MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
TRANSCRIPT
Red River (1948): Notes on Cattle and Cowboys
Hollywood has done its part to iconize the American cowboy. At least 27 Hollywood films have
depicted a fictional account of the first cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail, including The Texans
released in 1938 directed by James P. Hogan and starring Randolph Scott and Joan Bennett. Red
River which was released in 1948 starred John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Coincidentally,
Walter Brennan costarred in both films depicting cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail.
Historical background is very useful when watching Red River so I thought I should talk today
about cattle drives in the American West. They were a major economic activity in the nineteenth
century particularly between 1866 and 1886 when twenty million cattle were herded from Texas
to railheads in Kansas for shipment to stock yards in Chicago and points East. It would take as
long as two months for the cattle to travel from a home ranch to a railhead. As early as 1836
ranchers in Texas began to drive cattle along a beef trail to New Orleans. Then in the 1840s cattle
drives expanded northward into Missouri, the towns of Sedalia, Baxter Springs, Springfield and
St. Louis became principle markets.
The Shawnee Trail also known as the Texas Road or Texas Trail played a significant role in cattle
drives as early as the 1840s. But by 1853, as three thousand cattle were trailed through Western
Missouri local farmers blocked their passage and forced the herds to turn back because the Texas
longhorns were carrying ticks that carried Texas fever. Texas cattle were immune to this disease,
but the ticks that they left behind infected the local cattle and killed them.
By 1855, farmers in Western and central Missouri formed vigilance committees stopped some of
the herds and killed any Texas cattle that entered their counties. And a law effective in December
of that year was passed banning diseased cattle from being brought into or through the state. The
cowboys then took their herds towards the railheads through the eastern edge of Kansas but there
too they met opposition from farmers who induced their territorial legislatures to pass a protective
law against cattle driving in 1859.
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
The Civil War began in 1860. And in the early years of the War, Texans drove cattle into
confederate states for the use of the confederate army, but the War blocked access to eastern
markets as the union armies interfered with the cattle drives. The cattle drives stopped, and as a
result Texas cattle numbers grew significantly.
In that period. And after the War cattle could not be sold for more than two dollars a head in Texas.
By 1866, an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 surplus cattle in that state were available. Chicago
needed cattle. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, Philip Danforth Armour opened a meat packing
plant in Chicago known as Armour and Co. and with the expansion of the meat packing industry
demand for beef increased significantly. By 1866, cattle could be sold to northern markets for as
much as $40 a head making it profitable for cattle particularly from Texas to be herded long
distances to market.
The problem was how to get the cattle to the railheads. And in 1867, the cattle shipping facility
owned by Joseph G. McCoy opened in Abilene Kansas, and was built west of farm country and
close to the railhead at Abilene so the town became a center of cattle shipping, loading over 36,000
head of cattle in its first year.
The route from Texas to Abilene became known as the Chisolm Trail. It ran through present day
Oklahoma which was then Indian Territory, but there were relatively few conflicts with Native
Americans who usually allowed cattle herds to pass through for a role of ten cents a head. The
Chisholm Trial ran through a number of rivers which ensured that the cattle had enough water in
order to make the trip. Later, other trails forked off to different rail heads including those at Dodge
City and Wichita, Kansas.
By 1877 the largest of the cattle shipping boom town, Dodge City Kansas, shipped out half a
million head of cattle. With six states enacting laws in the first half of 1867 against trailing cattle
north, Texas cattlemen realized the need for a new trail that would skirt farm settlements and thus
avoid the trouble over tick fever.
The Chisholm Trail was the most important route for cattle drives. The typical drive comprised
1500 to 2500 head of cattle; the typical outfit consisted of a trial boss, perhaps the owner, from 10
to 15 hands or cowboys each of whom had a string of 5 to 10 horses, a horse wrangler who handled
those horses and a cook who drove the chuck wagon. The wagon carried bedrolls, tents were
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
considered to be an excess luxury. The men drove and grazed the cattle most of the day, herding
them by relays at night. Ten or twelve miles was considered a good day’s drive, as the cattle had
to walk slowly in order not to lose weight and they had to thrive on the route. They ate grass, the
men ate bread, meat, beans with bacon and coffee. Wages were about forty dollars a month and
they were paid when the herds were sold.
