Red River (1948, Howard Hawks)
Monday 25th of November, 5pm in the Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02
Join us on Monday the 25th of November from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) in the Professor Stuart Hall Building (here) room LG02 for a screening of Howard Hawks’s Red River (1949). The film is 2 hours 13 minutes long so the screening will finish by 7:30pm.
Working across virtually every Hollywood genre – including screwball comedy, musical, film noir, war film and western – American auteur Howard Hawks was consistently broaching questions other Hollywood directors didn’t, regarding gender conventions, American capitalism, community, the nuclear family and individualism. (See Peter Wollen’s classic essay, “Who the Hell is Howard Hawks?”) In this case, he plays by his own rules regarding how the western should be conceptually and cinematically confronted.
As Hawks’s first of the genre, Red River tells the story of a father, son and crew of cattle breeders, balancing stringent professionalism and a sense of humanity. On an increasingly tense journey, its development is saturated with absurdly skewed morals and power hunger, while the community of men pass through American landscapes for the ultimate cattle fortune. Hawks exposes the values of self-interest, wealth and family which western ideologies contain, making Red River both a deeply American and a deeply political film. The spectacle of tyrannical gestures ultimately operates against the idea that there can be an escape from the cruelty of conservative masculinity and American antagonisms.
In an essay for the Criterion Collection release, Geoffrey O’Brien writes:
There’s a steadiness of emphasis through the film’s long central movement, a sense of emotions held in check in order to get on with what has to be done, so that when violence and something like madness do finally emerge, the effect is all the more jolting.
Red River has from the first imposed itself by its iconic visual force and the sheer logistics of what unfolds on-screen. Manny Farber—while characteristically qualifying its themes of loyalty and leadership as “romantic, simpleminded mush”—admired the film as “a feat of pragmatic engineering, working with weather, space, and physiognomy.” James Agee reviewing it for Time wrote, “there is a constant illusion that you are watching an extraordinary effort to get cattle across a certain immense expanse of difficult and threatening country, that you are learning a lot about how such a job feels and gets done, and that the perpetually wrangling players are important not so much of themselves but because the whole success or failure of the attempt depends on these people.” It is an epic made by a director constitutionally averse to grandiosity and inclined more toward unsentimental comedy than soul-stirring melodrama. If that comic sense led him to an ending that many have found unexpected and disconcerting, it also imparted a restraining tartness.