DVD Review: Red River - Page 2

But it’s Wayne’s role as Dunson that links this film to The Searchers. In the later Ford film, Wayne has always been credited with creating his first real villain, Ethan Edwards, a racist killer; but his essay as Dunson, eight years earlier, is more convincing, for we can relate to the man’s bitterness and motives. We do not identify with his quick and psychotic temper, but we understand what drives him. In The Searchers, Ford leaves Edwards as more of a tabula rasa, which would not be a bad thing, save there is no growth in the man. By the end of Red River, Tom Dunson has grown, although the denouement of this growth is perhaps the least satisfactory aspect of the film, for the ending just totally deflates, and seems highly unnatural given all the depth and, yes, complexity of the relationships between the two men, and the third main character, an old cuss named Groot (Walter Brennan), who is, for some reason, Dunson’s eternal sidekick.

The film starts in 1851, with Dunson and Groot leaving a wagon train bound for the far west, to establish a ranch just north of the Rio Grande. There is where they first meet young Matt (played by Mickey Kuhn), who is a survivor of the wagon train they just left. It was ambushed by Indians, and ended up killing Dunson’s woman, Fen (Coleen Gray), whom he sent on, feeling they were safer in the wagon train than alone with him and Groot. Soon they find the sort of land they desire, and Dunson murders the enforcer of a Mexican cattle baron who claims the land. Dunson then spends fourteen years raising livestock, establishing the Red River ranch, and living through the Civil War, only to find out there’s no market for his product, ten thousand head strong, so he has to hire men on to help Matt and him drive them north to Missouri.

Along the way they meet up with hardships, stampedes, Indians, robbers, and worst of all, their own egos. Several of the men end up being killed by Dunson for rebelling, and there is a morose ritual that Dunson always follows — he murders, then buries, and reads over the dead from the Bible. That is, until Matt takes command from him, sick of Dunson’s paranoia. He humiliates and emasculates Dunson in front of the others, and vows to take the cattle due north, along the newly blazed Chisholm Trail, to avoid Missouri bandits and sell his livestock at the Abilene railroad station.

Article Author: Dan Schneider

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