Cattle drives created cattle towns and the cattle towns flourished between 1866 and 1890 as
railroads reached places that were suitable for gathering and shipping cattle. The first was Abilene
Kansas. Other towns in Kansas included Witchita and Dodge City. In the 1880s, Dodge City
boasted of being the Cowboy Capital of the World. The most famous cattle towns like Abilene
were railheads where the herds were shipped to Chicago.
Cattle owners made these towns headquarters for buying and selling, and cowboys like the ones
in Red River, after months of monotonous work dull food and abstinence of all kinds were paid off
and turned loose. They got shaved and shorn they bought new clothes and gear just like the
cowboys in Red River. They drank. Historically, madams and gambling hall operators flourished
in towns that were wide open twenty four hours a day. Drinking and violence created the peace
officer that cattle towns made famous. Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp are perhaps the two bestknown cattle town marshals.
American cowboys were drawn from multiple sources. By the late 1860s, following the American
Civil War and the expansion of the cattle industry former soldiers from both the Union and the
Confederate Armies came West seeking work and a significant number of African American
freedmen, Mexicans and American Indians were also drawn to cowboy life.
In the West cowboys ranked low in the social structure of the frontier period. Most cowboys came
from lower social classes and the pay was poor. The average cowboy earned approximately a dollar
a day plus food and a bed in the bunkhouse. Nonetheless the traditions of the working cowboy are
etched into the minds of the general public because of the development of the Wild West Shows
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which showcased and romanticized cowboy
life. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the present day, Western movies popularized
cowboy lifestyle but also formed persistent stereotypes, both positive and negative.
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
The cowboy code promotes positive values that encourage honorable behavior, respect and
patriotism, but the cowboy and the gunslinger have come to be associated with one another.
Likewise, cowboys in movies are often shown fighting Native Americans but in reality, working
ranch hands have little time for anything other than the constant hard work involved in maintaining
a ranch.
In America, hard work is associated with manliness and American masculinity is equated with the
cowboy. The character of the cowboy expresses manliness. The cowboy does the best he can at all
times, his work is comfortless, arduous and often dangerous. In Red River, the cowboys are tough
long enduring hard working and gritty. They are slow to complain. Loyalty is an important
characteristic of the cowboy and it is an important issue in Red River.
Issues of loyalty in particular, showcase Howard Hawks’ critique of capitalism. It can be argued
that Tom Dunson represents traditional norms and forms being an older man he values profit over
the welfare of his men and his animals. Money and property are ends for Dunson. Matthew Garth,
on the other hand, a younger man, can be said to represent new modern norms and forms of
manliness. Property and profit are means to an end rather than ends in themselves for Garth. It
seems that Hawks is offering two types of masculinity to his viewers.
So keep an eye on the dialectic between old and new when watching Red River. I’m looking
forward to discussing Hawks’ treatment of capitalism and masculinity with you in the forum.
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
is a 1948 Western film produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery
Clift. The film’s supporting cast features Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Colleen Gray, Harry Carey,
John Ireland, Hank Worden, Noah Beery, Jr., Harry Carey Jr., and Paul Fix. The screenplay was
based on Borden Chase’s original story which was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post
in 1946 as “Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail.” The movie’s ending differs from that of the
original story. In Chase’s Saturday Evening Post’s story, Cherry Valance shoots Tom Dunson dead
in Abilene and Matt takes his body back to Texas to be buried on the ranch. Red River cost an
estimated $3 million to make it did very well at the box office. In 1948, it grossed $5 and a half
million domestically and worldwide it made over $9 million. It was a very, very popular movie.
The film is also an art movie. It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Film Editing by
Christian Nyby and Best Writing Motion Picture Story by Borden Chase. John Ford was so
impressed with John Wayne’s performance in Red River that he is reported to have said I didn’t
know the big son of a bitch could act.
