American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (24 page)

Hawks also thought about casting Cary Grant in the supporting role of cowhand Cherry Valance. Grant was one of Hawks’s favorite actors (he had used him in 1938’s
Bringing Up Baby,
1939’s
Only Angels Have Wings,
and 1940’s
His Girl Friday
), but he, too, begged off because he had never made a western and also refused to play any role but the starring one. Valance’s role eventually went to John Ireland, a handsome tough-guy journeyman character actor.

Only then did Hawks decide on Wayne for Dunson and, to get him, he smartly made Charles Feldman the film’s executive producer. Feldman would be instrumental in getting Wayne to agree to do the film. He was hesitant, at first, to accept the role, as he had just a played an older character in
Fort Apache
. Dunson is essentially a father figure in the film and ages during it to older than Wayne’s real-life forty-one years, and there was no real romantic interest for him in the script. The extent of Wayne’s reluctance is debatable, but he eventually agreed to take the role.
⁸²

Despite gray in his hair and lines added to his face, at first Wayne still had trouble projecting the physical movement of an older man. To help him with his performance, Hawks assigned Walter Brennan, also in the film as Groot, Dunson’s sidekick, to teach Wayne how to “act older.” Also in the film was Harry Carey Sr., and his son, Harry Carey Jr. (Everyone called Carey Jr. Dobie so he wouldn’t be confused with his father, whom he strongly resembled. Carey Jr.’s hair was the color of the brick used to make adobe houses.)
⁸³
Red River
was the senior Carey’s penultimate screen appearance. He died in 1947 of cancer at the age of sixty-nine, before the delayed 1948 release of the film, and shortly after appearing in a Walt Disney movie, Harold D. Schuster and Hamilton Lake’s part live-action, part animated
So Dear to My Heart,
a vehicle for Disney child star Bobby Driscoll. “God, it was a terrible day,” Carey Jr. recalled. Wayne was at the hospital when it happened. “Duke brought me a tumbler of whiskey. I think it was the first time I ever turned down a drink.”

THE MOST INTERESTING TURN OF
casting for
Red River
was Hawks’s choice of the young and diminutive Montgomery Clift in the role of Matt Garth. Clift had caused a sensation on Broadway as one of the new “Method actors.” The notion of making a Hollywood movie, with John Wayne no less, was not something that interested him at all. Hawks, who could be both convincing and persistent, flew Clift out to L.A., wined and dined him, and further sweetened the pot by offering the young, inexperienced film actor a fee of $60,000. Clift asked for time to think it over, flew back to New York, and a few days later called Hawks to tell him he was accepting his offer.

Not that Clift, who was gay, felt simpatico with Hawks or Wayne; he was an easterner through and through. He was from the New York theater community, where sensitivity reigned over machismo. In her biography of Clift, Patricia Bosworth described Clift’s uneasiness around these “real men”: “Clift respected Wayne’s and Hawks’ professional abilities but disliked them on a personal level. He told a friend about Duke and Hawks’ nightly card games. ‘They laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.’ ”

Hawks set up an initial meeting between the two stars of his film. Wayne was a little bit surprised at how small Clift was and told at least one interviewer his initial reaction to the New York actor was that he was “a little queer . . .”
⁸⁴
Wayne was skeptical that someone as small and “sensitive” as Clift could make the film’s climactic fistfight look at all believable, but Hawks assured him of the young actor’s abilities. Wayne reluctantly agreed to try to work with the young Method actor.

Hawks’s version of that first meeting is a little different: “When [Wayne] saw Clift for the first time, he said, ‘Howard, think we can get anything going between that kid and myself?’ I said, ‘I think you can.’ After two scenes, he said, ‘You’re right. He can hold his own anyway, but I don’t think we can make a fight.’ I said, ‘Duke, if you fall down and I kick you in the jaw, that could be quite a fight, don’t you think so?’ And that was all there was to it.” It eventually took three days to film the climactic fistfight, to make Clift look believable against Wayne. Hawks himself taught Clift how to throw a punch and move the way fistfighters did.

As it turned out, Clift was more than just a brilliant casting coup on Hawks’s part. He represented the passing of a generational torch, from the actors of Wayne’s generation, who learned their craft on the job, who grew up with the industry from the days of silent films, to the new youth-oriented crop of actors weaned on “the Method.” Clift was the first of a trio of young men who would, in the ’50s, redefine what screen acting was—Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. This great acting transformation begins in Hawks’s
Red River.

