Red River

I like old westerns for several reasons. 

First, they remind me of the time I spent in my grandfather’s living room. He held court in a t-shirt and slacks and spent his afternoons watching whatever was on TBS.

In those days Ted Turner’s folly was known as The Superstation and you could count on either a Braves game, a war movie or a western.

I still watch Braves games too. 

Second, the Western is of course, the myth America tells about itself. We (umm some of us) conquered the west and made it safe for civilization. America is such a good thing that we gave it to the west and we will give it to the rest of the world too.

That’s the tale you get until the revisionist westerns that came along in the late 1960s and 1970s.

What your ancestors did was not evil as long as you are the one telling the story. 

Red River is the kind of movie where Native Americans show up to kill cowboys and settlers without any explanation given other than, that’s what they do. One character laments that he doesn’t understand why they always have to burn the wagons.

After a quick opening and a quick ending (off screen) to a wagon train the movie moves on to setting up it’s rancher/cattleman mostly main character.

At one point Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) announces to two Mexicans that he now owns all the land north of the Rio Grande for his ranch. 

The Mexicans explain that the land is owned by someone else and that it was granted to that person by the King of Spain. 

Dunson replies that the land is owned by the person who takes it and keeps it. Then he kills one of them just to prove his point. 

And there you go, America’s complicated relationship with Mexico as told by Hollywood in one scene.

Dunson spends a decade rounding up all the cattle in Texas and Mexico, branding them and getting them ready to sell.

But beef prices in Texas are close to zero so a cattle drive will be required.

One more thing, this is the kind of movie where the hero can shoot a gun out of bad guy’s hand rather than kill them. America was never that innocent, but it was that innocent inside the movie theater.

Anyway, the flick is mostly concerned with the cattle drive and it is as interesting a cattle drive as you could hope for from a movie made in 1948.

The greatest cattle drive on film remains the mini series Lonesome Dove.

But Howard Hawks was one of the best directors of his generation and this film is a nice showcase. Other critics point to his craftsmanship with the scene of the cowboys celebrating when the drive begins and the stampede. Sorry that’s a spoiler but if you do a cattle drive movie without a stampede you have done it wrong.

Walter Brennan plays the same craggy, comic relief character he always plays on these things. 

And Montgomery Clift delivers a nice bit of early James Dean/Marlon Brando energy as Dunson’s adopted son. 

This is supposedly the movie that left John Ford impressed with Wayne’s acting ability. Ford, of course, had already made a bunch of movies with The Duke. 

“I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act,” he said. 

Red River delivers a compelling narrative as the men battle the elements and then battle each other as they struggle to complete their difficult task.

Wayne plays a man who slowly loses his grip and then eventually turns to villainy before the final showdown. 

The ending wimps out considerably. That is, I suspect, a reason why Red River isn’t in the same conversation as The Searchers. 

The rest of this is fun cowboy stuff.