In June 2008, the American Film Institute listed Red River as the fifth best film in the Western
genre. In 1990, Red River was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
by the Library of Congress as being culturally historically or aesthetically significant.
Red River is a cattle drive movie. It’s the story of a Texas rancher who has to move his cattle to
the railroad in order to be able to save his ranch. The movie has a very famous stampede scene in
which Richard Harlan, the cinematographer, has a river of the long horn cattle pour down a hill.
As a visual experience, Red River is spectacular. It was filmed in 1946, copyrighted in 1947, but
not released until September 30 1948. This movie had many production problems and post
production problems. Howard Hawks was not satisfied with the editing of Red River while the
movie was in production and he asked Christian Nyby to take over cutting duties. After production,
the prerelease version was 133 minutes long before this version could be released Howard Hughes
sued Howard Hawks he claimed the scene between Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth was taken
from another scene called The Outlaw which was released in 1943 which Hawks had shot for
Hughes. To resolve this issue, Nyby went back and forth, trimming and cutting until a compromise
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
with Howard Hughes could be reached. Their final product was the original theatrical version
which was released at 127 minutes. Now, nobody knows why but this 127-minute theatrical
version, which was preferred by Howard Hawks, was lost, and what people have seen on television
broadcasts and home video releases for decades was the 133-minute, pre-release version which
Howard Hughes disliked and threatened to sue them over.
The original, theatrical cut was re-assembled by Janus Films in co-operation with United Artists’
parent company MGM for their Criterion collection, and this was released on May 27, 2014. So,
if you’re reading critical material on this film, and there’s scenes that you don’t recognize, it’s
because those critics were working with the 133-minute pre-release rather than the 127-minute
theatrical version that we’ll be looking at in this course.
Critical reviews of Red River are fascinating. So what I’ve decided to do today is take a look at
Bosley Crowther’s review of Red River which came out in 1948 and compare it with Ebert’s review
of the same movie fifty years later.
“Up to a point in "Red River," which came to the Capitol yesterday, this opus is on the way towards
being one of the best cow-boy pictures ever made. And even despite a big let-down, which
fortunately comes near the end, it stands sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these
days. So strap on your trusty six-shooters and race to the wind-swept Capitol, you lovers of good
old Western fiction. It's round-up and brandin' time!”
Crowther talks about what works for him in the movie before moving on to what doesn’t work.
What works for Crowther is the cattle drive itself. He says, “for at least two-thirds of the way, it's
a down-to-earth story of cow-pokes and the tough, dangerous lives they used to lead. It's the story
of a great migration of a cattle herd, said to be the first, from the breeding grounds in Texas to
Kansas, along the Chisholm Trail. And it's the story of a desperate contention between two strongminded men, a hard-bitten veteran and a youngster—or Mr. Wayne and Montgomery Clift.”
“So long as it sticks to cow-herding and the gathering clash between these two—a clash brought
on by disagreement as to whether they should try the untrod trail—it rings with the clang of honest
metal and throbs with the pulse of real life, “ Crowther says. “For Mr. Hawks has filled it with
credible substance and detail, with action and understanding, humor and masculine ranginess. He
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
has made it look raw and dusty, made it smell of beef and sweat—-and he has got a stampede of
cattle in it that makes you curl up with terror in your seat.”
Crowther really likes the transmission and representation of masculinity in this film. He says the
problem with the film is that there’s a woman in it: then he says, “Then the cowboys—and the
picture—run smack into "Hollywood" in the form of a glamorized female, played by Joanne Dru.
For she is the typical charmer, with a voice like Dorothy McGuire's, and the havoc she plays with
the hero—and with the contents—is almost complete. The characters turn into actors and the story
turns into old stuff. It ends with the two tenacious cowboys kissing and making up.”
