Episode 149 – Howard Hawks’s Red River

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:19:49 — 36.8MB)

This time on the podcast, Scott is joined by David Blakeslee and Sean Hutchinson to discuss Howard Hawks’s 1948 film, Red River.

About the film:

No matter what genre he worked in, Howard Hawks played by his own rules, and never was this more evident than in his first western, the rowdy and whip-smart Red River. In it, John Wayne found one of his greatest roles, as an embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher whose tensions with his independent-minded adopted son—played by Montgomery Clift in a breakout performance—reach epic proportions during a cattle drive to Missouri. The film is based on a novel that dramatizes the real-life late nineteenth-century expeditions along the Chisholm Trail, but Hawks is less interested in historical accuracy than in tweaking the codes of masculinity that propel the myths of the American West. The unerringly macho Wayne and the neurotic, boyish Clift make for an improbably perfect pair, held aloft by a quick-witted, multilayered screenplay and Hawks’s formidable direction.

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Buy The Film On Amazon:

Peter Bogdanovich on John Wayne in Red River:

Episode Links:

• Red River (1948) – The Criterion Collection
• Red River: The Longest Drive – The Criterion Collection
• Red River (1948) – IMDb
• Red River (1948 film) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Rail of Tomorrow: Strike Anywhere
• Red River – Roger Ebert
• Howard Hawks’s Terrifying Instincts – The New Yorker
• ‘Red River’ Hits Criterion: Parsing the Different Forms of Howard Hawks’s Classic Western
• Scott Reviews Howard Hawks’ Red River [Masters of Cinema Blu-ray Review]
• Jabberwock: A rambling tribute to Red River
• Red River gets fresh appreciation – Chicago Tribune

Episode Credits:

• Scott Nye (Twitter / Battleship Pretension)
• David Blakeslee (Twitter / Criterion Reflections)
• Sean Hutchinson (Twitter / Latino Review / Mental Floss)

Next time on the podcast: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal

Music for this episode is from Dimitri Tiomkin’s work in Red River and Jimmie Rodgers’s song “Red River Valley.