tough cowboys and strong women

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. Ah yes, the old Hollywood formula. But what if it’s 1948, and you have Howard Hawks to produce and direct the movie, and John Wayne and Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru to light up the big screen, and Borden Chase and Charles Schnee to write a powerful screenplay, and ... since the story is about the first great cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail, let’s get a few thousand head of cattle to stir up the dust and challenge the cowboys, who aren’t boys at all but men, real men, tough men.

And let’s make the women strong and brave, and ready to face the hard life of the Wild West and the hard heads of the cowboys they love. Then let’s call it Red River, and make a classic that will take its place with Stagecoach and High Noon and Shane and Lonesome Dove and the very best examples of that great American invention, the Western.

And what if you play with the old formula, so that the film begins with boy loses girl? Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leaves a wagon train in 1851 to head south to the Red River and Texas to raise cattle, but he leaves behind his sweetheart, Fen (Coleen Gray), promising to send for her later. It’s an emotional, moving opening scene, and the words that Dunson and the young woman speak establish that we’re watching tough cowboys and the strong women they underestimate:

Fen: Please take me with you. I’m strong. I can stand anything you can.
Tom: It’s too much for a woman.
Fen: Too much for a woman? Put your arms around me, Tom. (They hug and kiss each other.) Hold me. Feel me in your arms. Do I feel weak, Tom? I don’t, do I? Oh, you’ll need me. You’ll need a woman. You need what a woman can give you to do what you have to do. Oh listen to me, Tom. Listen with your head and your heart too. The sun only shines half the time, Tom. The other half is night.
Tom: I’ve made up my mind.
Fen: Oh change your mind, Tom. Just once in your life change your mind.
Tom: I’ll send for ya. Will ya come?
Fen: Of course I’ll come. But you’re wrong.

And he is wrong. Believing that "It’s too much for a woman," Tom Dunson loses his love. After Dunson leaves, Commanches attack the wagon train and Fen is killed. So boy loses girl, forever. To fill the void, Dunson devotes his life to raising cattle in Texas. The film jumps 15 years ahead, to a time when he has a great herd but there’s no cash market for them in post-Civil War Texas. His only hope is to drive the cattle a thousand miles north, to the railroad in Missouri.

So begins the great cattle drive, as Dunson tells his adopted son, Matt (Montgomery Clift in his first film), to "take ‘em to Missouri" and we have the famous early morning "yee-hah" scene, with all the cowboys waving their hats in the air and yelling to cue the cattle and begin the great adventure. In the long middle scenes of Red River, it’s all about brave cowboys and lots of beef on the hoof and stampedes and hardship, and it’s extremely romantic in its way.

And yet the romance of the heart needs a woman, so eventually Tess Millay (Joanne Dru in her second film) arrives in the film as part of a wagon train on its way from New Orleans to Nevada to set up a gambling establishment. When this band of gamblers and prostitutes is attacked by Indians, Matt and three other men ride up to help the people in the circled wagons.

Matt, naturally, finds himself next to Tess Millay, a pretty young woman who is not a prostitute, although he doesn’t know that. Tess is fighting alongside the men, firing at the attacking Indians, as the protective cowboy tells her to stay down. She tells Matt, "What are you so mad about? I asked you why you’re angry. Is it because - because some of your men might get hurt, killed maybe?" In mid-sentence she is struck in the shoulder by an arrow. She keeps talking and faints in his arms, but not before slapping his face for the attitude he shows toward her.

The wagon train manages to fight off the Indians and Matt returns to Tess to remove the arrow from her shoulder and suck out the poison—an amazingly intimate, almost erotic, kind of first date for these two. She keeps up her interrogation, asking him if he’s angry about helping a bunch of women, and of course she’s angry because he assumes that she’s one of the prositutes. But there’s no mistaking the immediate physical attraction between Matt and Tess. So boy meets girl, even if it’s not the boy who lost another girl at the beginning of the film, and Tess may be even stronger than Tom Dunson’s sweetheart, Fen.

The dialogue between these two crackles as they discuss Tom Dunson. (Matt and the cowboys have taken the herd from the tyrannical Dunson, in the Mutiny on the Bounty Meets the Chisholm Trail part of the film.)

Tess: Why does he think that way?
Matt: Because he got to a place where, see, he’d taken empty land used for nothin’, made it the biggest ranch in the state of Texas. Fought to keep it...one bull and one cow, that’s all he started with...After he’d done all that, gotten what he’d been after for so long, it wasn’t worth anything...So he started this drive. Everybody said, ‘you can’t make it. You’ll never get there.’ He was the only one believed we could. He had to believe it. So he started thinking one way, his way. He told men what to do and made ‘em do it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. He started ‘em for Missouri and all he knew was he had to get there. I took his herd away from him.
Tess: You love him, don’t you? He must love you. That wouldn’t be hard. (She kisses Matt on the lips.) Did you like that?
Matt: I’ve always been kind of slow in making up my mind.
Tess: Maybe I can help. (They kiss again.)
Matt: I don’t need any more help but will you do that again? (They kiss again.)

Once she enters the film, Tess Millay is the equal of any of the men. She has another sensual moment with Matt where she runs her fingers lightly over his face and his lips as they talk, and you can just imagine the butter melting again in all the boxes of popcorn in the theatre.

Tess has a scene later with Tom Dunson. She will do anything to keep Dunson from killing the mutinous Matt, whether it means marrying Dunson or shooting him (she has a gun hidden in her arm sling) or simply begging. At the end of the film, when the cowboys and cattle have reached the end of the drive and it’s time to celebrate, naturally Matt waits for Dunson to ride into town, and because it’s John Wayne you know there’s going to be a fist fight, and a good one. But even during the fight Tess Millay has her role to play, scolding the two men and shaming them.

Tess: Stop it. Stop it. Stop makin’ a holy...Stop it I said. I’m mad, good and mad. And who wouldn’t be. (To Dunson) You Dunson, pretendin’ you’re gonna kill him. Why, it’s the last thing in the world you...(Dunson moves.) Stay still. I’m mad I told ya. (To Matt) And you Matthew Garth, gettin’ your face all beat up and all bloody. You oughta see how, you oughta see how silly you look, like, like somethin’ the cat dragged - STAY STILL - What a fool I’ve been, expectin’ trouble for days when, when anybody with half a mind would know you two love each other. (To Dunson) It took somebody else to shoot ya. He wouldn’t do it. Are ya hurt?
Dunson: No, just nicked the...
Tess: Then stay still. No, don’t stay still. I changed my mind. Go ahead. Beat each other crazy. Maybe it will put the sense in both of ya. Go ahead. Go on. Do it! (After angrily thrusting her gun into the stomach of a cowhand/bystander, she marches off, disgusted by both of them.)

The next line belongs to Tom Dunson, and it’s a winner: "You’d better marry that girl, Matt." To which Matt replies, "Yeah, I think I...Hey, when are you gonna stop telling people what to do?" Cue the music, cue the cattle, cue the credits, cue the reviewers, and cue the generations of movie fans who have come to love all 125 minutes of this classic, with its beautiful black and white cinematography, its young Montgomery Clift, its feisty Joanne Dru, and an often underrated actor, the Duke, in one of his finest roles.