Personally I like the ending of Red River, but then I think it’s funny. I don’t think that Crowther
thought it terribly funny at all. In 1998, almost fifty years later, Roger Ebert wrote a review of
Howard Hawks’ Red River, and his take on the movie shows us that in some ways American
culture has changed and in other ways it hasn’t changed that much at all. Ebert is particularly
interested in the character of Tom Dunson, He says Dunson is both “hero and villain. It's a sign of
the movie's complexity that John Wayne, often typecast, is given a tortured, conflicted character
to play. He starts with “a boy with a cow and a man with a bull,” and builds up a great herd. But
then he faces ruin; he must drive the cattle north or go bankrupt.”
Ebert says, “[t]he theme of “Red River” is from classical tragedy: the need of the son to slay the
father, literally or symbolically, in order to clear the way for his own ascendancy. And the father's
desire to gain immortality through a child (the one moment with a woman that does work [for
Ebert in the film] is when Dunson asks Tess to bear a son for him).”
This leads us to two really interesting questions that Ebert raises about the movie: the first is Tom
Dunson a tragic figure? Is he a tragic figure in the classical sense of the term? If so, he’d have to
have the following characteristics. Does he display arête or traits of excellence? Is he an
outstanding individual? Does he have hamartia or character flaws? And most importantly, does
he exhibit hubris, overweaning pride that motivates him to attempt to rise above his station in life?
Now if Dunson is a tragic figure in this sense what sort of a film narrative is Red River? Could the
god badman be a tragic hero?
Ebert also points out that Tim Dirks, another critic, has noticed that there’s parallels between Tom
Dunson and Matthew Garth’s conflict and standoff and Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian’s
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
conflict and standoff in Mutiny on the Bounty. Borden Chase’s screenplay for Red River does
“much of the older man's pride and the younger [man’s] need to prove himself.” So this is another
possible way to read the movie.
Also established but never really developed, and this has been quite a topic for discussion in the
last twenty years, is the rivalry between Matthew Garth and Cherry Valance. Groot, played by
Walter Brennan, predicts that there’s “gonna be trouble” between those two but the film never
develops this rivalry and never delivers the trouble, so these two characters are stranded in the
middle of what Ebert terms “a peculiar ambivalence.” Cherry has a really famous line, he says
when he’s handling Matt’s gun, you know, ““there are only two things more beautiful than a good
gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss watch?”
Now apparently when Hawks and his actors were blocking and rehearsing the scenes, they decided
to play the scenes as if the two men were closet homosexuals. Another thing to keep your eye on
when you’re watching Red River are the three scenes with Tess. Ebert claims that those three
scenes are the movie’s low points in part because of her prattle, in part they are the low points
because she’s all too obviously the deus ex machina the plot needs to avoid an unhappy ending.
He says, the final scene is the weakest: two men, he says, “act out a fierce psychological rivalry
for two hours, only to cave in instantly.”
When you watch the end of Red River, it will be interesting to see if the ending does or doesn’t
work for you. I’m looking forward to talking to you in the forum about Red River. Let’s take ‘em
to Missouri.
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
We’re going to start the course with a short movie called The Great Train Robbery. It was released
in 1903. They say that Hollywood grew up with the Western, or conversely the Western grew up
with Hollywood, so I thought The Great Train Robbery would be the place to start. Then we’re
going to skip ahead to 1939 and take a look at John Ford’s Stagecoach. I want to talk about the
Western in general before we look at Stagecoach and The Great Train Robbery because the
Western really is genre that’s quite complicated and has morphed throughout the twentieth century.
At the very beginning, the Western contained a number of art forms: for example, there were dime
novels, penny dreadfuls, comics, films, radio and television. It’s a form of American storytelling
or myth-making. The Westerns we’re used to seeing come out of the American Old West. Many
feature Native Americans, cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, soldiers, and, of course, the landscape of
the American West which is in effect a character in the Western. It was an extremely popular art
form in the ‘Teens and the Twenties. It was particularly popular in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and into the
60s. The heart of the Western really lies at the very heart of America itself.
So, let’s take a look at The Great Train Robbery. The Great Train Robbery was released in 1903.
It’s a short Western silent, and it was written, produced and directed by Edwin W. Porter who was
an Edison Studio’s cameraman. Great Train Robbery is considered to be really the beginnings of
the Western and a milestone in American filmmaking. Porter used a number of techniques that
were ground-breaking at the time: composite editing was one; on location shooting was another.
