RED RIVER (1948) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Howard Hawks
John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru,
Walter Brennan, Colleen Gray, John Ireland,
Noah Beery Jr., Hank Worden, Harry Carey Sr.,
Harry Carey Jr., Paul Fix, Mickey Kuhn
The great cattle-drive western starring John Wayne as a rancher whose spread covers about half of Texas, and Montgomery Clift as his adopted son, moving a herd of steers a thousand miles to Missouri (or is it Kansas?) It's one of Wayne's toughest performances, the one that proved to anybody who was paying attention that he could really act, and Clift, in his first movie, already commands the screen. You won't see anything in this that doesn't turn up in a lot of other westerns. You just won't see it done better, that's all. The film that closes Ben Johnson's movie house in "The Last Picture Show" is "Red River".
