It's a grand, sprawling tale of the civilizing of the west and of the love-hate relationship between the old and the new, but to call Red River one of the greatest Westerns of all time is to unfairly build up hopes for it that it can't meet. It's not consistent enough for such an honor. Instead of being a cohesive masterpiece, it's a series of brilliant scenes tied together with aimless meandering; its handful of wrong turns toward the end are nearly fatal, and its ending provokes the wrong kind of laughter. We should value it instead for those scenes during which John Wayne was never better in his career, Montgomery Clift demonstrated an exciting new talent, and director Howard Hawks, directing his first western, alternately perfected genre conventions and turned them on their heads.

Writer Borden Chase's Saturday Evening Post serial, an epic of the founding of the West, arrived onscreen under the firm hand of Hawks, one of the genre's—heck, any genre's—undisputed masters, with an unbelievably good cast: aside from Wayne and Clift, there's John Ireland as the lanky, dangerous gunfighter Cherry Valance; multiple Oscar winner Walter Brennan as Groot, Wayne's cantankerous conscience; and a gaggle of grizzled pros, from Harry Carey Junior and Senior to Noah Beery Jr. Wayne plays Tom Dunson, a hard man who builds a Texas cattle empire by taking land from its previous owners and killing anyone who opposes him; Clift plays Matthew Garth, Dunson's surrogate son and putative heir. Desperate for a market for his cattle, Dunson starts a seemingly impossible drive to Kansas, where he hopes to survive gangs of thieves and rustlers and sell at the only railroad depot he knows of. As the drive progresses, Dunson's hard but fair attitude turns pathological, as he decides to enforce the cowboys' contracts through violence if necessary. Clift comes to reject his surrogate father's blind totalitarianism, overthrows him, and marches the cattle into the future (a closer railroad depot that Dunson refuses to believe in). Wayne's old system, quick to violence and totalitarian in its methods, is supplanted by Clift's new system, which is humane, thoughtful, and more egalitarian.

Much of the film is a magnificent old-fashioned Western, stocked with grizzled galoots on horses, yodeling cowboys driving endless streams of cattle across picturesque countryside, and tough-talking interactions between tired and noble men of principle. The last third of the film, when Dunson has completed his descent into insanity and has turned into a sort of avenging monster, feels almost like a horror film. The bright daylight of the earlier scenes is diminished; the characters' fears are reflected in their surroundings, which suddenly are full of concealing trees, and the weather, which turns to fog and torrential rains. What other Western has characters stumbling around in the fog? Throughout, it's the individual scenes that jump out and stick in one's memory. There's the constant sizing-up, laden with tension—including sexual—between Matthew Garth (Clift) and Cherry Valance (John Ireland), culminating in the fondling of each other's guns and an explosive target-shooting exhibition. There's the justly famous, if a little hokey, beginning of the drive, with Wayne's "Take 'em to Missouri, Matt" and the dozens of close-ups of cowboys yelping and yahooing (used by Peter Bogdanovich to summarize the Old West in The Last Picture Show some 25 years later). There's the awesome majesty of the stampede and the crossing of the Red River (literalizing the biblical metaphors). And, of course, that staple of the Western: violence. Instead of drawn-out gunfights where people duck behind barrels and shoot it out, or stand, dusty and still, in the middle of Main Street for pregnant minutes before drawing, the violence here is vertiginously quick and brutal: shootouts are done in seconds, and before we have a chance to figure out exactly what happened, Dunson is standing and his victims are dying.

But then it shoots itself in the foot. Along with those great and memorable scenes are the bad and memorable ones, most of which come in the last third of the film, especially the climactic fight between Matt and Dunson, so awkwardly interrupted by Joanne Dru and the Hollywood convention that, as Hawks later put it, "Look, Wayne isn't going to die." Thematically, too, it loses its footing, starting with the important tension between Cherry and Matt. In following Dunson's orders without question, Cherry had emerged as a possible heir to Dunson's fortune, adding another layer—siblings fighting over an inheritance—to the veiled threats of physical violence (and the sexual tension that viewers may choose to credit). But then it vanishes: Matt turns on Dunson, and Cherry follows Matt without question, a decision at odds with what we know about him already. He, like most others in Matt's camp, is sure that Dunson will get his revenge, so why doesn't Cherry side with him in the first place? In Chase's story, Cherry does side with Dunson, a decision that makes more sense. But it still could have worked but for the complete disappearance of any tension at all between Matt and Cherry. Why aren't they struggling over leadership of the cattle drive in Dunson's absence? Why don't they fight over Joanne Dru? Instead, the film gives us awkward dialogue scenes in which Cherry and Groot try to explain Matt to her (and I wish they'd have allowed us to hear those explanations, since Matt remains an enigma throughout). Cherry's disappearance was the result of offscreen shenanigans: Joanne Dru was Hawks's girlfriend, and when Hawks discovered that she was fooling around with Ireland, he reportedly slashed both actors' screen time. As Chase recounted later, "I don't care if he's fooling around with the Virgin Mary, you've got a picture to make and the guy is good." It's a shame that Hawks let his personal problems with Ireland hamstring his film. And Dru's entire role is problematic. She appears late in the film and suddenly, in the space of two scenes, is the pivot point on which the entire film teeters. In Chase's story, Tess is a major character throughout; the screenwriters, having chosen instead to introduce her late in the film, attempt to equate her with Coleen Gray's striking single-scene performance in the prologue, but the comparisons are forced and Dru isn't as good as Gray was.

By the time Dru solves its epic struggle between two competing worldviews with a hearty scolding that has made audiences laugh or groan for almost 60 years (an ending that Chase dismissed as "garbage," despite the fact that the film earned him his only Oscar nomination), it's difficult to keep in mind the film's strong points. But let's not forget Hawks's signature depictions of masculine cameraderie, those stunning individual scenes, and the Oscar-worthy performances by John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, and Walter Brennan.

—July 15, 2007