Red River (1948)

This Howard Hawks production is one of maybe ten westerns essential to film literacy. The story is a variant on Mutiny on the Bounty, though here set on a cattle drive. John Wayne is Tom Dunson, the actors most complicated character beside The Searchers Ethan Edwards. Dunson lost the girl he loved to an Indian attack on a wagon train he had left to pursue new cattle land in Texas. Guilty over what he feels was an abandonment (he intended to send for her from California once he got his ranch going) he raises the lone survivor from the wagon train, a teenage boy, as his own. Fourteen years later, after the Civil War, with the southern economy a mess and Texas just lousy with Cattle, Dunson leads his adoptive son (as an adult played by Montgomery Clift in his film debut) and a group of men (including the always fun Walter Brennan), north towards Missouri where beef starved Yankees will pay a boat load for his 9,000 head of cattle. But en route Dunson becomes crazy and despotic, Captain Bligh-like, which necessitates Clift’s leading a mutiny against him when Dunson tries to hang two of the cattle hands. The deposed Dunson rides off for assistance, and with his new found posy presses after Clift with the intent to kill him. Very well done western with few dry spots. I was impressed with how many of the men on cattle train felt like they actually had developed characters. The citizens of Abilene on the arrival of the cattle seem probably more excited about access to beef then they were about the end of the civil war. John Ireland plays one of the great red hearing characters of all time. 4 ½ out of 5. Very watchable for a black & white western.