In 1851, Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and his sidekick Groot (Walter Brennan) break from a wagon train moving through northern Texas when Dunson decides the state would be a good place to start his own herd. “It’s good land, good grass for beef, so I’m goin’ south where it is.” Dunson says goodbye to his sweetheart (Coleen Gray), giving her a bracelet and promising to send for her later.

The men reach the Red River, but smoke on the horizon tells them that the wagon train has been attacked. Bunkering down for the night, the men fend off a Comanche raiding party, but Dunson finds his bracelet on one of the Indians. The next morning, they come across the sole survivor of the wagon train, a whippersnapper wandering with his cow. Dunson takes the boy under his wing.

Fourteen years later – with the young Matt Garth now played by Montgomery Clift (in his film debut) – Dunson’s brand covers 10,000 cattle, but none of them are “worth a plug three cent piece” in Texas, after the Civil War has taken money out of the South. Dunson decides to drive the herd one thousand miles to market in Missouri.

Determined to succeed at all costs, Dunson grows tyrannical, almost shooting a man for accidentally starting a stampede, then ordering a deserter hung. Matt stands up to his surrogate father and leads a mutiny. With Dunson shot in the hand and abandoned, Matt takes over the herd and decides to drive them to Kansas instead. Dunson calls the kid “soft-hearted” for letting him live, and promises to catch up with them, and kill him when he does.

Directed by Howard Hawks, from a screenplay adapted by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee from Chase’s novel The Chisholm Trail, Red River was the first of five collaborations between Hawks and John Wayne. Shot in 1946, its release was held up two years while the independent company Hawks had formed with talent agent Charles Feldman – Monterey Productions – was sold off in order to cover budget overruns of $1 million.

The film is a parable for the limitless opportunity of America, and its dark side. While Dunson proudly brands his “Red River D”signature onto his first head of cattle early in the film, he expresses no reservations about stealing land from a distant Mexican don, by telling deputies, “He probably stole it from the Indians.” Matt’s attempt to become his own man and accomplish a great enterprise of his own conflicts with Dunson, who seems willing to make any sacrifice to succeed.

John Ford, who directed Wayne in Stagecoach among countless other westerns, is said to have told someone after seeing him in this movie, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act!” The movie starts out like your typical Duke oater, but gets much more complex once the mutiny occurs. Wayne is indeed giving a real performance here, a Captain Bligh on the plains, not just playing himself.

Red River is a beautiful black and white film. With co-director Arthur Rosson, Hawks excels at vividly creating mood on the plains. There’s nervousness in the scenes where Wayne and Brennan await the Comanches, and later, when the mutineers fear that every sound in the dark could be Dunson creeping in to kill them. The musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin is thunderous, some of the greatest ever composed for a western.

What prevents the movie from being as great as The Wild Bunch or The Outlaw Josey Wales for me is an ill advised romantic liason for Montgomery Clift introduced more than 2/3’s of the way through the story. The movie goes off track here, then it derails when the woman (Joanne Dru) starts monologing in the film’s closing minute, telegraphing the film’s message for the people in the cheap seats.

In fact, the women in the film are so shrill and annoying, anyone who proclaims this the “greatest western of all time” hasn’t seen enough of them. When Red River sticks to the conflict between young man and older man, or the exhilaration of making your living on the back of a horse, it’s great.

The superior script gives Brennan and his “store teeth” a lot of wonderful dialogue, while Harry Carey, playing a cattle rancher, personifies the manifest destiny of the film when he says, “There’s three times in a man’s life when he has the right to yell at the moon. When he marries, when his children come, and … and when he finishes a job he had to be crazy to start.” Great stuff.