Undescribable Perfection

Good concept, poorly executed.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Top 10 best western movies of all time?! Nope. In my opinion, just an average movie. After Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby", "His Girl Friday", "Scarface", "The Big Sleep"... this comes pretty much as disappointment. :(6/10

Red River is an epic but flawed western which loses focus when it introduces a love interest in the last third of the film which leaves it with an odd and almost absurd ending.John Wayne (Dunson) plays a driven man who has built up a cattle empire in Texas and not through entirely legal means. He has taken land, cattle and killed for it.Montgomery Clift (Garth) plays his adopted son who Dunson took in as a boy. Dunson is in financial trouble, to get the best price for his cattle he embarks on an epic cattle drive to Missouri. The trouble is Dunson is driven to the edge of insanity in his quest, he falls out with his men over the best route, his strict rules and his cruel punishment for rule breakers and deserters.At one point Garth rebels against stubborn Dunson and relives of his herd and drives them successfully to Kansas, on route Garth and his men repel an Indian attack on a wagon train where he meets and falls in love with Tess Millay (Joanne Dru). All the time Garth knows Dunson is following and will want vengeance.John Wayne plays a ruthless man, with a dark underbelly. It is hard to root for him when he his driving his men to question his abilities.Clift in an early film role matches Wayne in his Oedipal struggle to supplant the father figure, get the herd into town and pay off his remaining men. The film should had got to a showdown between Wayne and Clift but it gets rather sidetracked.

Tom Dunston (played by John Wayne) needs to drive his herd of 10,000 or so cattle to market. The market is 1,000 miles away and the trip will be an arduous one. The stubborn, uncompromising Dunston is often at loggerheads with a young man who works for him, Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift), and the rift threatens the expedition. A classic Western. Epic in its plot and canvas. Great direction by Howard Hawks. Takes a while to get going but once it does it moves along briskly. Good action mixed with convincing human drama.John Wayne gets top-billing but Montgomery Clift steals the show. Great performance by Clift. Wayne puts on his usual swaggering performance, but here seems less one-dimensional than usual. Good supporting cast.

. . . explains how RED RIVER director Howard Hawks tried to coach "Tess" actress Joanne Dru to pull off a Lauren Bacall impression during the John Wane-Montgomery Clift Western simply because Hawks had directed Bacall opposite Humphrey Bogart a few months earlier in THE BIG SLEEP. Apparently, Hawks thought of actors as interchangeable widgets (being akin to their cattle co-stars of RED RIVER), a viewpoint he shared with director Alfred Hitchcock. Sadly, Hawks was not Hitchcock, Dru couldn't lift Bacall's jockstrap, and RED RIVER ranch mobster Wayne wouldn't have lasted five minutes in a Bogart gang. Only Trump voters would try to shoehorn RED RIVER between THE MALTESE FALCON and CASABLANCA on a list of Classic American flicks. Maybe there's an Alternate Universe in which Ms. Dru would NOT stick out like a sore thumb if positioned between Mary Astor and Ingrid Bergman, but I'm mighty glad I don't live there. TENSIONS AND TRADITIONS: MOLLY HASKELL ON RED RIVER is a catch-all sort of title, but there's no danger of anyone catching a whiff of Critical Thinking here.