Preview Of Coming Attractions...

One of the problems in writing a blog, and particularly one involving a lifelong love affair with the movies, is what could be described as the opposite of writer's block —having too many good ideas to choose from for the next entry, and lately too little time in which to give any of them the treatment they deserve.  So about the best thing that can be done in this space for the moment is to spin out a quick rundown on what's cooking in the synapses, a preview of coming attractions —to borrow from the trailers— though not necessarily in order of future publication:

A rundown of the "great" religious epics of the 1950s and 60s, with a focus on the only one, in my opinion, that really works —Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 magnum-opus, The Ten Commandments.

An examination of the Western films of Clint Eastwood, as both director and star.

A paen to a long-gone cinematic palace of this author's salad days.

And the moment that forever changed the way I view the movies.

You Wuz Wrong, Mr. Hawks.

If ever there was a movie that was ruined by its ending, it had to be Howard Hawks' Red River (1948).

I remember watching this movie for the first time about a decade and a half ago, give or take a couple of years, when it came up on WYES Channel 12, the local PBS station in New Orleans.  I had never seen it before, but heard a lot about what a great Western it was, with one of John Wayne's finest performances ever.  And when I sat down that first time in front of the TV, I saw an old classic that lived up to just about everything said about it.

Then came that awful, awful ending, and I felt cheated. It colored my whole impression of the film and for years afterward, I was never able to again watch it, or even consider adding it to my video library.  I simply could not get past that stupid ending for anything.  I know plenty of movies have had endings just as awful, hackneyed, and trite as this one (usually the defects in the fabric of the film were also glaringly obvious even before that point).  But it was in this particular case that I was left cold and angered that I had been strung along only to have my expectations cruelly stomped on.

Red River came up again on Turner Classic Movies just recently, as part of the lineup celebrating the movie network's Star Of The Month for April, John Wayne.  The burn I felt from that intelligence-insulting climax never left me, but I thought to go ahead and sit through the movie before writing this article (or rant if you prefer) just to give it a fair shot once again.  Time has not healed that burn. The ending of this movie just simply sucks, and what makes it all the worse is that, up to those last two minutes, it was one hell of a picture.

Movie buffs and especially Western fans know the story: Wayne is Tom Dunson, a Texas cattle baron who, after the Civil War left him broke and with no market for all his walking beef, decides to drive his vast herd up the newly-blazed Chisholm Trail to Missouri in hopes of selling it and restoring his fortune.  At his side are long-time friend Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan, in one of his many fine character roles) and young Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift in his debut film role), whom Dunson had adopted fourteen years earlier; the sole survivor of the wagon train Dunson had left which was subsequently massacred by Indians.  The woman Dunson loved was among the dead, which left him guilt-ridden and bitter.  Dunson spends the intervening years devoted to his growing cattle empire and the young boy who became his son, mentoring him into manhood with the aim of eventually leaving the Red River D ranch to him, and loving Garth as only a father could.  With his hand-picked crew that includes gunslinger Cherry Valance (John Ireland), Dunson starts off his drive for Missouri.  Along the way, Dunson becomes increasingly obsessive and tyrannical, particularly after losing an entire chuck wagon and several of his drovers to a stampede which leaves the drive both short-handed and short of provisions.  His monomaniacal determination to get the herd to Missouri, even dismissing news of the new railroad line that just ran through to Abiline, Kansas, a closer market, finally forces a crisis when, on the verge of hanging two drovers for desertion and theft, young Matt rebels along with the entire crew against Dunson.  Garth is acknowledged as the new leader of the drive, even by Groot who had stuck by Dunson through thick and thin for fourteen years, when he determines to make for Abiline.  They leave Dunson with a horse and provisions enough to make it to the nearest town along the trail, but Dunson is unforgiving of Matt's betrayal and coldly vows to track him down and kill him.

"Cherry was right. You're soft.  You should have let 'em kill me, 'cause I'm gonna kill you. I'll catch up with ya. I don't know when, but I'll catch up. Every time you turn around, expect to see me, 'cause one time you'll turn around and I'll be there. I'm gonna kill ya, Matt."

