Red River (1948)

Red River is a 1948 American western film directed and produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, giving a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail.

The film's based on a screenplay by Borden Chase and a subsequent published novel, which in turn is based on his serial "The Chisholm Trail", which was a fictional account of the first of the nation's great cattle drives.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It's one of the most recognized and complex westerns of its era, and it's noticeably more ambitious and serious than the majority of Howard Hawks' films, especially his later work.
 * 2) It gives a fictional recreation of the first cattle drive north along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas.
 * 3) The screenplay manages to mostly stay faithful to Borden Chase's serial and his novel, although the film adaptation notably makes several changes to the script, with some of the most noteworthy being adding a prologue and revising the ending.
 * 4) Excellent performances from the cast that help to enhance the portrayals in comparison with the novel.
 * 5) * A near perfect and fearless performance from John Wayne, in one of his greatest and most complex roles as the villainous protagonist. Plus, Wayne's character (Thomas "Tom" Dunson) is as usual, a tortured and conflicted person. Wayne manages to deliver a nuanced and unvarnished version of Dunson.
 * 6) * Montgomery Clift in his screen debut, particularly played a memorable character, Matthew Garth who eventually rebelled against Dunson's tyranny and became his most formidable rival.
 * 7) * Walter Brennan played his role Nadine Groot as a straight comic relief fairly well.
 * 8) Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth's rivalry is very well-established and set up to be almost scarily realistic. You truly feel everything Matt's going through.
 * 9) Stirring, amazing score by Dmitri Tiomkin.
 * 10) Some of the greatest black-and-white cinematography by Russell Harlan.
 * 11) Various moments of clever symbolism such as the Biblical interpretations (crossing the Red River = crossing the Red Sea) to the bracelet that passes among five different characters to the distinctive “Red River D” belt buckle, which Wayne wore in subsequent westerns and has been reproduced for the consumer market.
 * 12) “Take 'em to Missouri, Matt!”

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The big showdown the entire movie was building up for is a major letdown considering Dunson and Garth acted out a fierce psychological rivalry for two hours (and 14 years timewise) during the film, only to cave in instantly to Tess breaking the fight up. In fact, Tess' characterization is very uneven and shaky.
 * 2) The use of back projection in some of the dialogue exchanges can be pretty glaring the distracting.
 * 3) The fact that the same mountain can be seen on the horizon throughout the drive may come across as fairly obvious to modern viewers and it makes it seem like there's very little space to film.
 * 4) The way Hawks relied on the cattle drive itself to provide a story line, is perhaps the film's most glaring flaw. In various other western works, a cattle drive provides a background to compelling dramatic incidents taking place in the foreground. The nuts and bolts of actual cattle drives aren't very interesting, so one could be forgiven if they found the film dull and certain areas.

Trivia

 * Red River was the first feature Montgomery Clift ever made -- although it was released after his film The Search.
 * Just before the film's release, Howard Hughes filed an injunction against the film opening in Texas, contending that the climactic gunfight sequence paralleled that in Hughes' The Outlaw - a production on which director Howard Hawks had briefly worked in 1940. To placate Hughes, Hawks cut approximately 28 seconds from the scene.
 * A director's cut of the film was released in 1987 - approximately seven minutes longer than the original release and reinstating the footage excised due to Howard Hughes' injunction. The 1948 version includes a spoken narration by Walter Brennan's Groot Nadine, replaced in the later release by handwritten text from an "Early Tales of Texas' diary.
 * The iconic “Take 'em to Missouri, Matt!” scene from this movie was featured as the final scene from the doomed small-town theater in The Last Picture Show.