Red River

John Wayne -- showing off a darker side to his screen persona than we'd previously seen -- portrays Thomas Dunson, a frontiersman who, with his longtime partner Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan), leaves abandons a westbound wagon train in 1851 to make his future as a rancher in Texas. Doing so forces ...more

In his first collaboration with John Wayne, Howard Hawks examines capitalism and dueling masculinities in the rousing context of a Western cattle drive. A Mutiny on the Bounty for Big Sky country, Red River features a challenge between Montgomery Clift's Matthew Garth and Wayne's Tom Dunson that becomes a contest between new and old models of Western manhood -- a clash enhanced by the different performance styles of ambiguous, Method-acting, proto-rebel Clift and stolidly imposing star Wayne. ...more