance. Deliberately confronting a man with a gun who has an avowed intention of killing you, and doing so without a firearm of your own, isn’t “manly”? And Matt spent three years in bloody Civil War battles, which is more than Dunson ever did. How much more must he do to “prove” his masculinity?) I understand that the shortened version of this scene was arrived at via a lawsuit by Howard Hughes concerning a similar scene in Hughes’ The Outlaw, which Hawks had also worked on. Considering how often Hawks lifted dialogue and entire action sequences from his previous movies, this is hardly surprising; if a thing worked once, he reasoned, it could work twice. Hawks may be forgiven for not foreseeing the eventual cable and home video markets, but he obviously paid no attention to how, even in 1948, television in its endless need for programming was gobbling up old movies. Still — did he think movie audiences had no memories at all?
If Wayne’s performance was a revelation (John Ford: “I didn’t know the big sonofabitch could act!” What did Ford think Wayne was doing in They Were Expandable and Fort Apache?) Clift’s acting must have been as astonishing to movie audiences as his almost unbelievable beauty. As with Brando — whose first important screen performances would follow this one by a couple of years — there isn’t a moment, a word or a gesture (other than that nose-rub, imposed on him by Hawks) that feels false. The Method, at least as taught by Americans like Strasberg who little understood it, could certainly be ridiculed. But the inculcation of it in people like Brando (trained by Stella Adler) and Clift brought undeniable richness to the craft of screen acting. Clift leaves a little mystery in Matthew Garth, something for the audience to guess at, a secret he never reveals but which imbues his performance with unspoken depth. Perhaps because as a boy he’s seen his parents and everyone he knows massacred by Indians, perhaps as well his wartime experience. Whatever the mental or emotional source of the detachment, Clift’s Matt stands aloof from almost everything, not judging but observing, that sly smile of his revealing little. He’s almost a blank canvas on which the audience writes its thoughts, which surely includes both female and (some) male desire, and there’s always a little something he holds in reserve. When Matt acts, then, the impact is twice as resounding as it might otherwise be. And no one who sees Clift in Red River could imagine he’d never ridden a horse until he began to prepare for the role. He seems to have been at home in a saddle from infancy.
As is so often the case with movies of the period, even those filmed by the finest directors, the studio scenes don’t match the location work. Otherwise the cinematography of Russell Harlan is splendid, especially his night sequences, although there is nothing in the picture as eerily evocative as Chase’s description of St. Elmo’s Fire dancing from the horns of the cattle. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score is extremely effective, anchored as it is to an infectious cattle lullaby, instantly familiar to anyone who loves Rio Bravo as the later ballad (with a different lyric) “My Rifle, Pony and Me.” A secondary theme is equally memorable, and Tiomkin is never bombastic here, as was often his wont.
The good supporting cast includes Harry Carey as a genial Abilene stock merchant, Chief Yowlachie as the Indian guide who wins Brenna’s teeth in a card game, Mickey Kuhn playing Matt as a boy and uncannily anticipating Montgomery Clift and, among the Dunson wranglers, Noah Beery Jr., Harry (“Dobe”) Carey Jr., Paul Fix, Hank Worden, Dan White and Ivan Parry. And if your eye is quicker than your incredulousness you may spot an impossibly slender Shelley Winters as a dance hall girl in Dru’s wagon train. Hawks turns the movie’s chief liability — John Wayne’s disappearance from most of its second half — into an asset by repeatedly showing just how spooked everyone is by his threat to return. And despite my reservations about Joanne Dru, she does play the scene well in which she’s pinned by the shoulder to a wagon wheel, embarrassed about more than pained by what must be an excruciating arrow wound. The censorship of the time is partly to blame for why her role never quite lands: Her character, Tess Millay, is far more calculating, and interesting, in the Chase novel, where she repeatedly proves that while she is susceptible to a handsome face her eye is on the main chance: When she says she’ll give Dunson a son in the book, she means it, and engineers Cherry’s death to make sure Dunson lives through their gunfight. Hawks is forced to make her a Good Girl, which doesn’t suit her any more than Dru’s almost-performance does.
Perhaps as a result of having been born wealthy, Hawks was a notorious dawdler, remarkably irresponsible with other people’s money. Red River‘s domestic box office sounds pretty healthy — $4,506,825 in 1948 dollars — but that’s against a budget Hawks permitted to bloom into nearly $3 million, dooming what should have been an enormous success to the status of barely breaking even. A decade earlier he had lost the chance to direct another pet project, Gunga Din, after ballooning the budget on Bringing Up Baby. Some people, even smart people, never seem to learn.
Text copyright 2021 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 