Red River (1948)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Following the Civil War, headstrong rancher Thomas Dunson decides to lead a perilous cattle drive from Texas to Missouri. During the exhausting journey, his persistence becomes tyrannical in the eyes of Matthew Garth, his adopted son and protégé.
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What critics compared Red River to
However, the smart-aleck references to Brokeback as his "gay cowboy picture" definitely do it a disservice -- besides, the very concept of gay-cowboy movies is pretty old hat (see the subtext in Howard Hawks' Red River, not to mention the Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey film, Lonesome Cowboys).
The widely reported carryings-on in Brokeback Mountain also reminded some reviewers of the supposedly subtextual implications of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne and the posthumously “outed” Montgomery Clift, as well as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford—the latter lacking even the gossipy whispers of Clift’s sexual orientation to sustain the subtextual suppositions.
Hailed as a landmark of mainstream tolerance (and to the "mainstream"'s shame, that's exactly what it is), Brokeback Mountain feels more like an antiseptic gimmick that attempts to hijack the conventions of a traditionally-masculinized genre (despite Red River and Johnny Guitar and The Hired Hand) to further demonstrate, as if further demonstration were needed, that two men in love is as natural, tempestuous, and ineffable as heterosexuality.
His and Scully’s relationship, defined at first by patronising paternalism, and then, finally, by nakedly bellicose warfare, evokes the clash of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River .
There’s a Howard Hawks-ian brio to director Joseph Kosinski’s Only The Brave, a relaxed, no-muss-no-fuss camaraderie of stoic men doing their jobs that in its best moments reminded me of Red River or Only Angels Have Wings.
Fight Club is well worth seeing, for its theme -- what it means to be a man -- is one of the great American obsessions, endlessly examined in films from Red River to Pulp Fiction.
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The performance is so strong, so credible, that you could ignore, if you wanted to, the absence of anything darker, such as the monomaniacal ambition and cruel self-righteousness that raged in John Wayne when he embodied this type in Red River and The Searchers, or the sense of guilt that nagged at Eastwood himself in Unforgiven.
Logan director James Mangold loads the drama up with banter in the style of Howard Hawks (Hawks’s own Red Line 7000 features Shelby’s cars) and even has the two men wrestling in the dirt while a wife patiently waits it out, a scene stolen from Red River.
The Hoka's ramshackle atmosphere actually complements Robby Muller's black-and-white cinematography and Robert Ziembicki's production design, which present images of the West influenced as much by "Eraserhead" as by "Red River" or any other classic traditional Western.
Bligh and Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
A loose variation on Mutiny on the Bounty, it has a more tangible goal in mind.
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But try finding a sense of sacred history in Red River, Rio Bravo or El Dorado To Howard Hawks, the West often seemed to be nothing more than a convenient place where men could hang around and pretend to fight, though they really were in love with each other.
Grumpy old Ford, seeing Hawks' " Red River ," said "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act."
He made top movies in all genres: the detective film (The Big Sleep), the western (Red River), the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) the screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the war film (Air Force), the epic (Land of the Pharaohs), the adventure (To Have and Have Not), the gangster film (Scarface), etc.
With the noble exceptions of The Dawn Patrol, Hawks’s first talkie, and the epic Red River, all of the films we have seen have seemed wonderfully relaxed, as if they must have been a pleasure to make.
They had previously only made one film together, Red River (1948), but it had established Hawks as a master of the western and it provided Wayne his first opportunity to stretch as an actor (and, in the process, gain a little respect from his most frequent director and greatest critic, John Ford).
I can only state that I am a great fan of his Westerns, of which “Red River” was the first, “Rio Bravo” (1959) the best, and “El Dorado” (1966) the most underappreciated.