Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

sol- Disenchanted by his stubbornness during a grueling cattle drive, an orphan stands up to the rancher who raised him as his own in this iconic western starring Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. While contemporary film scholars often obsess over the homosexual subtext as Clift and co-star John Ireland compare guns ("maybe you'd like to see mine?"), the heart and soul of the film is the surrogate father/son chemistry between Wayne and Clift, how obsessed Wayne is with land, and how betrayed he feels. All of Wayne's innermost insecurities come out well in a speech about how he "can't live forever", wanting a son as someone to pass his hard-earned land/cattle on to. Usually a solid rock of machismo, Wayne is at his most heartfelt, and viewed for a third time, his performance comes across as magnificent. Not so impressive is Dimitri Tiomkin's score. It is atmospheric but also melodramatic at all the wrong times, especially during Wayne and Clift's shoot-out halfway in. Wayne's descent into sleep deprived madness also disappoints as we are told more than shown how he is losing his grip on reality. The film additionally has some pacing issues, but overall, it is engaging and stands up very well to repeat viewings with a tangible human drama element constantly elevating it above genre clichés. There are several fun moments of comic relief too, such as how one man takes an incredibly long time warming up to signing his name, only to then write an X on the document.

cricket crockett . . . in a misguided attempt to add a couple hundred million individual writing styles to the hard-enough-to-read printed page. If there's anything MORE diabolically tedious than reading a printed book, it's struggling to decode a volume scribbled out in cursive. Hard as it may be to imagine for Modern Folks of Today, that's exactly what a movie studio called MGM expected people to do IN A MOVIE THEATER with its RED RIVER flick. At least 14 times (at 2:04, 13:56, 14:24, 14:33, 42:50, 45:17, 47:02, 59:37, 1:01:48, 1:09:52, 1:23:35, 1:46:03, 1:53:34, and 1:58:00--I could have nodded off through several more of these deal breakers) MGM puts a paragraph WRITTEN IN CURSIVE up on the screen for a couple of seconds (NOT long enough to actually decipher it, but for just a sufficient amount of time to make the audience feel that they've missed something that must be important) to dry up any "flow" this snooze-fest might otherwise channel. (A "friend" gave me this RED RIVER "Book Version" from a two-disc DVD set, but kept the first disc for themselves!) Just when you think that RED RIVER cannot possibly get any worse after an hour and a half, an actress named Joanne Dru ("Tess") suddenly pops up to try out her Lauren Bacall impression. She fails miserably, not even teaching Montgomery Cliff how to whistle. At least director Howard Hawks soon admitted on tape that last-minute substitute Dru (whom the temp agency sent over when the originally cast Tess actress confessed that she was pregnant in Real Life on the first day of shooting) totally stunk up his picture.

Hot 888 Mama . . . explains how RED RIVER director Howard Hawks tried to coach "Tess" actress Joanne Dru to pull off a Lauren Bacall impression during the John Wane-Montgomery Clift Western simply because Hawks had directed Bacall opposite Humphrey Bogart a few months earlier in THE BIG SLEEP. Apparently, Hawks thought of actors as interchangeable widgets (being akin to their cattle co-stars of RED RIVER), a viewpoint he shared with director Alfred Hitchcock. Sadly, Hawks was not Hitchcock, Dru couldn't lift Bacall's jockstrap, and RED RIVER ranch mobster Wayne wouldn't have lasted five minutes in a Bogart gang. Only Trump voters would try to shoehorn RED RIVER between THE MALTESE FALCON and CASABLANCA on a list of Classic American flicks. Maybe there's an Alternate Universe in which Ms. Dru would NOT stick out like a sore thumb if positioned between Mary Astor and Ingrid Bergman, but I'm mighty glad I don't live there. TENSIONS AND TRADITIONS: MOLLY HASKELL ON RED RIVER is a catch-all sort of title, but there's no danger of anyone catching a whiff of Critical Thinking here.

Tad Pole . . . to prate paeans of praise to some dying geezer (in this case, ancient RED RIVER director Howard Hawks) upon whom Bogdanovich could exercise his Mitch Albom brand of vulture interviewing (should you decide to view the 2014 Criterion DVD feature titled A FILM OF FIRSTS: PETER BOGDANOVICH ON RED RIVER prior to viewing one of the versions--that is, the longer "book" print or the briefer "voice" edition) of the 1948 feature film, RED RIVER). Bogdanovich, who proved with his supposed Classic THE LAST PICTURE SHOW that he couldn't SELECT--let alone DESIGN--a sexy brassiere to save his life, bad-mouths American genius Howard Hughes here simply because Hollywood Maverick and noted lingerie engineer Hughes was too sharp (even at the height of his madness) to grant the fawning sycophant Peter an interview. (Which, I guess, is a good thing, as it saves Civilization from listening to Bogdanovich rhapsodizing over "My Great Friend Howie's" bottled pee collection.) As mean-spirited as Peter Bogdanovich can get with anyone unavailable to add to his career roster of names-to-be-dropped, he does provide a fairly succinct comparison of the two versions of RED RIVER included in the Criterion set. But this constitutes about three minutes of a 17-minute piece, and the remaining time may seem like an Eternity to folks who've endured a few more of Peter's ubiquitous exercises of LOOK AT ME--I'M THE KID PHOTOSHOPPED INTO THE PICTURE!