Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: Red River (1948)

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Related Essay:
Rio Bravo

Although he embraced nearly every genre from adventure to Film Noir to screwball comedy throughout his enviable career (and didn’t shy away from blending several together in the span of a single film’s running time), technically speaking, 1948’s Red River was Howard Hawks’ first western.

Admittedly that’s an amazing feat when you consider the film’s overall complexity. Yet as a character driven storyteller less concerned with traditional structure and formula than he was in spinning a memorable yarn, Red River had all the hallmarks of a Hawks classic.

Coming right off the heels of To Have and To Have Not and The Big Sleep — both of which starred Humphrey Bogart — Hawks dared to cast the white-Stetson clad, All-American cowboy hero John Wayne in a role that was decidedly better suited to guy like Bogart whose screen fedoras and Stetsons typically ranged in color from black to gray.

A subversive casting decision, Hawks also aimed to rip that black hat/white hat surface level philosophy to shreds.

While we get the impression The Duke begins the film like the heroic cowboy we’d all come to know and love from movies like Stagecoach, within River's first act Hawks gives audiences their first glimpse of Duke as a Noir tinged antihero after he makes a fatal mistake by not bringing his lady love with him to settle land and build a cattle empire.

Losing her to frontier violence in a (thankfully) offscreen Native American attack, Wayne’s hardened Tom may have lost his beloved but he unexpectedly gains an adoptive son.

Taking a young boy named Matt under his wing who’d likewise lost everyone he’d had to old western violence as well, Tom becomes the veritable father to the child who grows to become Montgomery Clift.

Jumping ahead in time until the end of the war which found land overtaken by carpetbaggers and all of the money depleted from the south, Tom and Matt decide to go where they can make a living by organizing a late nineteenth century cattle drive from Texas all the way to Missouri along the Chisholm Trail.

A post WWII cinematic study of evolving masculinity across two generations as contrasted by Wayne’s hard-hearted tyrannical patriarch and Clift's sensitive, contemplative, level-headed veteran who’s experienced violence as a survivor and a soldier embodied by the actor in his first screen role, Red River is also another in a long line of father/son, mentor/protégée male “love stories” that would populate Hawks’ career.

Essentially a new variation of an old storyline and/or an unofficial thematic sequel to Only Angels Have Wings which he made a decade earlier and would follow up with again each decade with new screen interpretations such as Rio Bravo in the ‘50s and El Dorado in the ‘60s, Red River was a character-driven western first and foremost.

Distinctly Hawksian with its screwball “three cushion dialogue” that talked around points like characters were shooting pool and aiming for rebounds and style points, in the oeuvre of Hawks, the women served as dialogue-heavy aggressors — articulating things that the men in their lives would never bring themselves to admit like Jean Arthur in Wings, Bacall in Have and Sleep or Angie Dickinson in Bravo.

Thus, following suit, it's a role that the filmmaker’s contracted second choice of Joanne Dru was given in River that she managed to play pretty damn well despite lacking the presence of the other stars (and a rushed ending that even the director concedes just never worked completely right in any way, shape or form when contrasted with the rest of the picture).

And although Hawks was inspired by master western filmmaker John Ford, Red River was the first film that convinced Ford that “the son of a bitch” Wayne could actually act, thereby facilitating the next phase in Duke's evolving role in subversive ‘50s and ‘60s masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Yet more than just awe-inspiring for what it did for Wayne’s career, it’s also a fascinating historical document to illustrate the change in screen acting.

For not only did River launch newcomer Clift’s career but as such it also inspired a new generation of actors from Marlon Brando to James Dean and Paul Newman to embrace the natural, Stanislavski method as opposed to the demonstrative expressive “show me” technique popularized in the '20s and ‘30s.

While Hawks was the first to discount his skills as a filmmaker by giving credit elsewhere (such as second unit director Arthur Rosson or cinematographer Russell Harlan), or acknowledging the role that luck played in helping him execute an occasional poetic “John Ford shot,” the film is still influential.

