Red River

Thursday, January 31, 2008

I think I can count myself as a Howard Hawks fan. He makes movies that are essentially just entertainment, but his craft and visual style are so brilliant that the films become art. I can see why John Carpenter is such a big fan, they share this similar sensibility. Hawks I think is a little more skilled with his actors/writing/characters/etc. (I like Carpenter more, though... he's more subversive, he's sly in his social commentary, and most importantly he knows how to make a great horror film).

Well, when I credit the character work in the Hawks films I've seen, it's not exactly that he creates works of unparalleled empathy and insight to the human spirit... he just knows good dialogue, and how to get his actors to make it snappy and seem like god damned movie stars. When it's done this well, I love that kind of shit.

Well any way, I'm watching Red River, which is a late 40's John Wayne western that Hawks did. And I'm realizing that not only is this film as entertaining as his best stuff, but the story, characters and themes are a lot more complex. This is great. This could be a masterpiece. It has his great sense of fun and humor, it's got his great adventure. But it also has multi-faceted character relationships, and it's a genuinely dark journey into madness and obsession. It's like a cross between Hawks's El Dorado and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I am loving this fucker.

Which is why it's pretty damned heartbreaking that it flies off the rails on the last 30 minutes or so. To paraphrase Charlie Wilson, Hawks fucked up the endgame.

If you've seen a few Hawks movies, you know that there is this sort of Hawksian female lead character type in a lot of them. The women are these smart, sassy, willful, quick-witted types who tend to spew awesome one-liners at the male lead to throw him off his game/as foreplay. This has worked well in, I think, all the other Hawks movies I saw.

Red River, for it's first 100 minutes or so, is almost entirely about men. There is one female character at the very beginning, and she has one brief scene and then dies off screen.

Then, in this last act of the movie, almost at random we are introduced to one of those Hawksian women, who talks fast, wittily and shamelessly flirts with Montgomery Clift's character... right in the middle of a deadly Indian attack where everyone is fighting for their lives. She is, in fact, so caught up in her banter that she scarcely notices when she gets shot through the shoulder with a fucking arrow. Instead of, you know, screaming in pain or fainting, she just continues on with the blather. This scene is so out of place that the effect is surreal.

The rest of the film becomes a weird tug of rope between the darker themes and this weird, lighthearted, sassy comedy and unfortunately the bullshit wins. The movie builds to what we expect to be a dark, intense fight between two main characters, and then that's all more or less dismissed with a joke and then the woman acts all sassy and then everyone forgives each other. Already that's like "what the fuck?" but even weirder is that John Wayne coldbloodedly kills somebody right before the ending, but then the movie immediately forgets that and has this silly, happy finale.

I can't wrap my brain around any of this. Did Hawks not realize how dark the rest of the film was? Did he not think audiences would accept a darker ending? Or maybe was this some fucking brilliant avant garde thing where we follow John Wayne's madness and obsession so deep that the movie itself descends into lunacy? Maybe the surrealism was intentional.

(It's not.)

Fuck, man. This was like an inch shy of being a great film.

Final note: Despite hearing that Clash song a million times, I was completely unfamiliar with this Montgomery Clift fellow until now. I will have to check some more of his films out.