The drive eventually comes upon a wagon train under Indian attack, and Matt decides to rescue it.  Going in with three of his men while setting Cherry to lead the rest of the drovers in a pincer attack on the Indians, Matt meets Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) during the fighting, and the two fall in love.  Leaving Tess and the wagon train much as Dunson had left his beloved fourteen years earlier, Matt continues with the drive.  Days later, Tom Dunson and the posse he's gathered encounters the wagon train, and Tess invites Dunson to share a cup of coffee.  She knows all about the relationship between the two men and the conflict that has divided them.  Dunson admires her enough to want to father sons by her, and she counters by offering herself to him if he'll break off his revenge quest against Matt.  Dunson, however, will not be deterred.

Eventually, Matt and the herd make it to Abiline, accomplishing the first ever cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail, and the young man sells the herd off at a good price, just as well as Tom Dunson could have done.  In every way, Matt Garth has grown into the man Dunson had hoped he would become.  But all this is lost on the revenge-crazed Dunson, who rides into Abiline two days behind the herd and one day behind Tess, who found Matt and urged him to leave town before he is killed or is forced to kill his adoptive father.  But Matt won't leave, and he won't draw a gun on Dunson, and the next morning, the two finally meet face to face for the first time since the mutiny on the trail.  Dunson challenges Matt to draw, pulls out his gun and tries knicking him with bullets to get him to draw, and enraged all the more for the young man's determined pacifism, charges and begins to brutally beat on him.  Finally, Matt starts fighting back against Dunson...

And then the whole thing turns to shit when Tess comes forth, points a gun at the pair, berates them for their stupidity especially as they know deep down how much they really love each other, and the two men smile and make up on the spot.  Blah blah blah gurgle-urp.  End of movie.

It was an ending that got pulled out of somebody's ass, and it destroyed the story that preceded it.  It's the sort of ending that just corrupts the entire work from start to finish, and it all comes down quite literally in the last two minutes of the picture.  Two hours of a gripping adventure/revenge drama that collapses in its last two minutes.

Movie audiences may have been a lot more forgiving back in 1948, but I can't find it in me to be so forgiving, especially because up until that last two minutes, this really was a great movie.  I can't say that often enough when I'm talking about how awful that ending was!  Red River really had everything you could want in a good Western drama.  It had solid characters. It had the sprawling backdrop of the untamed country, with all its beauty and danger.  It had ambition.  It had conflict not only between men against one another, but against nature and against challenges almost too large for men to handle.  And it had some of the most beautifully staged and photographed action sequences of any Western.  This was, or could have been, a larger-than-life epic, and for most of two hours the movie lives up to that promise.  That is, right up until that stupid ending.

John Wayne gives one of the finest performances of his entire career.  "I didn't know the big son-of-a-bitch could act" director John Ford, who helmed fourteen of Wayne's films, would say.  Tom Dunson is a complex man with powerful demons crawling inside him; a man slowly going insane.  Wayne displays a rage running both cold and hot that you do not see in most of his characters (Ethan Edwards, the Wayne character in The Searchers, is about the closest match to Tom Dunson as you can find).  Also, he's paired with the young Montgomery Clift, acting in his first feature film and showing the clear signs of the quality that would make him so compelling in his signature roles in A Place In The Sun and From Here To Eternity.  And the force that drives this picture is the stark contrast between the two characters: Dunson the hard man who has nothing left to lose, and Garth the moral man who draws his strength from the determination to do right by the men under him and even to the father who has now rejected him.

Again, Red River was for most of its length a great movie.  If it hadn't been for that ending, I could even have tolerated the presence of Joanne Dru, who is an OK actress but not really a great or even good one and was horribly miscast in this part (though to be a bit fair, she was a replacement for Margaret Sheridan, who could not appear in Red River due to her pregnancy at the time).  She doesn't even appear until after the picture is two-thirds of the way done, so the romance angle seems especially forced and Dru hardly gives the kind of performance to make us want to buy into it.  But even all that could have been forgivable had the movie reached a far more natural conclusion than the one we got.

