Howard Hawks (1948)
I remember watching it, or some of it, on television in the early 1990s. I wanted to see it again after reading Amy Lawrence’s book, The Passion of Montgomery Clift. Red River tells the story of the first cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene[1]. I’ve no idea how factually accurate it is but does that matter anyway? Westerns are to most people a creation of cinema – rather than a part of history or a literary sub-genre. The question of historical accuracy doesn’t arise as it would in a film about the American Civil War or an adaptation of a major nineteenth century novel. The imagery of the classic film Westerns is prototypical and Red River, photographed by Russell Harlan, has a definitive look. The two main characters are tough, bloody-minded Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth, an orphaned boy whom Dunson and his sidekick Nadine Groot (a man) virtually adopt early in their initial journey to Texas, which precedes the main drive. The dramatic centre of the film is the relationship between Dunson and the adult Matthew Garth and their different ideas of leadership. Eventually, Dunson’s tyrannous pig-headedness causes a mutiny and most of the team he’s collected around him head on down to Kansas with Matt in charge.
Since Dunson is John Wayne and the boy Matt grows up to be Clift, in the first film he made (although it appeared in cinemas a few months after The Search), this generational antithesis obviously has a resonance beyond the story being told by Howard Hawks. In the board room sequences in The Apprentice, you sometimes get the sense that Alan Sugar is having to remind himself that he’s contractually obliged to appear narked all the time. John Wayne in Red River is very similar. He does embody the character and, from shot to shot, can look impressive. The problems start when he has to change expression during shot. This is such a slow process that there are times when Hawks has cut before Wayne’s got there. When two of his men are threatening to give up on the cattle drive, Dunson says, ‘I hate quitters – ‘specially those not good enough to finish off what they started’. It’s impossible to tell, from the way Wayne speaks these words, whether it’s the line that’s ludicrous or the delivery that’s clueless. Or both.
Montgomery Clift is an original and subversive presence in this setting and company. He’s largely wasted but the freshness of his acting is electric. For reasons I didn’t understand, the boy Matthew Garth goes off for a year or so before returning to help Dunson and Groot develop their Texas cattle ranch. He returns as Clift. We don’t know what happened to Matthew during his gap year but the time away makes perfect sense of Clift’s quality of seeming to inhabit more than the world in which a story is taking place. I got confused reading the chapter on Red River in Amy Lawrence’s book. Lawrence seemed to be saying that Clift – rather than Hawks and the screenwriters Borden Chase and Charles Schnee (who based the script for Red River on a Saturday Evening Post story by Chase) – introduced homoerotic elements into the film. That seemed highly improbable, given what Lawrence describes elsewhere in her book: Clift’s anxious, increasingly unsuccessful attempts to keep the nature of his sexuality secret in forties and fifties Hollywood. Once I’d finished the book, I assumed that Lawrence meant that, because of what Clift came to signify in cinema history, we retrospectively see him as imposing meanings, deriving from what he later signified, on the movies he appeared in. It seemed scarcely less improbable to me that the director and writers did anything to encourage a queer reading of relationships in Red River. Watching the film made me realise I was wrong. The subtext of the I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours conversation about guns between Clift and John Ireland (as someone called Cherry Valance) could hardly be more blatant. The light-hearted gunplay is foreplay. Ireland’s character opines that the only thing that can beat a fine weapon is ‘a good Swiss watch or a pretty woman from anywhere’. Then he asks Clift, ‘Ever had a good Swiss watch?’
I don’t at all mean to imply that Clift comes into his own only in the crypto-gay territory of Red River. The boy Matt is played by a lad called Mickey Kuhn and he is hopeless. Just about all you notice is that he holds his hands at his sides, uncertainly but stiffly, somewhere between his midriff and his thighs. It’s a mark of how skilfully sympathetic Clift is that, when he first appears, he echoes the position of Kuhn’s hands – although now it looks natural – before discreetly making it disappear. Whenever he’s expected to connect with another player, he succeeds in doing so – Clift is remarkably good and dynamic in the romantic scenes here, even with a partner as weak as Joanne Dru (as the love interest Tess, whom Matt and co save when they repulse an Indian attack on a wagon train). It’s hardly worth saying that the women’s roles aren’t up to much (or much more than the Indians’ roles anyway). Coleen Gray is Dunson’s girl who, at the start of the film, begs him to let her go with him on his journey to Texas. He refuses, saying she’ll be a hindrance and you have to think she’ll certainly be a bore. I imagine we’re meant to see how remorseful he is when, in a fight with an Indian a few (screen) minutes later, Dunson kills him and discovers on his wrist the bracelet he gave his girl when he kissed her goodbye. Since it’s John Wayne, we don’t. (This bracelet ends up on Matthew Garth’s wrist, something else Amy Lawrence has a field day with,) Among the band of brothers, John Ireland, Walter Brennan and Noah Beery Jr all give good, entertaining performances.
Howard Hawks directs with considerable flair (Arthur Rosson was credited as co-director) and sequences like the cattle stampede are genuinely exciting. It was amazing nevertheless, after watching Ball of Fire and The Big Sleep a matter of days before, to see Hawks responsible for something as primitive as this. The narrative is punctuated, very frequently, by inserts of cursive writing, purportedly from a collection of ‘Tales of Old Texas’: one of these pages appears on screen at intervals of about five minutes for most of the film’s two plus hours. Then they appear for a second or two with just the middle lines of writing highlighted – just about enough to get the gist but giving the upper and lower text a continued p.94 irrelevance. The indefatigable music is by Dmitri Tiomkin. I suppose there must be lyrics to the theme song because Frederick Herbert gets a credit for them (Tiomkin wrote the music for this too) but the orchestration is so loud that it drowns out the chorus. All I heard were the words of the song title ‘Settle Down’, partly because they recurred so often, partly because they’d been included in the opening credits. Everyone ends up in Abilene, where the film climaxes with a fight between Wayne and Clift. It’s vigorous but, when it’s over and Joanne Dru scolds the pair of them and they smile ruefully and amiably, we’re meant to think that boys will be boys and they were only kidding all along. But the opposition between Wayne’s and Clift’s personas and acting styles (not that John Wayne is an actor) has a charge that doesn’t go away so easily.
2 February 2011
[1] According to Wikipedia: ‘The Chisholm Trail was a trail used in the late 1800s to drive cattle overland from ranches in Texas to Kansas railheads. The trail stretched from the Red River, and on to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway in Abilene, Kansas, where the cattle would be sold and shipped eastward. The Chisholm trail stretched from around San Antonio, Texas to Abilene, Kansas’.
