Red River (Hawks/1948)

I said they were enjoyable, John.
Essential are the three I mentioned, and possibly The Searchers. The others arre (imo) fun to watch. Don’t forget that not all spaghettis are essential …

Scherp I have still no idea what you see in Angel and the Badman.

The Comancheros is in parts a bit simple, but mostly well made, and yes fun to watch. And Wayne is very good in it. He also directed it more or less as Curtiz had health problems (he died shortly after).

But I have strongly to disagree about True Gri,t which is a very good western, and one of Wayne’s best. Hathaway’s best western also.

[quote=“Stanton, post:22, topic:2149”]Scherp I have still no idea what you see in Angel and the Badman.
The Comancheros is in parts a bit simple, but mostly well made, and yes fun to watch. And Wayne is very good in it. He also directed it more or less as Curtiz had health problems (he died shortly after).

But I have strongly to disagree about True Gri,t which is a very good western, and one of Wayne’s best. Hathaway’s best western also.[/quote]

Angel and the Badman: We all have our particular preferences, maybe it’s my Boot Hill

True Grit is a good movie, I think most films I mentioned (apart from the greats) could be characterized as ‘good’ or ‘fun to watch’. At least I have enjoyed them.
He was not the greatest actor in history, but not the worst either, and I don’t understand why some people hate him so much. In the sixties times were different and anybody with his political views was hated for them, but I thought we were over these things. After all he was not a nazi or something.

Yes, he still bears a grudge, and he would have tried to kill him under other circumstances, and he probably would have killed him anyway if he wasn’t someone he didn’t know that well.

You shouldn’t forget that he wasn’t such a hard man before the trail started, and that Clift and Brennan were his “family” for many years.
The ending is surely a surprise, but not so much compared to people behaving like that in “real life”, but for the genre convention the film ignores.
For me a fitting end.
The only other good end would be that Wayne indeed kills Clift, but that would be … well …

Dear me, I need to rewatch Red River …

[quote=“scherpschutter, post:18, topic:2149”]You’ll also miss:

The Searchers, El Dorado, Big Jake, True Grit, The Horse Soldiers, Rio Lobo, The Comancheros, The War Wagon, The Dark Command, The Sons of Katie Elder, Angel and the Badman, The Big Trail, The Shootist[/quote]

Need to see a lot from this bunch, however didn’t have a very good time with El Dorado and I wouldn’t put The Searchers in the list with the best westerns ever made, can see why it’s considered a classic for many people though. I’m in no way in a rush to see as many Wayne westerns as possible, there’s shitloads of earlier films that I find much more enjoyable than many John Wayne ‘classics’.

Btw I’m pretty sure the screenplay ending was that Wayne got mortally wounded in the duel with Ireland and finds then salvation in the arms of Clift (probably with lots of sobs) before he actually dies. The worst of the possibilities to end the film.

The Searchers was long time considered as Ford’s masterpiece. When I first saw it, I think in the early 80s, I was impressed too, and I still think it’s a good film, but Ford has done better. It must have looked more impressive when it was released, and some of its shortcomings (basically the Fordian comedy moments that are really awkward here) weren’t felt as shortcomings then, I suppose. Many films of the period (some Hitchcocks for example) have this kind of silly, childish humor. So even though it’s still a good film, it hasn’t aged that well, and I wouldn’t mention it among the very best either (it’s not in my Top 10).

But that applies for every Ford film. Fort Apache is also full of this stuff, and Liberty Valance also. You find it in some Hitchcocks, but mostly in a more mature form, and rarely in his abysmal films.

Generally Fort Apache is less valued than Searchers, Stagecoach, Clementine, Valance, Wagonmaster and Yellow Ribbon. I don’t know why, but it appears very often. I have just checked the Criterion list and Fort Apache is only the 9th of Ford’s westerns.
I think that Fort Apache is in fact an underrated film.

And frankly said I think that She Searchers is still considered as Ford’s all time masterpiece by a majority. And it wasn’t probably before the late 60s or the 70s that anyone called it a masterpiece. Since then its reputation is still growing and it makes mostly all these best films lists, wherever and by whomever they are compiled.

[quote=“Stanton, post:29, topic:2149”]But that applies for every Ford film. Fort Apache is also full of this stuff, and Liberty Valance also. You find it in some Hitchcocks, but mostly in a more mature form, and rarely in his abysmal films.

