The Great Movies: "Red River"

Red River
Howard Hawks, 1948

When I was around ten, I stayed with my oldest sister at college, and by way of evening entertainment she took me to a John Wayne movie being screened on campus. Watching Red River last night was only my second exposure to Mr. Wayne, so it is safe to say that I don't have a deep understanding of this American icon.

Apparently, Red River is one of the finest films to star Wayne, and the one in which he is thought to have best employed his acting skills. This gives me a profound sinking sensation when I consider the rest of his large corpus, which must therefore be worse than this piece of crap. For Red River is a straightforwardly bad genre movie, exactly the film I feared I would be watching when I saw My Darling Clementine a few weeks back. Wayne is a block of wood who, throughout the film, sounds like he's reading a script into a Dictaphone; a half hour toward the end of the film when he is largely absent from the action is far and away the least bad part.

I have read that there are people who think of John Wayne as a kind of American hero or saint, as an exemplar of the qualities of our great (or, at the very least, our very large) nation. It is disturbing, then, to see him here portraying a deeply evil character. Ebert, curiously, wants to see him as an ambiguous character, and to see that ambiguity as the interesting part of the movie. But no, there's really nothing ambiguous about it. The film begins with the Wayne character knowingly abandoning his friends and fiancé to danger, then watching impassively from a distance as they are all killed a few hours later, then stealing some land, then murdering a representative of the rightful owner in cold blood. And that's all in the first ten minutes.

Subsequent scenes show him stealing his neighbors' cattle, bullying them (the neighbors, not the cattle) into submission, attempting to murder an employee, successfully murdering three other employees, and finally attempting an execution-style murder of two more. He is admittedly also fond, albeit in a grotesquely dysfunctional fashion, of a young man he adopts early in the film, but the idea that this makes him morally "ambiguous" is frankly preposterous.

Plot: Some ranchers move cattle a long distance, overcoming difficulties along the way.

Visuals: Lots of pictures of ranchers doing their work. It struck me here, as it has before, that there is really nothing unusually interesting about the work of ranchers. You seldom see films with long montages of 19th Century farmers, office workers, or office laborers going about their tasks, but filmmakers often seem to think that maneuvering herd animals has inherent fascination. I don't get that.

Dialog: Although badly delivered by Wayne and by some of the supporting cast, the script is weirdly macho but no worse than your average genre movie. An exception is the dialog given to the film's one female character, whose lines boil down mostly to three soliloquies that are almost dumb enough to be fascinating, but not quite.

Prognosis: Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole.