by Scott Eyman
The budget was set at $1.75 million, funded by a consortium of bank and private loans, with Hawks earning $125,000 and 57 percent of the profits and Feldman earning 24 percent of the profits. United Artists would take its distribution off the top, followed by the investors and the banks. Hawks’s and Feldman’s Monterey Productions was last in line.
A young actress named Coleen Gray was under contract to Fox and was interested in the crucial part of Fen, the woman who offers Tom Dunson her loyalty and her body but is rejected and dies offscreen, thereby sealing Dunson’s isolation.
“I knew nothing about Hawks or Red River or anything else, except that he was a famous, respected director,” remembered Gray. “He was a very nice man; soft-spoken and intelligent, which is a joy. Supposedly, they had tested three hundred people for Fen, so I came in late in the game, but I didn’t know about any of it. Hawks told me, ‘If you can get your voice down a couple of octaves, we’ll test you.’ This was on a Thursday or Friday, and he told me to go out in the hills and scream until I broke my voice.
“I said, ‘Yes sir,’ but I thought, ‘Over my dead body.’ I was a singer, and singers don’t do anything to ruin their voices. But Hawks liked Lauren Bacall and Joanne Dru, those girls with low growls. I left and did not go out and scream. But when I did the test, I lowered my voice the best that I could. And apparently that was good enough.”
Hawks chose Gray for the part, but there was a problem—Fox hadn’t cleared her to make the test. Rod Amateau, Gray’s husband, said, “When in doubt, go to the top.” So Gray made an appointment with Darryl Zanuck. “I had never met him, but I knew two things: he was from Nebraska and he was a womanizer. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do if he made a move at me.
“I went to his office and he shook hands and took me to his desk. I said, ‘I’m so glad to meet you. I’m from Nebraska—from Staplehurst, and you’re from Wahoo.’ And I think if he had any ideas, that set him back on his haunches. At any rate, he didn’t approach me. I was relieved, but also a little disappointed because I thought that meant he didn’t think I was sexy.
“I told Zanuck that Hawks’s picture was a grand opportunity and Fox wasn’t doing anything with me at the moment. And he said, ‘If Howard will call and ask for you, we’ll see.’ ”
Gray called Hawks, Hawks called Zanuck, Zanuck said yes. And, as Gray remembered it, “I earned the undying enmity of the lower echelon of Fox executives, because I’d gone over their heads.”
By the first week of September 1946, Gray joined the company on location in Elgin, Arizona, where filming began on a seventy-six-day schedule. But it rained in Elgin. “We sat around in our tents drumming our fingers and being restless,” remembered Gray, who ended up reshooting her scene back at the Goldwyn studio months later.
“Fox had sent me to the Actor’s Lab in Los Angeles to study the Method, and I was thinking about the part. I sat in the rainy tent with paper and pencil and decided to write out what I thought Fen had been like in her life up to the point we meet her in the film. That occupied some time and thought. And then I marched through the rain with my umbrella to Mr. Hawks’s tent, and he came to the door and I explained to him what I had done.
“ ‘Would you please read this?’ I asked him. ‘I want to know if I’m on the right track.’ He took it very quietly and solemnly and closed the door. And that was that. The next day it was sunny and we hadn’t shot the scene yet. I asked Hawks about the pages I’d given him and asked him if I was on the right track. ‘Yes, you are,’ he said and we never discussed it further. He must have gotten a chuckle out of it, but he always treated me with respect. His direction to me just before we shot the scene was ‘Be a woman.’ ”
The company was on location into early November before heading back to Hollywood, while Arthur Rosson stayed behind in Arizona, directing a second unit that put together the stampede sequence.
Gray found Wayne to be “very quiet, very polite, rather shy. He knew his lines and he was professional. It was my first movie, so I was in no position to judge anybody else. I didn’t say anything to him because I was terrified. I was a young girl from Nebraska, and in all my career in Hollywood I was never able to overcome a certain basic shyness about not speaking unless you’re spoken to. So he didn’t talk and I didn’t talk. We’d stand there kicking our toes in the sand. He did not seem to be a social person.”
Hawks didn’t shoot a lot of takes, and on Gray’s first close-up of her big scene, he called “Print!” whereupon she piped up with “I can do it better.” Hawks said okay, and Gray did it again. Hawks again said “Print!” and that’s the one in the film.
A young actor named William Self joined the company and noticed the improvisatory nature of Hawks’s method. “Something would catch his eye on the first take, and he’d throw things out, make some dialogue changes, and Wayne would do it easily. He wouldn’t always do that—it depended on his level of comfort with a director. But he and Hawks were remarkable together—they were nimble and confident of each other.”
But not always. Wayne had become extremely sensitive about his image, and he would complain in later years that Hawks “wanted to make me a big, blustering coward. ‘You’ll win an Academy Award,’ he said. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. Instead I played it as a strong man who was scared. After all, as a man you can be scared, but you can’t be a coward.”
Which is as succinct a summation of the John Wayne character as there is.
Hawks had a knack for choosing relatively inexperienced actors and matching them up with champions who forced the younger talents to raise the level of their game. He did it with Lauren Bacall on To Have and Have Not, with Dorothy Malone on The Big Sleep, and with Montgomery Clift on Red River, after first trying to get Jack Buetel, the young actor who had starred in The Outlaw. But Howard Hughes wouldn’t loan out Buetel, so Hawks settled on the young actor he had seen on Broadway in You Touched Me.
Clift was interested but hesitant—he wasn’t sure he could handle the brutal fight with Wayne at the end of the picture. “You’re an actor, aren’t you?” asked Hawks. Swayed by that argument—and the $60,000 salary—Clift took the job.
Wayne wasn’t at all sure Clift was the right choice. When he and Clift met in Hawks’s office, Clift avoided looking him in the eye, which put Wayne off. He was also alarmed about the physical disparity between them—Clift was about six inches shorter than Wayne.
“Howard, do you think we can get anything going between that kid and myself?” he asked Hawks with a perceptible concern.
“I think you can,” said the phlegmatic Hawks. After shooting a couple of scenes with Clift, Wayne told Hawks, “You’re right. He can hold his own, anyway, but I don’t think we can make a fight.”
A mutual doubt was about all that Wayne and Clift shared. While the company waited for the rain to stop in Arizona, Wayne took Clift and Hawks’s son David on a bear-hunting trip. “We never saw any bear, but we did get lost,” remembered David Hawks. “The guide admitted that he didn’t know the way back. So John Wayne took charge, and he really and truly led us back. One horse fell, lost its footing, and we had to shoot it.” Clift seems to have been appalled by the entire adventure, writing a friend, “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?”
They were two very different kinds of actors from two different generations, and Hawks had to figure out a middle ground that would accommodate them. Clift was introspective, a Method actor, and Wayne was purely instinctive.
“Wayne never read a script that I had,” said Hawks. “He’d say, ‘What am I supposed to do in this?’ and I’d say, ‘You’re supposed to give the impression of this and that.’ And he’d say ‘OK.’ He’d never learn lines before I talked to him, because he said that threw him off. He could memorize two pages of dialogue in three or four minutes, and then he just goes and does it. He’s the easiest person I ever worked with because he doesn’t discuss it and try to fine-tune it; he just goes and does it without squ
awking.”
Clift would tell a friend that Wayne and Hawks “laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.”
Without knowing it, the actors were replicating the generational difference between Matthew Garth and Tom Dunson. Hawks’s film was about the passing of a torch from autocratic authority to a more humanistic style—it’s really Hawks’s version of a theme Ford would make his own in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
The script wasn’t set, the budget kept rising, but Clift just kept getting better, matching Wayne scene for scene. “Mr. Hawks took [Clift] aside and pointed out [stuntman, later actor] Richard Farnsworth,” remembered Danny Sands, another stuntman on the picture. “ ‘Montgomery, you walk along behind him and watch him carefully. If he scratches his butt, you scratch yours. He’s a real cowboy.’ And he did, by God. Farnsworth took him and tutored him and, damn, he made a cowboy out of a hell of an actor.”
But Clift’s Method affectations irritated Wayne, as did his awkwardness with guns. One day he barked at the young actor, “Christ, my goddamn kid can do it, for Christ’s sake and he’s 11 years old. You can’t do it? Do it!”
The trick to achieving competence at quick draws and twirls is to practice while kneeling on a bed. You’ll drop the gun three hundred times, but you won’t have to bend over three hundred times, which makes all the difference. Clift got up to speed very quickly, and even Wayne was eventually impressed with his dexterity.
“Monty drove him nuts,” remembered Harry Carey Jr., who worked on the picture for several weeks. “He didn’t like Monty as an actor. Years later, I said that I thought Monty was very effective in Red River, and Duke said, ‘He was a pain in the ass.’ But he didn’t deny that he was effective.”
Hawks’s gift for staging was never more evident than in the final fight. “Wayne was aware that there was a great physical disparity between him and Clift,” said William Self. “Wayne was a giant brute and, believe me, he could have killed Clift with one punch. Clift was very modestly built. The fact that Hawks could make those two fighting look at all realistic was remarkable.”
When Clift saw the completed picture, he hated it. He felt the script had been watered down, and like a great many people ever since, he hated the ending, “because Joanne Dru settles it and it makes the showdown between me and John Wayne a farce.”
With the unmotivated “you boys quit fighting” ending, Hawks shyed away from the ultimate implications of Dunson’s character, even though some ardent auteurists defend it—as if an Old Testament patriarch like Dunson is suddenly going to see the error of his ways and hand everything over to a New Testament character like Matt. “It’s true that Howard got up to that point without being ready for it,” admitted Wayne. “Maybe the fact that it was right at the end of the picture made it more obvious.”
By the time Red River was finished, it was a month over schedule and far over budget. Monterey Productions had to borrow an additional $200,000, then another $111,000, then still more—a whopping $639,000 overage in all. The film ended up costing $2.8 million, and the overage wiped out the profits that Hawks and Charles Feldman were counting on.
But Hawks hadn’t frittered away all that extra time and money. He used it to make an authentic epic—the size of the characters matches the size of their task: to drive a herd of longhorn cattle one thousand miles from Texas to Missouri. Hawks adopted an appropriately expansive, panoramic style that stops short of either the pompous or elegiac.
Ford had used Wayne as a sort of overgrown country boy—his characters in Stagecoach, The Long Voyage Home, and even They Were Expendable are manifestly decent men, almost submissive until they’re pushed too far. When Hawks gave Wayne the part of Tom Dunson, he gave him the missing arrow in his acting quiver—the freedom to play a domineering, wrongheaded son of a bitch. For the rest of his career, Wayne would shift between these two characters and, in definitive performances, combine them.
From the beginning, Dunson is unyielding. Although the luscious Fen tells him in unmistakable terms that “The sun only shines half the time; the other half is night,” Dunson refuses to take her with him. He promises to send for her, and she promises to come, despite the fact that “you’re wrong.”
When Dunson finds out that she has been killed, he barely flinches. It’s typical of the single-minded nature of a man who doesn’t need a backstory. As the critic Dave Kehr wrote, “Here was a man who could get you through the worst the world had to offer. Here was a man who could kill you without a second thought.”
Like any great actor, Wayne communicates with his body. During the scene when he tells Matt that he’s going to kill him, Dunson’s posture contradicts his words—he’s leaning against his horse; the relaxed slant of his body belying the rigor of the threat. Dunson is close to being played out, but not so much that Matt or the others can relax. Dunson means to do what he says, and, as ragged as he is, he just might be able to do it. Contrasting with Wayne’s indomitable Dunson is the tensile strength of Clift’s Matthew Garth—a wiry watcher.
For the first time, Wayne plays an implacable force, and he’s completely believable. Red River begins the transition of John Wayne from man to mountain. That the movie is about the great stakes involved in the tide of empire makes the character’s ruthlessness viable.
