The first of Howard Hawks's five westerns, Red River is the epic story of a post-civil war cattle drive up the Chisholm trail. It's alandmark filmthat brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career. Anticipating his unsympathetic Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Wayne plays Tom Dunson, a middle-aged Texas land baron acting with equal ruthlessness whether dealing with his Mexican neighbours in Texas or the hired hands he employs on the hazardous journey to a railhead up north.
The film introduced to the screen Montgomery Clift, one of the greatest American actors of his time, as Matt Garth, Dunson's quiet, gentlemanly adopted son. He revolts against his increasingly brutal father halfway through the journey and takes the herd on a different, less dangerous route. The film is a transposition to the American west of Mutiny on the Bounty, and its author, Borden Chase, went on to write several equally complex Anthony Mann westerns, as did his co-screenwriter Charles Schnee, who won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful. The movie was shot in black-and-white because Hawks thought 1940s Technicolor too garish for the realistic style he was after, and this Blu-ray version gives it the look of 19th-century photography.
Certain characteristic Hawksian themes occur in the film, most notably the notion of tough professionals working together on a joint enterprise, the presence of a strong-minded woman holding her own in male company, and underlying hints of homoeroticism. In fact the same central characters were to figure a decade later in a more relaxed manner in Hawks's greatest western, Rio Bravo, where Wayne and Walter Brennan reprise their roles as a vigorously independent sheriff and his cantankerous sidekick, with Ricky Nelson a barely acceptable stand-in for Clift (thoughtfully rubbing his nose in an identical manner) and Angie Dickinson a great improvement on Joanne Dru's itinerant gambler. Red River's appropriately rousing score by Dimitri Tiomkin anticipates his music for Rio Bravo and even includes the same song, My Rifle, My Pony and Me. When the film went into production, John Ford, who had a paternal interest in Wayne, sent Hawks a letter saying: "Take care of my little Duke." He did.
