Directed by Howard Hawks. Written by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee
A piece of history, Red River is the fictional account of an epic cattle run that saw thousands of cows driven from Texas to Kansas to be sold, paving the way for the commercialization of American beef. It’s more than a sensationalized history lesson, though: it’s American anthropology, depicting the bullish obsession of the men who carved up the land in their image.
Thomas Dunson has his eyes set on big things. Breaking off from a group of farmers selling their modest number of beef cows, he goes south with dreams of an empire. Alongside him an old crank of a loyal sidekick and an orphaned boy who stumbles into their path. Feisty and not to be knocked around lightly, the boy nonetheless falls under Dunson’s wing.
Fast forward more than a decade, and the dream came to pass. Dunson’s emboldened by his success, and the boy, Matt Garth, has grown into a man, a fine rancher in his own right, capable as any, and loyal to the paternal figure who raised him. But the local market for beef has cratered, and Dunson makes a bold decision: he’s going to take all his cows out of state where they’re worth something, an arduous trek beset with dangers. Matt has his doubts about the destination, but defers to Dunson, who’s not one to take advice from anyone but himself. Will that last?
Red River is a towering American movie because it’s about the great, awful, difficult, psychotic men that made the country what it is. John Wayne, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, stands tall as Thomas Dunson, a rancher who built the largest cattle ranch in Texas from nothing, and now stands to lose it all unless he does what no one else has, and drives thousands of cows all the way across state lines to be sold.
Dunson’s hellbent attitude, where it must be his way or the end of a rope, is almost an archetype, a stark and vivid depiction of megalomania wherein actions are as productive as they are destructive. In him, we see the American railroad built on human suffering, business mastodons like Amazon built on the same currency; we see the Hearst empire bloom like a corpse flower, and just about any sizable and successful endeavour that came about on the domination of others. As much as it is about tenacious camaraderie, Red River is about the demons that begot the U.S.
Hawks is a demon behind the camera too. Some scenes exhibit his pioneering spirit, like when we watch the heaving masses of cattle cross rivers and plains, sometimes leaping up and around the camera during a stampede. He even crosses a river with the camera inside a creaking wagon. The daring choreography is something special, and The Tall Men would pay homage to great effect seven years later.
As Matt Garth, Montgomery Clift shows us why he’s a different type of leading man. Soft-spoken and reserved, he comes off as timid against the machismo of Wayne, but over the course of the cattle run, we see how every bone in his body is made of steel. Clift isn’t big in stature, but the ferocity of movement he can summon and the taut spring he can turn his voice into suggests something dangerous. Add to the fact his calm and self-possessed demeanor makes him a modern love interest among the brutes, and you have something special.
Where would we be without the dreamers with the will to see them through, no matter what? Who knows, but Red River is an exciting and damning account about one of them, a portrait of a national disease that’ll drive everything ahead of it, and trample it too, in its obsession with advancement.
Mikkel Frederiksen 