When Peter Bogdanovich needed a movie to play as the final
feature in the doomed small-town theater in “The Last Picture Show,” he chose
Howard Hawks’ “Red River” (1948). He selected the scene where John Wayne tells
Montgomery Clift, “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt!” And then there is Hawks’ famous
montage of weathered cowboy faces in closeup and exaltation, as they cry “Hee-yaw!”
and wave their hats in the air.
The
moment is as quintessentially Western as any ever filmed, capturing the
exhilaration of being on a horse under the big sky with a job to do and a
paycheck at the other end. And “Red River” is one of the greatest of all
Westerns when it stays with its central story about an older man and a younger
one, and the first cattle drive down the Chisholm Trail. It is only in its few
scenes involving women that it goes wrong.
The
film’s hero and villain is Tom Dunson (Wayne), who heads West with a wagon
train in 1851 and then peels off for Texas to start a cattle ranch. He takes
along only his wagon driver, Groot Nadine (Walter Brennan). Dunson’s
sweetheart, Fen (Coleen Gray), wants to join them, but he rejects her almost
absentmindedly, promising to send for her later. Later, from miles away, Tom
and Groot see smoke rising: Indians have destroyed the wagon train. Groot, a
grizzled codger, fulminates about how Indians “always want to be burning up
good wagons,” and Tom observes that it would take them too long to go back and
try to help. Their manner is surprisingly distant, considering that Dunson has
just lost the woman he loved.
Soon
after, the men encounter a boy who survived the Indian attack. This is Matt
Garth, who is adopted by Dunson and brought up as the eventual heir to his
ranch. Played as an adult by Montgomery Clift (his first screen role), Matt
goes away to school, but returns in 1866 just as Dunson is preparing an epic
drive to take 9,000 head of cattle north to Missouri.
I
mentioned that Dunson is both hero and villain. It’s a sign of the movie’s
complexity that John Wayne, often typecast, is given a tortured, conflicted
character to play. He starts with “a boy with a cow and a man with a bull,” and
builds up a great herd. But then he faces ruin; he must drive the cattle north
or go bankrupt.
He’s
a stubborn man; all through the movie people tell him he’s wrong, and usually
they’re right. They’re especially right in wanting to take the cattle to
Abilene, which is closer and reportedly has a railroad line, instead of on the
longer trek to Missouri. As the cattle drive grows grueling, Dunson grows
irascible, and finally whiskey and lack of sleep drive him a little mad; there
are attempted mutinies before Matt finally rebels and takes the cattle to Abilene.
The
critic Tim Dirks has pointed out the parallels between their conflict and the
standoff between Capt. Bligh and Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
And indeed, the Borden Chase screenplay makes much of the older man’s pride and
the younger one’s need to prove himself.
Also
established, but never really developed, is a rivalry between young Matt and a
tough cowboy named Cherry Valance (John Ireland), who signs up for the cattle
drive and becomes Matt’s rival. There’s gonna be trouble between those two, old
Groot predicts, but the film never delivers, leaving them stranded in the
middle of a peculiar ambivalence that drew the attention of “The Celluloid
Closet,” a documentary about hidden homosexuality in the movies. (“You know,”
Cherry says, handling Matt’s gun, “there are only two things more beautiful
than a good gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss
watch?”)
The
shifting emotional attachments are tracked by a silver bracelet, which Dunson
gives to Fen before leaving her. It later turns up on the wrist of an Indian he
kills, and Dunson then gives it to Matt, who later gives it to Tess Millay
(Joanne Dru), a woman he rescues and falls in love with. The three scenes with
Tess are the movie’s low points, in part because of her prattle (listen to how
she chats distractingly with Matt during an Indian attack), in part because she
is all too obviously the deus ex machina the plot needs to avoid an unhappy
ending. The final scene is the weakest in the film, and Borden Chase reportedly
hated it, with good reason: Two men act out a fierce psychological rivalry for
two hours, only to cave in instantly to a female’s glib tongue-lashing.
What
we remember with “Red River” is not, however, the silly ending, but the setup
and the majestic central portions. The tragic rivalry is so well established
that somehow it keeps its weight and dignity in our memories, even though the
ending undercuts it.
Just
as memorable are the scenes of the cattle drive itself, as a handful of men
control a herd so large it takes all night to ford a river. Russell Harlan’s
cinematography finds classical compositions in the drive, arrangements of men,
sky and trees, and then in the famous stampede scene he shows a river of cattle
flowing down a hill. It is an outdoor movie (we never go inside the ranch house
Dunson must have built), and when young Matt steps inside the cattle buyer’s
office in Abilene, he ducks, observing how long it’s been since he was under a
roof.
Hawks
is wonderful at setting moods. Notice the ominous atmosphere he brews on the
night of the stampede–the silence, the restlessness of the cattle, the lowered
voices. Notice Matt’s nervousness during a night of thick fog, when every
shadow may be Tom, come to kill him. And the tension earlier, when Dunson holds
a kangaroo court.
And
watch the subtle way Hawks modulates Tom Dunson’s gradual collapse. John Wayne
is tall and steady at the beginning of the picture, but by the end his hair is
gray and lank, and his eyes are haunted; the transition is so gradual we might
not even notice he wears a white hat at the outset but a black one at the end.
Wayne is sometimes considered more of a natural force than an actor, but here
his understated acting is right on the money; the critic Joseph McBride says
John Ford, who had directed Wayne many times, saw “Red River” and told Hawks, “I
never knew the big son of a bitch could act.”
Between
Wayne and Clift there is a clear tension, not only between an older man and a
younger one, but between an actor who started in 1929 and another who
represented the leading edge of the Method. It’s almost as if Wayne, who could
go over a flamboyant actor, was trying to go under a quiet one: He meets the
challenge, and matches it.
The
theme of “Red River” is from classical tragedy: the need of the son to slay the
father, literally or symbolically, in order to clear the way for his own
ascendancy. And the father’s desire to gain immortality through a child (the
one moment with a woman that does work is when Dunson asks Tess to bear a son
for him). The majesty of the cattle drive, and all of its expert details about “taking
the point” and keeping the cowhands fed and happy, is atmosphere surrounding
these themes.
Underlying
everything else is an attitude that must have been invisible to the filmmakers
at the time: the unstated assumption that it is the white man’s right to take
what he wants. Dunson shoots a Mexican who comes to tell him “Don Diego” owns
the land. Told the land had been granted to Diego by the king of Spain, Dunson
says, “You mean he took it away from whoever was here before–Indians, maybe.
Well, I’m takin’ it away from him.” In throwaway dialogue, we learn of seven
more men Dunson has killed for his ranch, and there’s a grimly humorous motif
as he shoots people and then “reads over ’em” from the Bible.
Dunson
is a law of his own, until Matt stops a hanging and ends his reign. If all
Westerns are about the inevitable encroachment of civilization, this is one
where it seems like a pretty good idea.
