Western Watch: Red River (1948)

Watched:  03/26/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Howard Hawks

Who knew the highly regarded American Classic film would be pretty good?

Red River (1948) is a Howard Hawks post-war epic, one of a dozen John Wayne classics, and features a good number of the A-list supporting players of the era who show up again and again in different configurations through the 1960's.  

The film is also curiously myth-building for Texas history, and it's curious to see a movie made about it 80 years after the fact, rather than the additional near-80 that have since passed.  John Wayne plays a gunman who joins a wagon train in the years just prior to the Civil War going southwest out of St. Louis.  Somewhere in what would become the Oklahoma Indian Territory, Wayne decides to peel off and head South, crossing the Red River into Texas.  There a girl who begs to go with him (Coleen Gray*) but he says he'll send for her.  He's heading out into hard land with his pal, Groot (Western staple Walter Brennan).  

They soon see the smoke from a Comanche raid on the wagon train - and everyone (including Gray) is killed except for a young boy that Wayne takes into custody.  And Wayne's regrets are something he has to just swallow.

Together the three claim land just north of the Rio Grande. 

This is where we get into some Texas myth-building.  No sooner have they branded their first cow than some Mexican fellows ride up and inform Wayne that this land is owned by a Mexican Don, some 400 miles away.  Which leads Wayne to shoot the enforcer.

Look...  the timeline suggests that this is after the Texas war for Independence AND the Mexican-American War.  The idea that someone was still trying to claim territory this far north is possible, but they'd know this was a losing battle.  Secondly, what was really happening at this time was that people who had lived in the area for a century or more did have much smaller parcels of land than what is suggested, and happened to be on the north side of the Rio Grande.  As Anglos came in, they systematically stole land, harassed the families who were there, often using the Texas Rangers, and ignored property rights that were bestowed by Spain and Mexico because who was going to stop them?

To see this recast as "those greedy Mexican Land Baron isn't sharing" is a convenient way to cover for the fact there were people in some places where Anglo-American immigrants were setting up shop.  To this day, some families in the South Texas region know what their claims are supposed to be, and it's a legal mess if anyone were to start recognizing what happened.

Here endeth my soapbox stand.  This is a non-trivial point in the film, but it is early on and really meant to just show John Wayne's character is a wee bit uncompromising about his plans.  As a movie plot point, it's really solid.  It's just kinda standing on a rickety foundation.

As an aside - expect for Native Americans to get the treatment common for films of this era.  Either as unknowable shadow figures attacking settlers or as wily comedic figures among the white men.

14 years after settling in, John Wayne, Brennan and the boy - now grown up to be Montgomery Clift - decide to take their 9000+ heads of cattle to market. In post-Civil War Texas, they can't move or sell them, so they decide to go to the railroads - making this a movie about one of the first cattle drives on The Chisolm Trail (excellent point here about appearing successful, but it doesn't mean anything to own a bunch of cows if you can't sell them).**

The real story is about, of all things, management style.  But also love between a father and son, doing the impossible, the dangers of life on the cattle drive, and stumbling upon Joanne Dru in the dark.

If you read Lonesome Dove (highly recommended), you're familiar with the trials and travails of the cattle trail, and this movie certainly gets into that - and, fun - has a stampede scene that is, once again, harrowing.  But as the cowhands move the herd, and things get tough, alternative plans become available, and Wayne becomes more and more like a Captain Bligh, moving his men onward - making himself judge, jury and executioner for those who disagree with him.

Clift is fantastic as the son who sees a different path - you can feel the coming changes in acting styles in his performance.  Brennan gets to actually act instead of just complain and be wacky.  Joann Dru absolutely kicks ass as the tough frontier dame.  But we also get John Ireland as a gun looking for a reason to fight, both Harry Carey and Harry Carey Jr., Noah Beery, Chief Yowlachie, and one of my favorite oddballs of movies - Hank Worden.  

Growing up, people in the 1980's were just now dealing with the legacy of the Western, and it was hot business to discuss the American Myth building that westerns helped along.  But one of the funny things is that when you actually watch Westerns, they're never quite what the critics want to describe.  It's not a good guy in a white hat doing the right thing.  Heck, between this, The Searchers and plenty of others, John Wayne had no problem playing essentially a complex dude who turns heel at some point.  He's not always Hondo.  And in movies like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he's flagging that the cowboy gunman was necessary for a minute but wasn't what you need in civilization.  Get into Winchester '73, The Ox-Bow Incident, Sergeant Rutledge, High Noon...  it gets pretty complex out there on the frontier.

I don't know or care too much about the personal politics of a guy born in Iowa before indoor plumbing was standard.  So have at him in his personal life, but he was able to play complicated men, and those tough guys are flawed - and may be right about a good many things, but often very, very wrong about the big picture.

At the end of the day, based in history or not, this is a good @#$%ing movie.  I dug it.  Totally get why NathanC brings it up from time to time.  

*when Coleen Gray asks to go with you, you say yes, John

**Btw, I grew up near Round Rock, Texas but still inside Austin.  It's essentially right off the Chisolm Trail, so I'm always a bit delighted when it gets mentioned.