Cinematically, this is particularly evident given the way that — much like the friendships that occur throughout his filmography between an older man and a younger one based on their professional camaraderie and ability as fliers, fighters etc. — he liked to rely on his actors’ talents to play things out when it came to his edits.

Cutting on movement rather than action shots to keep edits hidden in order to spotlight the actors so you know that it’s really Walter Brennan driving that wagon across the river, Wayne catching a shotgun and handily firing three times or Clift hopping into the stirrup to get on his saddle, Hawks ensures a sense of realism and masculine cool simultaneously.

Likewise, from a narrative perspective, he preferred to open sequences (and frequently his films) with a fast-paced action-packed moment that gets us right into the story before slowing things down to bring us up to speed with explanations or expositions.

By way of this effect, Hawks once again achieves with his camera the same billiard like rebounds and style points that take a backward way into traditional storytelling, which he frequently utilized with his famous “three cushion dialogue” as he discussed with Peter Bogdanovich in his book Who the Devil Made It.

And knowing him better than most, Bogdanovich makes a welcome appearance as a film scholar on the Criterion set, offering key insights and behind-the-scenes information that makes a great companion to the Hawks chapter of Devil.

Gorgeously restored to a sharp, high definition sheen, The Criterion Collection serves up both definitive versions of Hawks’s adaptation of the Boren Chase novel that the author had shortened into a Saturday Evening Post story which he translated into screenplay form alongside Charles Schnee.

Also including the out-of-print original novel with the impressive dual format edition box set that boasts the film in DVD and Blu-ray for a total of four discs, the collection serves up Hawks’ preferred theatrical edition along with the longer “book version.”

Despite being unauthorized by the filmmaker, the book version that is lacking Walter Brennan’s audible narration boasts an ending that’s closest to the one that the helmer had intended.

Threatened with legal action by the litigious Howard Hughes, who felt like Hawks had repurposed the ending he’d written for Hughes’s The Outlaw before he’d been fired, while there honestly isn’t that much of a difference between the two cuts which due to Dru’s rushed, ineffective delivery Hawks has never actually liked all that much, it’s still interesting to see the two back-to-back.

And while I agree that the tone moves from too deathly serious to too jovial ultimately — as Hawks had always emphasized — the film is less fixated on the girl than it is on the relationship between the two generations of men.

Elevated by the compelling interplay between the leads whose dynamic is analyzed in a fascinating new light in the gender and sexuality focused nonfiction study Masked Men which I read during a film school project that dissected Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Red River is not only of the director’s very favorite films he’s ever made (along with Scarface) but it’s one of my very favorite westerns.

The first genre work that actually opened my eyes to what can be achieved in a western, perhaps Red River is so unique because of its novelty as not only the director’s first western but also Clift’s first film and Wayne’s first challenging role.

And while I'm sure the film was liberating to the actors, it's a distinctly Hawksian achievement all-around.

Without the weight of previous genre efforts impacting his thought process, Hawks was uninhibited and free to let the lessons he’d learned on everything from Bringing Up Baby to Only Angels Have Wings and The Big Sleep inspire him to make his own kind of western.

And that’s precisely what Howard Hawks did in Red River, which finds the filmmaker producing the work on his own — less focused on rules or formula than he was determined to capture a stampede of character, conflict, cattle and celluloid to see exactly what type of cinematic endeavor he could achieve.   

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DVD Review: El Dorado (1966) -- The Paramount Centennial Collection

New From Paramount Centennial Collection

In the oft-cited famous story of Hawksian lore, when Howard Hawks contacted Robert Mitchum about the possibility of making a movie together and an interested Mitchum took the bait and fished for the plot-- Hawks reeled him in telling the actor that, “There’s no story. You and Duke play two old cowboys.”

