Red River (1948)

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift

'Red River' is a Western adventure movie made in 1948, directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru and Walter Brennan. The script was written by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, and is based on Chase's original serialised story "Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail", first published in 1946 in The Saturday Evening Post.

The movie has come to be regarded as a masterpiece of filmmaking and as one of the best Westerns ever made. It only received two Adademy Award nominations, one for Best Motion Picture Story for Borden Chase and one for Film Editing for Christian Nyby, and won neither. With hindsight there is a very good case for nominations at least, for Howard Hawks, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift.

Search Amazon for 'Red River'

'Red River'tells the story of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along what became known as the "Chisholm Trail". John Wayne plays Tom Dunson, a hard Texan rancher, who begins a difficult, almost impossible cattle drive over 1000 miles of hostile territory to the Kansas, Missouri railhead. Tension builds up between Dunson and his adopted son, 'Matt' Garth, played by Montgomery Clift, making his screen debut, and the journey gives plenty of opportunity for exciting action sequences, gunfights, cattle stampedes and Indian attacks plus a great climax - a final confrontation between Wayne and Clift.

'Red River' is a great film, a marvellous mixture of old-fashioned, violent Western adventure, combined with a more thoughtful, character driven interplay between the main participants and a depiction of the changing nature of the West. Wayne's character represents the old system, where violence and totalitarian methods rule, but which is being supplanted by Clift's new, more humane, and more egalitarian system. The acting is first class, particularly from Wayne and Montgomery Clift, ably backed up by Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan and John Ireland. The powerful impact of the film is accentuated by the rousing score by Dimitri Tiomkin. A true classic movie.