Up to this point, films had been shot in studios. Porter took the camera out to the train and out into
the country while making this particular film, and there was frequent camera movement as well.
The Great Train Robbery was really innovative for its time, really ahead of its competition. When
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
this film was actually being made and the negatives had been produced, they were sent to the
factories and the women would sit and hand-tint each individual frame—and it only cost a hundred
and fifty dollars, to give you an idea of what it cost to shoot a Western then.
If you look to your left, you can see the film poster which identifies it as an Edison film,
copyrighted in 1903. And in the middle of the poster there is a picture of a man who is shooting a
gun at the camera. I’ve got a larger copy of that photo—you should be able to see the gun pointing
at you and the man’s face. This is the last shot of the film, and for the time it was a really
controversial shot. Audiences were not making distinctions between reality and then the reality
that’s being presented on the screen as being different. Early audiences, if they saw a train coming
down the tracks towards them or towards the camera, would run out of the auditorium, because
they were afraid they were going to be run over by the train. In 1903, it was not surprising that
women were screaming and fainting when the man pointed his gun at them and a big puff of smoke
would come out of the muzzle. This was a film that was very controversial for its time, a lot of
ground-breaking work in this film. Upon its release, The Great Train Robbery became a massive
success. It became one of the first blockbusters in the film industry.
Genre conventions: revenge plot line, taming the frontier plotline, civilized order vs the lawless
frontier is another popular convention that you find working throughout the Western. Another
important convention in the Western, and it really frames the film narratives that we’ll be watching,
the movement in these films from East to West. It’s very, very important. When you’re working
with the movement from East to West, you’re looking at a transition from the Old to the New
World. America was a social experiment, so quite often you’ll find the Old World being
represented by European values, and Americans going forth, boldly creating a new country.
There’s an emphasis on egalitarianism in the Western, underpinned by the idea of man leaving a
corrupted civilization and going to a natural Paradise.
Iconography is important when you’re working with the Western: covered wagons, of course, and
teepees, certain guns, certain kinds of whips, knives, roll-your-owns. There’s different kinds of
hats that are definitely Western hats like Stetson Trail Bosses; boots, crosses, lariats, and saddles
are all identified belonging to the Hollywood West. Interior settings of saloons, hotels, jails, towns
MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN
RED RIVER (1948) – NOTES ON CATTLE AND COWBOYS
and streets are identifiably Western, and we’ll be talking about those as we go along. It’s important
to know how to look like a Western hero.
I mean, it’s immediately recognizable. For example, the picture, Human Stuff, does not
immediately identify itself as a Western title. We’re not looking a Cowboy Stuff, or Cowgirl Stuff
or even Cow Stuff. It’s Human Stuff. Even though Harry Carey, Sr., here is a major Western star,
he could be in some sort of a melodrama rather than something that is identifiably Western, but
we know that it’s going to be a Western, because he’s wearing his cowboy boots, and he’s got his
cowboy hat and neckerchief on.
There’s all sorts of dualities, and I’m just going to introduce three right now. We’ll be looking at
others as we go through the course. There’s the East/West duality or binary; a binary that runs
throughout many of these movies between Law and Order and Lawlessness; men and women also
tend to square off against each other. Women are generally associated with the East. A “real” man
out West settles his own affairs as he sees fit.
So let’s take a look at the Western—let’s take a look at this amazing construct, this amazing
product of American culture. We’re going to start in 1939. In 1939, it cost a lot more to make a
Western. Remember when we looked at The Great Train Robbery, we were looking at a hundred
and fifty dollars in terms of production costs and post-production to get the prints together, and
then they went off to the theatre. In 1939, it cost $392,000.00 to make a Western. The returns were
high. People paid to see Westerns. So, Stagecoach: the powerful story of nine strange people: it
was a Walter Wanger production. It was directed by John Ford. John Wayne wasn’t a big star.
And I’ll be glad to introduce you to Stagecoach in the next lecture.