History and Film: Red River

It's Friday, so it's time to hit the multiplex. And since Red River was sitting on my TiVo, waiting to be watched, why not go with that? Quick thoughts (because real analysis requires work):

• Tom Dunson (John Wayne) the cattle baron gets set up from the beginning as less-than-sympathetic. He deserts a wagon train (leaving his girl to die). He takes land from Don Diego. And he tries to steal a fellow cattle baron's cattle, only confessing to it when he’s almost caught. Hardly a movie that mindlessly glorifies pioneers.
  
• For the first forty-five minutes, there’s a nice discussion of the economic forces that lead to the drive up the Chisolm trail waeved into the dialogue. It doesn’t feel like forced exposition -- it’s front-and-center for these guys because it would be. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Matt Garth(Dunson's foster son, played by Montgomery Clift) was “away,” for most of the fourteen years, allowing everyone to catch him up on what happened while he was gone.
  
• And that's one one of those things you don’t often deal with in non-historical fiction. Economic discussions. (It’s not unheard of, but it doesn’t always have the same urgency to the plot as in these kinds of stories.)
• The voiceover/montage at the beginning feels a little kludgy to this modern eye (ear? some kind of facial orifice), but it does get you through fourteen years in the space of a minute or so. (This kind of technique is something I want to study harder. How do you handle large swathes of time?)
• The whipping scene – nice way to show how hard discipline is outside of civilization. The fact that it's followed by desertions and outright mutiny shows a nice thinking through of the consquences of these actions. Tom Dunson, not too far off from Captain Bligh. (Apparently, I'm not the only one to notice this.)
• The journal-page-as-title-page trick, while not unique, is a decent way of making the movie "feel" historical. At least, it was in 1948, before it got overdone. Why does it work here, when I'd usually roll my eyes at it?
  
• Unfortunately, the negotiation in the denoument is unrealistic compared to discussion of everyone's dire economic straits in the beginning. It’s a little too convenient. It doesn't wreck the film because it’s incidental to the main theme of the story, which is the struggle between Garth and Dunson, but it can still creep past suspension of disbelief.
• After the Winslow Boy commentary, I've been trying to watch props a little more. Three key ones that bear watching through the film (aside from the handwritten journal pages) are the bracelet, Garth's gun, and the brands for the cattle.
  
• And there's a definite homoerotic subtext. I'm certainly not the first to notice this. Just sayin’ is all.