Film: Red River
Director: Howard Hawks | Year: 1948
From Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and The Big Sleep (1946), to The Thing From Another World (1951), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959) - over a fifty year period Director Howard Hawks repeatedly demonstrated himself as a founding pioneer of American film making.
Hawks’ boundlessness of genre makes his body of work remarkable. Whether it’s Drama, Crime, Comedy, or Caper, his approach to genre is not one of visual study and reference as it is from today’s directors like Tarantino, Wright, and Abrams. Instead, every film he made was a vast claim on a new frontier, settling foundations and a style guide as point of reference for filmmakers to come.
Red River, released in 1948, is the first Howard Hawks Western, and is an exemplary model of how one Director could seemingly define any genre of film he turned his camera to. Following a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the banks of the Red River, All-American-Hero of the Wild West John Wayne commands his men across the wide frontier.
Film Westerns are so entrenched with the expected visuals of desert landscapes and gun-slinging duels (all accompanied by American fanfare), that it would be easy for Hawks to fall into the motions of delivering formula. And although of course Red River has its fair share of landscapes and gun-slinging, never do they take the fore as the film’s key substance.
Instead, Hawks focuses almost all of his running time on his characters, their motivations, and their relationships with one another. This approach is true of all the great Howard Hawks films, and doing so allows audiences to invest in people as opposed to place. For a film so dominated by men they all have a surprising amount of feeling and emotion. Montgomery Clift in particular delivers an outstanding performance as Wayne’s adopted son, Matt. We the audience do not particularly care about the physical journey from Texas to Kansas, instead we are made to care deeply about why it is so important for John Wayne and his men to get there together and in one piece.
Red River is available on Bluray through The Criterion Collection, and is also preserved in America’s Library of Congress as a “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant American film”. As always, Criterion’s presentation of the film (both in packaging and in content) is stellar. The company continues to produce highly coveted and collectible box sets that make physical film formats still worthy of purchase.
Purchase Red River HERE.
Watch the trailer HERE.