Critics reviews

Red River may have the most widely disliked ending of any major canonical film... Do I agree? I do not. I love it. Where others see a crude deus ex dame, I see a woman restoring order. After all, Dunson should have taken a woman's advice from the beginning.

...Red River's chuckwagon full of cowhand archetypes, magisterial wilderness, and Oedipal conflict is studded with modern inflection and attitude: Clift's bashful ironic-erotic shadings; Wayne's notably self-aware take on a figure who is part Lear, part Odysseus, part purebred mule-stubborn Texas sonovabitch; Joanne Dru's no-bullshit interlocutor/love-interest who establishes her Hawksian bona fides by taking an arrow in the shoulder as nonchalantly as one of the boys.

The psychology behind the rebellion is expertly built and realized by Hawks, posing the physicality of the landscape and nature of the enterprise as further elements in a combustible assemblage of vocation and virility.

The abrupt, happily-ever-after conclusion of the film admittedly feels a bit false, but it also provides an unexpected surge of emotion, which is more cathartic than your standard restoration of order allows for. It's a thoroughly Hawksian ending, in other words, which is arguably much more valuable than mere plausibility.

Many westerns have been self-consciously conceived on an epic scale, but Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), in its deepest channels, actually feels like an ancient epic. It is measured in long breaths and offers up scenes eroded to their fundamentals... It is an epic made by a director constitutionally averse to grandiosity and inclined more toward unsentimental comedy than soul-stirring melodrama.

Just as Humphrey Bogart interrogated his screen persona in the same year's TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, RED RIVER afforded John Wayne a rare opportunity to chip away at his own iconic veneer and expose the psychotic self-righteousness that was a typical undercurrent in his roles.

This is the strength of genre: the variations and nuances an informed genre piece contains produce the small fragment, the subset, that reverberates through the larger set of the film, the oeuvre, and the genre. This is what Hawks does extremely well, and Red River is one of his best examples.

In the films of more formalist directors such as Fritz Lang or even Ford, the fates of characters seem determined by some larger mechanism. In Hawks's films--and never more clearly than in Red River--it's the characters who shape the world around them. Repeatedly setting Wayne's powerful figure against an almost featureless landscape, Hawks creates a strong tension between the two, making visible the film's overriding theme: the struggle of individuals to seize the land... and to master it.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks's epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle... the film is only superficially a study in the ethics of command; its real subject lies in the deeper bonds of friendship and mutual respect.

Hawks's achievement of moderate toughness in Red River, using Clift's delicate languor and Wayne's claylike acting, is remarkable. As usual, he steers Clift through a series of cornball fetishes (like the Barney Google Ozark hat and the trick handling of same) and graceful, semicollegiate business: stances and kneelings and snake-quick gunmanship.