However, their perception of the film differed upon its completion with Robert Mitchum confessing that—truth be told-- El Dorado “was all character development,” whereas the traditionally anti-analytical Hawks had second thoughts, revealing in the notes of this Paramount Centennial Collection 2-Disc DVD that in all actuality there ended up being a pretty good plot (courtesy of Leigh Brackett’s crackerjack script) “even though it wanders around.”

For, in the familiar terrain of Hawksian male bonding pictures of “professional courtesy” even for one’s rivals-- along with a strong female character who’s one of the boys and the mentor/protégé relationship of pairing a cynical and wise man (usually Duke Wayne) with a naïve but earnest youngster--you can most definitely-- as he shares, “let a thing wander around.”

And despite the fact that Howard Hawks seemed to master every genre from the gangster picture with Scarface to the screwball comedy with Bringing Up Baby to the film noir with The Big Sleep-- making in fact very few westerns in comparison to the era’s most famous genre director John Ford (with whom he shared John Wayne countless times) -- it's his westerns that have become especially beloved over the years.

While my favorite Howard Hawks western is undoubtedly Red River starring John Wayne in the role he frequently stated made Ford finally realize that he could actually act alongside the irreplaceable Montgomery Clift-- Hawks' biggest hits seem to be the ones that blended together all of the elements from his previous genre pictures like the slapstick of Baby to the professionalism of Only Angels Have Wings to the sultry dames played by Lauren Bacall in movies such as The Big Sleep.

And to this end in 1959, Hawks made his most rousingly entertaining western with Rio Bravo (again starring The Duke and penned by Brackett) which was originally envisioned as a right-wing response picture to their distaste for the Gary Cooper classic High Noon which Hawks and Wayne found downright un-American (for more on this subject, read my essay on the films here).

Containing what can arguably be considered Dean Martin's best on-screen performance as an alcoholic law man driven to drink due to trouble with a woman (a frequent plot device), Rio Bravo found Martin teaming with veteran tough Wayne, the kid “Colorado” (Ricky Nelson), and a disabled Stumpy (Walter Brennan) to take down a ruthless villain.

After a couple of flops and although Hawks vehemently denied the claim, he remade the film for a second of what would eventually be three times (resulting in their final western together, Rio Lobo) via 1966’s El Dorado which began filming in ’65 but was ultimately released in ‘67.

In doing so, he returned to the same Old Tucson location set where he’d filmed Bravo years earlier complete with those smaller buildings that made the tall actors look even larger than life. Additionally he reworked the earlier premise with the help of Brackett who (along with Wayne) had actually wanted to be more faithful to novelist Harry Brown’s darker, Greek-tragedy inspired western book The Stars in their Courses but they ultimately abandoned most of the literary source material in favor of something Hawks considered far more entertaining.

A classically structured western and one that—as the antithesis to the increasingly dark but brilliant works of Ford (like my personal Wayne/Ford favorite The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) that didn’t give Wayne a whole lot to do—Hawks' film used a far more comedic, fast-paced structure that true to form, Hawks would add to on-shoot sitting in his chair and rewriting lines on yellow legal pads during filming.

As cinema scholar, filmmaker, and indeed commentary track contributor Peter Bogdanovich revealed--in one of two commentary tracks included on El Dorado’s most recent Paramount release—Hawks, who didn’t direct actors too much other than telling them to just pick up the pace, never wanted to linger over action and preferred to instead making his violence fast and economical without lingering over it, for example in the way that era’s up-and-comer Sam Peckinpah did in The Wild Bunch.

This is evidenced throughout the rather simple tale of Wayne’s hired gun who—upon realizing that El Dorado’s town sheriff is his old friend J.P. Harrah (Mitchum, basically taking on Dean Martin’s Bravo role)—turns down the offer to work for Ed Asner’s greedy land owner who’s violently strong-arming the local MacDonald family.

