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 comments
1 - Jill Henry
"...Wayne has always been credited with creating his first real villain, Ethan Edwards, a racist killer..."
Remember, when the politically correct use the term racist, they simply mean white Gentiles who discriminate.
"I hate racists" translates to "I hate honkys!"
So, to translate the first quote: "his first real villain, Ethan Edwards, a honky killer"
2 - Dan Schneider
Back on planet Earth: as I'm not PC, is it fair to say it's that time of the month, Jill?
3 - paull
Missing from this account is the history of a bracelet. Years before the movie started, Dunson inherited it from his late mother. At the film start, he leaves it as a pledge of return to Fen in the first wagon train. Then he finds it on the wrist of an Indian he has just killed. Evidently the Indian had killed Fen. In later years, he gave it to Matt. Then Matt gave it as a keepsake to Tess. This isn't accidental.
The ending scene breakup by Dru firing a hogleg is of course silly, but that's not her fault. It's a stain of 40s movie requirement -- as is the sountrack quasi-heroic male chorus. The Tiomkin music is not all that bad.
Ms Dru more than earned her place in this movie in her earlier scene in a tent with a weary travel-stained Dunson, in which she tries to get him drunk so he won't follow Matt -- Dunson has a drinking problem -- and also considers shooting him with a derringer. She offers him possibly the greatest gift of his life -- she promises to bear him a son -- if he abandons his perverse desire to kill Matt. He rejects it. Killing is better than new life; and Dunson earlier won his Texas ranch by cold-blooded murder. The tent scene was open to all kinds of scenery-chewing, and there is nothing like that in this movie. As an intelligent and worldly woman, she offers Dunson an extraordinary sacrifice, as though it's just the sort of thing a woman would do. Very high moral level in this scene, which is seldom mentioned by critics.