MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN RED RIVER (1948) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
TRANSCRIPT Introductory Lecture: Red River (1948)
Welcome to the Western. I’m glad you can be here today. Red River (1948) is a 1948 Western film produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. The film’s supporting cast features Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Colleen Gray, Harry Carey, John Ireland, Hank Worden, Noah Beery, Jr., Harry Carey Jr., and Paul Fix. The screenplay was based on Borden Chase’s original story which was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1946 as “Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail.” The movie’s ending differs from that of the original story. In Chase’s Saturday Evening Post’s story, Cherry Valance shoots Tom Dunson dead in Abilene and Matt takes his body back to Texas to be buried on the ranch. Red River cost an estimated $3 million to make it did very well at the box office. In 1948, it grossed $5 and a half million domestically and worldwide it made over $9 million. It was a very, very popular movie.
The film is also an art movie. It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Film Editing by Christian Nyby and Best Writing Motion Picture Story by Borden Chase. John Ford was so impressed with John Wayne’s performance in Red River that he is reported to have said I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act.
In June 2008, the American Film Institute listed Red River as the fifth best film in the Western genre. In 1990, Red River was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally historically or aesthetically significant.
Red River is a cattle drive movie. It’s the story of a Texas rancher who has to move his cattle to the railroad in order to be able to save his ranch. The movie has a very famous stampede scene in which Richard Harlan, the cinematographer, has a river of the long horn cattle pour down a hill. As a visual experience, Red River is spectacular. It was filmed in 1946, copyrighted in 1947, but not released until September 30 1948. This movie had many production problems and post production problems. Howard Hawks was not satisfied with the editing of Red River while the movie was in production and he asked Christian Nyby to take over cutting duties. After production, MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN RED RIVER (1948) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
the prerelease version was 133 minutes long before this version could be released Howard Hughes sued Howard Hawks he claimed the scene between Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth was taken from another scene called The Outlaw which was released in 1943 which Hawks had shot for Hughes. To resolve this issue, Nyby went back and forth, trimming and cutting until a compromise with Howard Hughes could be reached. Their final product was the original theatrical version which was released at 127 minutes. Now, nobody knows why but this 127-minute theatrical version, which was preferred by Howard Hawks, was lost, and what people have seen on television broadcasts and home video releases for decades was the 133-minute, pre-release version which Howard Hughes disliked and threatened to sue them over.
The original, theatrical cut was re-assembled by Janus Films in co-operation with United Artists’ parent company MGM for their Criterion collection, and this was released on May 27, 2014. So, if you’re reading critical material on this film, and there’s scenes that you don’t recognize, it’s because those critics were working with the 133-minute pre-release rather than the 127-minute theatrical version that we’ll be looking at in this course.
Critical reviews of Red River are fascinating. So what I’ve decided to do today is take a look at Bosley Crowther’s review of Red River which came out in 1948 and compare it with Ebert’s review of the same movie fifty years later.
“Up to a point in "Red River," which came to the Capitol yesterday, this opus is on the way towards being one of the best cow-boy pictures ever made. And even despite a big let-down, which fortunately comes near the end, it stands sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days. So strap on your trusty six-shooters and race to the wind-swept Capitol, you lovers of good old Western fiction. It's round-up and brandin' time!”
Crowther talks about what works for him in the movie before moving on to what doesn’t work. What works for Crowther is the cattle drive itself. He says, “for at least two-thirds of the way, it's a down-to-earth story of cow-pokes and the tough, dangerous lives they used to lead. It's the story of a great migration of a cattle herd, said to be the first, from the breeding grounds in Texas to Kansas, along the Chisholm Trail. And it's the story of a desperate contention between two strong- minded men, a hard-bitten veteran and a youngster—or Mr. Wayne and Montgomery Clift.” MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN RED RIVER (1948) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
“So long as it sticks to cow-herding and the gathering clash between these two—a clash brought on by disagreement as to whether they should try the untrod trail—it rings with the clang of honest metal and throbs with the pulse of real life, “ Crowther says. “For Mr. Hawks has filled it with credible substance and detail, with action and understanding, humor and masculine ranginess. He has made it look raw and dusty, made it smell of beef and sweat—-and he has got a stampede of cattle in it that makes you curl up with terror in your seat.”
Crowther really likes the transmission and representation of masculinity in this film. He says the problem with the film is that there’s a woman in it: then he says, “Then the cowboys—and the picture—run smack into "Hollywood" in the form of a glamorized female, played by Joanne Dru. For she is the typical charmer, with a voice like Dorothy McGuire's, and the havoc she plays with the hero—and with the contents—is almost complete. The characters turn into actors and the story turns into old stuff. It ends with the two tenacious cowboys kissing and making up.”
Personally I like the ending of Red River, but then I think it’s funny. I don’t think that Crowther thought it terribly funny at all. In 1998, almost fifty years later, Roger Ebert wrote a review of Howard Hawks’ Red River, and his take on the movie shows us that in some ways American culture has changed and in other ways it hasn’t changed that much at all. Ebert is particularly interested in the character of Tom Dunson, He says 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.”
Ebert says, “[t]he 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 [for Ebert in the film] is when Dunson asks Tess to bear a son for him).”
This leads us to two really interesting questions that Ebert raises about the movie: the first is Tom Dunson a tragic figure? Is he a tragic figure in the classical sense of the term? If so, he’d have to have the following characteristics. Does he display arête or traits of excellence? Is he an outstanding individual? Does he have hamartia or character flaws? And most importantly, does he exhibit hubris, overweaning pride that motivates him to attempt to rise above his station in life? MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN RED RIVER (1948) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
Now if Dunson is a tragic figure in this sense what sort of a film narrative is Red River? Could the god badman be a tragic hero?
Ebert also points out that Tim Dirks, another critic, has noticed that there’s parallels between Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth’s conflict and standoff and Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian’s conflict and standoff in Mutiny on the Bounty. Borden Chase’s screenplay for Red River does “much of the older man's pride and the younger [man’s] need to prove himself.” So this is another possible way to read the movie.
Also established but never really developed, and this has been quite a topic for discussion in the last twenty years, is the rivalry between Matthew Garth and Cherry Valance. Groot, played by Walter Brennan, predicts that there’s “gonna be trouble” between those two but the film never develops this rivalry and never delivers the trouble, so these two characters are stranded in the middle of what Ebert terms “a peculiar ambivalence.” Cherry has a really famous line, he says when he’s handling Matt’s gun, 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 Swiss watch?”
Now apparently when Hawks and his actors were blocking and rehearsing the scenes, they decided to play the scenes as if the two men were closet homosexuals. Another thing to keep your eye on when you’re watching Red River are the three scenes with Tess. Ebert claims that those three scenes are the movie’s low points in part because of her prattle, in part they are the low points because she’s all too obviously the deus ex machina the plot needs to avoid an unhappy ending. He says, the final scene is the weakest: two men, he says, “act out a fierce psychological rivalry for two hours, only to cave in instantly.”
When you watch the end of Red River, it will be interesting to see if the ending does or doesn’t work for you. I’m looking forward to talking to you in the forum about Red River. Let’s take ‘em to Missouri!