Red River — directed by Howard Hawks. Western. On a 1,000 miles cattle drive a domineering boss conflicts with his rebellious son. 133 minutes Black and White 1948.
* * *
A journey story, and like all journey stories (picaresque stories, road movies), the overriding suspense is how the journey will end, the parenthesis of the beginning and that end filled only with episodes. Actual drama between characters never has the force of this interest. So this movie is like Hawks’ Air Force, which has only one small drama, that of John Garfield’s change of heart– a change which leaves no more conviction to the character than that of Montgomery Clift finally taking on John Wayne. When he does so, Hawks’ camera closes up again and again on Clift’s facial beauty, which is considerable at this stage of his life, but scarcely has to do with anything. Hawks even has Joanne Dru even make love to that face. The film is made overlong not just by her presence in it but the presence of her character in it, which is called upon to say and do preposterous things and to crash the ending. She recites her lines monotonously, in imitation, I suppose, of Dorothy Mcguire, and she is all Hollywooded up in hair, makeup and costume. But she was a last minute replacement, poor woman, and the entire section of which she was a part should never have been shot. The film should have ended with the meeting of the antagonist Wayne and the protagonist Clift in a finale in which Walter Brennan deals Wayne the coup de grace. But Hawks rewrote the story every day as he shot it, and he got to dislike John Ireland pretty quickly. Ireland plays a defiant gunslinger named Cherry, but Ireland did not take his work as an actor seriously and also took up with Joanne Dru whom Hawks fancied. So Hawks more and more diminished Ireland’s role, and more and more built up Brennan’s role as comic relief, thus diluting its power, which is the power of telling the truth. He is the one who should teach Wayne his lesson at the end. The fistfight between Wayne and Clift is ridiculous. Clift is flaccid as a fighter and only five ten next to Wayne’s six four and beefy. No one goes up against John Wayne; it’s not just a question of roles or treatment or story; it’s a fact of nature. But the movie has fallen on evil days long before this. All the campsites of the cattle drive are shot on sound stages at The Goldwyn Studios, so they lack conviction, as do the frequent process shots. Once Hawks finished a film he walked away from it, even to its editing. He’d hired Dimitri Tiomkin for the score but Tiomkin offers vulgar triumphals intermixed with pone, which is quite disconsonnant with the down and dirty cowboy life shown us. The films’ interest lies in Hawks’ simple camera, one step above still photography, and his abilities with actors to make scenes happen and to train them up to their tasks, with the result that Clift is completely convincing on a horse. Once Red River was done, Clift went back to his New York actor friends and, knowing it was the last time he could dine anonymously, said, “Tomorrow I’m going to be a star. Let’s celebrate before it’s too late.” And he was right. What’s good about the movie is the location work with the huge herd of cattle on the drive, all of which did take place in Texas, and which gives the show its fascinating unpredictability. The cowboys are costumed and hatted distinctively (Hawks gave Clift Gary Cooper’s hat). Wayne, at 38, is given grey hair to play a man of 55, and when John Ford sees Red River he says, “My God, the son of a gun can act,” and Wayne is no longer teeter-tottering in B Westerns but solidly becomes the great star his presence and craft and well-justified popularity deserved.