After gunplay erupts and time passes, Wayne’s Cole Thornton and his new knife-throwing vengeance-filled sidekick Mississippi (a dynamite James Caan in a better role than Nelson’s in Bravo)-- who can’t shoot a gun to save his or anyone’s life-- ultimately end up joining Harrah. With Mississippi in tow whom he’s fixed with a sawed-off shotgun to try and help even out his new friend’s weakness, Thornton returns out of friendship and loyalty when he discovers that his colleague has not only become a heartbroken “tin star with a…drunk pinned on it” but that Asner’s Bart Jason has recruited one of the best gunman in the area in the form of Christopher George’s Nelse McLeod.

While they weren’t exactly attempting to reinvent the wheel and upon its delayed release the very traditional studio picture became a surprise box office hit in the wake of a studio and Hollywood filmmaking atmosphere that had definitely begun to change to the era of ‘70s auteurs like Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and others—it still holds up as an enormously entertaining work to this day.

Intriguingly, although he’d be crucified for it now, Hawks’ defiance of logic and geography was bold as brass throughout. In El Dorado, for the sake of a better shot, Mitchum switched which side he uses a crutch on throughout which resulted in hilarious problems in continuity that prompted a great line by former continuity expert Wayne in the final cut and likewise, he abandoned reason in having the men double back around town in a chase sequence that doesn’t really make a whole lot of geographical sense. However, in this case it's all completely forgiven.

This is owed as much to the overall excitement of the film and our reverence of all involved spouting spirited quips and undergoing some pretty great pratfalls (especially via a few humdingers by Mitchum that display his little-known comic side) as it is to the fact that Hawks was definitely right in his assertion that it’s always okay to let characters wander around. And this is especially easy to "fake" when a majority of the picture occurs at night to hide the gaffes and ratchet up the tension.

Filled with impressively lit night shots that resulted into a critical disagreement when Roger Ebert playfully suggested that Ms. Pauline Kael needed to have “her glasses scrubbed” when she penned an exaggerated complaint to the contrary, there’s a tremendous standout in the picture that finds the men slowly meandering through the streets, guns out and ready to take down a killer. However, as Bogdanovich noted it is filled with reaction shots that are more about Wayne and Mitchum’s relationship and less about getting the bad guy in the end.

In a terrific sequence that—like Dean’s in Bravo—finds Mitchum having to prove his mettle by no longer further embarrassing himself in a bar shootout—Hawks simply lets the men wander for what must have been more than a dozen minutes. In doing so, they stalk all around town, church bells are used to curious effect and despite the large absence of fast-paced jokes, they still manage to work in a great line and gag when Caan’s Mississippi “hits” a bad guy not with the gun but by shooting a sign that hits him instead.

The result is pure Hawksian western poetry (that also includes its Edgar Allan Poe namesake in the poem quoted by Caan) with its depiction of a group of male outsiders coming together to try and set things right. Additionally, much to Brackett’s credit in improving upon the role that Angie Dickinson played in Bravo, she offers not one but two superbly written characters for actresses Charlene Holt and Michele Carey, ensuring that although you’ll never mistake the look and feel of a Hawks western for the mid to late 1960s filmmaking going on elsewhere, at least on some levels (despite one horrible Asian caricature scene) the film tried to change with the time.

And in fact, the lovely Michele Carey (one in a long line of Hawks’ favored memorably voiced brunettes) actually gets the chance to legitimately become a part of the gang by the end in a great shootout that likewise includes a nice twist on Hawks’ and Duke’s thematic and conversational emphasis of “professional courtesy” in a final showdown.

El Dorado was released as part of Paramount’s ongoing 2-Disc Centennial Collection titles in tandem with their other Duke offering—John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And while the widescreen print looks gorgeous and sounds dynamic (watching as I did in its original Mono as opposed to an enhanced Dolby Digital), in addition to the commentaries and a beautiful full-color booklet of facts and photos, the second disc features a seven-part documentary on the film along with galleries, the vintage trailer and featurette on the American west artwork included as well as a remembrance of John “Duke” Wayne.