Red River was based upon the novel Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail, written by Borden Chase and first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1946.  When Howard Hawks bought the rights to Chase's novel for this production, Chase was brought along to adapt his story for the big screen.  But as the movie's production churned on, delayed by numerous difficulties both on set and on location which included John Wayne contracting the flu, Hawks being poisoned by a centipede bite, and finally some behind-the-scenes tomfoolery involving actor John Ireland trying to nail Joanne Dru at the same time Hawks had his eye on her (which led to Ireland's part being cut way back) the ground was being set for the ending that was very different from the one Chase had originally written in his novel.  In the original story, Tom Dunson died of a gunshot wound inflicted by Cherry Valance, who drew on Dunson because he knew Matt Garth could never have brought himself to kill his own adoptive father.  The novel ends with Garth taking Dunson's body back to Texas to be buried at the Red River D ranch.

This ending, of course, would never do for a Howard Hawks picture, and it wouldn't do to have John Wayne die in any picture back in that day, because Wayne always had to be the hero.  Always.  And he always had to live.  And Hawks decided that Tess Millay was just the sort of female character who could be depicted by a typical Howard Hawks heroine: glib, stubborn, sarcastic, but with a heart of gold who would melt for the right man.  In other words, a Rosalind Russell type character.  He also decided that she was just the force that would end what had almost become a blood feud between two men with those very Hawksian attributes for her to draw upon.  Screenwriter Charles Schnee was brought in to change the ending over the objections of an increasingly bitter Borden Chase, who would never work with Howard Hawks again.  Hawks, for his part, would not only defend the dopey ending he imposed on Red River to his dying day but also dismissed Chase's criticisms and his talent as a writer.  Borden Chase went on to disprove Hawks' disparagement by penning the screenplays for Winchester '73, Bend Of The River, and The Far Country.  Chase hated the ending.  So did Montgomery Clift, who said of it that "it makes the showdown between John Wayne and me a farce".

The ending doesn't work because the entire logic of the picture leads inevitably to one man dying at the hands of the other: either Tom Dunson is going to kill Matt Garth or Garth will kill Dunson.  It is inescapable.  Everything sets up the viewer for this Greek tragedy to unfold to such a conclusion.  And given how Garth cannot bring himself to kill Dunson, it is the more likely outcome that it's Garth who will die.  Dunson will have destroyed everything he had spent fourteen years building up.  He will have destroyed his son and the better part of himself along with him.  And this logic of the plot is what loans Red River its power even in the face of the ending that drained it all away in two minutes.

Even if you are forced to acknowledge the other inescapable fact that movie audiences of that period would have been loathe to accept such a tragic conclusion with no redemptive value, a better ending than the one we got could still have been crafted: a weaker one than the logical outcome pointed to by the plot, perhaps, but one which also would not have just thrown that logic completely away.  And in fact there is a way that the conflict could have been resolved without a fatality and with a far more satisfying outcome.

In the opening minutes of the picture, Tom Dunson was given a silver bracelet by his woman, Fen, on the day he lost her.  The bracelet was recovered off the body of a dead Indian who was part of a raiding party that attacked Dunson and Groot after the wagon train massacre and was then passed on to Matt Garth.  Years later, Garth gives the bracelet to Tess, who's wearing it when she encounters Dunson.  The bracelet is the symbol of the ties binding Dunson and Garth, Dunson to his own past, and Garth and Tess.

So suppose that, after arriving in Abiline, Tess gives the bracelet back to Garth as a pledge of her love the same as Fen had given it to Dunson.  Then, in the climatic fight scene, Dunson, propelled by his rage, steadily beats Matt down, and is beating the young man to death when, at the moment when it seems the killing blow is about to be laid, Dunson spots the bracelet.  In an instant (with voice-over flashbacks), Dunson's entire past comes back before his mind, he realizes he's about to kill his own son, and horrified comes back to his senses just at the last moment —and imagine Wayne acting out this realization, with a tight closeup as his expressions change, writing the drama of Dunson's internal struggle against himself upon his face!  An additional ten minutes can flesh out the resolution as the two are reconciled to one another, the rift not quite healed but with a firm hope for the future for both father and son.

There are weaknesses to this resolution, of course.  It still reeks of artificiality, but it at least has the virtue of not quite flushing a two hour plot down the toilet with the instant patch-up of an violently irreconcilable feud just because some skirt gives the two rivals a good tongue-lashing.  And anything, almost anything, would have been better than the awful ending Howard Hawks gave us; the ending that mars what otherwise was a great movie.