Howard Hawks' Red River
John Wayne moved to the big time with this movie, Howard Hawks' Red River. Wayne was a star before this time, having appeared in a number of John Ford films (Stagecoach), as well as dozens and dozens of crappy B-Westerns. But this 1948 movie catapulted him to true stardom, and forever cemented his image as a tough and stubborn cowboy. It was also the movie which inspired Ford to comment that "I didn't know the big son of a bitch could act!"
This Western story is somewhat unusual because it isn't really about action; not about some shootout between bandits and Indians and what have you, but about a bunch of guys moving cattle (of course, being the Old West, there's still plenty of action). Wayne's character, for fourteen years, pours his life and money into raising a huge herd of cattle, with the dream of both owning all this land and animal, and of helping the people of his area get meat on the table. But he turns out to be broke after those fourteen years, having no mind for finances, so he decides to hire some men to lead the cattle thousands of miles from Texas to Missouri.
The cattle drive is led by Wayne, Montgomery Clift, and Walter Brennan. Brennan has always been Wayne's right-hand man, and Clift is Wayne's adopted son; at the beginning of the film, Wayne and Brennan find the dazed kid, an escapee from an Indian attack. The kid has a young bull calf with him, and Wayne uses it and the cow that he has as the beginnings of his herd, the Red River D. The tension simmers slightly right at the beginning, when the kid protests over Wayne's branding of his own initial on both his animal and that of the kid's, but Wayne says that he has to earn that right to have his own initial alongside Wayne's. Later on, when the kid grows up to be a man (played by Clift), things get worse.
During the cattle drive, Wayne grows to be such a tyrant. He told the potential assistants to the drive that if you join up, you have to go all the way; you can't quit, and Wayne takes that belief quite literally, as he actually kills a number of people who have had enough of his difficult regime ("There's quitters to be buried."). It's one thing if Wayne kills intruders, like a representative of a Mexican landowner who tries to kick Wayne off the property, but, once Wayne shoots down men of his own, some of the others, including Clift, feel that Wayne needs to be deposed.
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