Tom Dunson is Wayne’s first comprehensive portrayal of the deeply ambivalent core of American manhood. Dunson embodies the allure of the authoritarian—the possibility of violence, the shying away from women and home—what Jonathan Lethem called “the dark pleasure of soured romanticism—all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means to be a man in America.”
Red River was more than two years old by the time it was released late in 1948, after a frantic legal tussle between Howard Hughes and Hawks over what Hughes felt were untoward similarities between Red River and Hughes’s bizarre The Outlaw. Hughes’s ire stemmed from the climax, in which Dunson takes a series of shots at Matt that are meant to goad him into fighting, with one bullet creasing his cheek.
Hughes felt the entire scene was stolen from the end of The Outlaw, where Doc Holliday tries to force Billy the Kid to draw by nicking his earlobes. (Hawks had started directing The Outlaw in 1943 before walking off/getting fired.) Hughes wanted the entire four-minute confrontation taken out, an absurd demand, but one that came only a week or two before September 1, 1948, when the film was scheduled to open in 350 theaters in Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma, where Wayne was a particularly potent box office draw. Hughes was threatening an injunction that could tie up the film for months.
“He’s serious, Eddie,” said Hughes’s attorney Loyd Wright to Edward Small, who was a major investor in the film. “I tell you Howard’s serious. He means it.”
Under ordinary circumstances, this sort of problem could have been negotiated, but Small and the rest of the investors were loath to endure any more delay in getting their money back. Small had worked with Hughes before and knew that “from his viewpoint, procrastination was to be employed to gain his ends.”
Small had a meeting with Hughes in a projection room as they ran and reran the sequence. Hughes refused to alter his demand to remove the sequence, which would have left the picture with an abrupt cut and Montgomery Clift with an unexplained wound on his face. Finally, Small, Hawks, and Hughes had a meeting at one of Hughes’s aircraft plants near Inglewood.
The conversation began in rancor, then got worse. “Both men were tall and lean, and I felt like the referee between two animated redwood trees,” remembered Small. Finally, Small suggested that Hughes edit the sequence to suggest what Hawks, Feldman, and Small should do. Hughes made a few cuts, eliminating about twenty-four seconds, including a shot where Dunson’s bullet creases Matt’s cheek. Also removed were nine words of Wayne’s dialogue: “Draw. Go on, draw. Well, then, I
’ll make you.” As Small realized, “If I had made the same infinitesimal alterations, he probably wouldn’t have accepted them.”
The prints for Red River had already been manufactured, so editors fanned out across the Southwest to insert the revised sequence in the prints that had already been shipped to the exchanges. (Since the original negative remained untouched, the face-creasing shot has remained in the film as far as posterity is concerned.)
Critics thought that Wayne’s performance was remarkable; the trades praised both the picture (“a milestone in western film production,” said The Hollywood Reporter) and Wayne. Even Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said that “this consistently able portrayer of two-fisted, two-gunned men surpasses himself in this picture.”
Wayne always believed the film was crucial in his career. As he put it, “Stagecoach established me as a star; Red River established me as an actor.”
While Red River slowly wound its way toward release, in the summer of 1947 Wayne trooped off to Monument Valley to make John Ford’s Fort Apache. The writer and artist Stephen Longstreet was on the location for a week and was startled to hear good jazz playing on the Monument Valley PA system. John Huston, a classmate of Longstreet’s in the 1920s—“John was already a lanky oddball,” Longstreet remembered—visited the set, and Huston and Ford fell into a conversation about Joyce’s Dubliners, with Ford quoting lines from memory.
Longstreet found Ford “a surly bastard, but I think it began as an act to hide behind and it became a habit. Ford had a love/hate affair with the universe. Inside he was a mushy romantic. Read his films—the beauty of his camera setups. But the world didn’t live up to [his] idea of what it was going to be. . . . Ford was the great director of his era, but sour about the lost hopes of the world.”