Generally Fort Apache is less valued than Searchers, Stagecoach, Clementine, Valance, Wagonmaster and Yellow Ribbon. I don’t know why, but it appears very often. I have just checked the Criterion list and Fort Apache is only the 9th of Ford’s westerns.
I think that Fort Apache is in fact an underrated film.

And frankly said I think that She Searchers is still considered as Ford’s all time masterpiece by a majority. And it wasn’t probably before the late 60s or the 70s that anyone called it a masterpiece. Since then its reputation is still growing and it makes mostly all these best films lists, wherever and by whomever they are compiled.[/quote]

It’s also in Fort Apache, yes, but it hurts The Searchers more. In Fort Apache this humor is an expression of the ‘good life’ within the fort, and the fort represents, in Ford’s vision, the save haven in the wilderness. It doen’t make these comedy scenes any better as such, but they have a function. In The Searchers they’re just thrown in on several occasions (take for instance this ‘that’ll be the day’ thing with the Indian girl, or the scenes with Wayne jr. and the sword). But what I meant to say in the first place was that audiences in the fifties were more used to these comedy scenes, and therefore didn’t experience them in the way we do. All decades have their own particularities, and decades later, people notice how silly they are.

Yes, I also think that in The Searchers (but also in Liberty Valance )this comedy stuff looks worse than in Fort Apache or Wagonmaster, which is probably the main reason why I prefer these 2.
Well, Liberty Valance has also too much theatrical acting, and generally a theatre atmosphere, which may be in accordance with the content, but it still bugs me a bit.

Whatever, but Red River is surely also one of Wayne’s central films.

I reckon The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck is Henry Hathaway’s best Western.

I agree though Fort Apache is underrated; I always felt Henry Fonda gave a sterling performance in it and a far superior movie for me to Red River. However, I’m not a big fan of Ford: films like The Quiet Man and The Sun Shines Bright are terrible and his rough-and-tumble comedy is very, very dated, stuff that marrs even his best movies like The Searchers. My favourite John Ford film is probably The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as it finally acknowledges the myths he had been telling for years in his motion picture as exactly that.

I recently saw THE GUNFIGHTER and I prefer it to TRUE GRIT. Maybe it’s because I prefer Peck a lot more than Wayne (both as an actor and in his screen presence)

But The Gunfighter was directed by Henry King. It is another classic, but very different in tone and style from True Grit.

But Hatahway made in 1950 also a remarkable b/w western called Rawhide.

[quote=“Stanton, post:34, topic:2149”]But The Gunfighter was directed by Henry King. It is another classic, but very different in tone and style from True Grit.

But Hatahway made in 1950 also a remarkable b/w western called Rawhide.[/quote]
Damn, you’re quite right! I got confused between the two Henrys. After having a look at Hathaway’s filmography, I would concurr and say his best Western is indeed True Grit, however I think Niagara is his best film, regardless of genre.

Which I don’t like

Red River while a good film, suffers from some bad acting and as other posters have said, a giant missed oppurtunity in the ending. The build up was to the final scene was so well done, only to have a cliche’d hollywood ending. I shouldn’t have expected different considering this is a Wayne film. Despite this, Wayne and Clift were completly believable in their roles, Dru nearly ruins this film with her terrible overracting at the ending. Also the complete lack of emotion in the arrow scene. Basically Red River is a good western that is a cut above the rest but these small issues ammount to it being a 4 star film for me, which is a shame as it could have easily been a 5 star.

Then now say what would have been the better ending exactly? That there is a duel between Wayne and Clift and Wayne got shot?

The arrow scene is for me one of the best acted of Red River. This is exactly the way of acting which makes Hawks films different from the usual Hollywood films of that time. It is Dru’s cool re-acting which makes this scene so strong.

And in 1948 Wayne wasn’t as famous as in later years. He was just in these years on the brink of becoming a big star, but in the year before he was just a not very talented star of minor westerns, not real b-pictures, but surely not the prestige films of these years. In his bigger budget films in these years he played always only the second lead (Reap the Wild Wind, The Were Expandable, Fort Apache).
I say it again, the cliched Hollywood ending would be that Wayne dies in a typical good/bad man role, and in his most expensive film in the years before (DeMilles’ Reap the wild Wind) he dies as the second lead in a typical way in a typical good/bad man role.
In fact it is Red River which doesn’t deliver the expected ending.