Red River (1948) on Netflix
Approved19482h 13mActionAdventureRomance
Broke after the Civil War, Texas cattleman Thomas Dunson drives his herd to the Missouri railhead. His adopted son Matt Garth rides with him, and the two quarrel over the drive.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.7/1038,432 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1851 Thomas Dunson and his friend Nadine Groot leave St. Louis with a wagon train bound for California. Dunson breaks away to start a ranch of his own in Texas; after an Indian attack on the train, he takes in teenager Matt Garth, its only survivor, and settles near the Rio Grande with a brand he calls Red River D. Fourteen years later the ranch is thriving, but the Civil War has left Dunson with no cash. He gathers ex-soldiers and hands to drive close to ten thousand cattle a thousand miles to the railhead at Sedalia, Missouri, where he hopes to sell them at the best price. Gunman Cherry Valance joins the drive. Dunson pushes the men hard, and Matt begins to oppose him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Red River (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Howard Hughes sued Howard Hawks before the film could be released, claiming the climactic scene between Dunson and Matt was too close to The Outlaw, which both men had worked on. Hughes prepared his own 127-minute cut that replaced the storybook inserts with spoken narration by Walter Brennan.
- In 1981 Wayne's son Michael sent that famous buckle to a silversmith so copies could be made for all of Wayne's children. It was stolen while in the silversmith's care and has never been seen since.
SPOILER
The film's ending is not the one Borden Chase wrote. In his 1946 Saturday Evening Post story "Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail", Valance shoots Dunson dead in Abilene and Matt carries the body back to Texas to bury him on the ranch.- Hawks shot in black and white because he found Technicolor too garish for the realism he wanted. He later told Peter Bogdanovich the opposite, that he wished he had used color for the cattle crossing the Red River and thought it would have made a lot more money.
- Hawks thought Joanne Dru's big closing speech did not work and wished his original choice for Tess, Margaret Sheridan, had been available to deliver the lines.
- Dimitri Tiomkin's song "Settle Down", heard over the credits and through the score, was later given a new lyric by Paul Francis Webster and became "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me", sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo while John Wayne and Walter Brennan look on.