Tom Dunson is an aging Texas cattle baron after the end of the Civil War; in order to survive in business, he decides to move his herd over the Chisholm Trail, beyond the Red River into Missouri, where the railroads can transport his cattle west. The journey is fraught with obstacles—the elements, Comanches, and dissension among the hired hands, led by Cherry Valance, who, finding Dunson’s leadership too harsh, threatens to lead a revolt. Matt, Dunson’s grown-up foster son, stops it, and takes over the drive himself. He also finds love along the way when he helps rescue Tess Millay’s wagon train from a Comanche attack. (Broadway actress Joanne Dru replaced Hawks’s first choice for the role, Maggie Sheridan, when she became pregnant before filming began. A year after the film’s completion, Dru married John Ireland. The marriage lasted eight years.)
⁸⁵
Tess’s talky presence later on in the film ignites a Freudian rivalry between Dunson and Garth. Tess is a typical Hawks woman, rough, tough, and not just able to run with the boys but also to fire a rifle with the best of them.

During production, Clift grew into his character, to the point where during the climactic fight, he looked quite believable against Wayne, not because of Hawks’s off-screen fighting lessons but because both men played their characters so well; Dunson is older and wearier than Garth, and his surrogate son is filled with a rage of his own. It is to Hawks’s credit that he could tie together all the complex psychological ends of the film into one immensely entertaining picture, one of the gems of 1948. It is also one of the most liberal films of its time, with Dunson the dictator brought down by his brave, rebellious, and ultimately heroic foster son, Matthew Garth, the proto workingman’s hero.

Red River
was shot on location in seventy-six days in Elgin Rain Valley, Arizona, with the additional scenes filmed after the completion of
Fort Apache,
in the Goldwyn studios in Hollywood. To make these scenes match the earlier locations, twenty tons of sand and mesquite were imported from Arizona. Wayne received $165,000 and 10 percent of the net profits to appear in the film, renegotiated by Feldman from his original $125,000 because of the film’s extended production time, which caused Wayne to leave the film before it was finished, to work on
Fort Apache.
⁸⁶

When Hawks ran into some editing problems, he called Ford and asked him for help. Ford graciously agreed and convinced Hawks to eliminate some of the dialogue sequences that slowed the action and have Walter Brennan narrate them instead. It cut nearly eight minutes of film and increased its pacing. Ford’s influence extended into the actual shooting, as Hawks consciously tried to emulate the vistas that made Ford’s pictures so visually beautiful. Hawks: “I made a very good burial scene [in
Red River
] . . . I saw a cloud coming and I knew it was going to pass over the hill behind and I said to Wayne, ‘Now get ready and no matter whether you make a muff, just keep on going, we can dub it in easy.’ And he did, and he went on with some other things and he said, ‘What was happening?’ I said, ‘The cloud went right over as you were reading this thing—that made it very good.’ Ford fills his pictures with stuff like that.”
⁸⁷

One of the most curious prerelease moments happened when Howard Hughes, of all people, saw a screening and objected to the use of “Draw your gun,” a line of dialogue in the film. Hughes then insisted that the end of
Red River
had been wholly lifted from his 1943
The Outlaw
’s quirky retelling of the saga of Billy the Kid, as seen through the point of view of Jane Russell’s chest. In that film, there is a sequence near the end in which, according to Hedda Hopper, “Billy the Kid resists the efforts of his erstwhile friend Doc to draw him into a duel. Billy refuses to go for his guns even though Doc shoots a few rounds in his ears. The two are reconciled during the film.” Hawks couldn’t believe it, but the lawsuit threatened to hold up the film’s already long-delayed release, so, despite his insistence the line be left in the film, he finally agreed to delete it.

That still didn’t satisfy Hughes, who insisted on suing Hawks for copyright infringement and went to court, where it appeared he was going to win, until Gradwell Sears and Edward Small, two executives from United Artists, agreed to give Hughes the right to edit out the entire scene. An exasperated Hawks went to Wayne and asked him to intervene with his friend. Wayne then met with Hughes and asked him to please leave the scene in, saying it meant a lot to him personally. The perverse billionaire then smiled and asked Wayne why it took him so long. Wayne laughed, as did Hughes, who then dropped his lawsuit, and the scene was left in the film.

Red River
opened September 30, 1948, six months after
Fort Apache,
and of the two films, it was
Red River
that proved the career turning point for Wayne. Even with Clift’s impressive debut, the film belongs to Wayne, who gives not just a bravura performance, but the best of his career to date. In the midst of his increasing polarizing political activities, an unstable second marriage, financial problems, and a postwar Hollywood increasingly populated with bunch of newer and younger angst-filled actors, like Clift, Wayne was able to rise above it all to deliver a performance that was at once physically coarse and emotionally strong.

The reviews rightly hailed both the film and Wayne’s soaring performance in it. The
New York Times
’ Bosley Crowther called it a film with a “solidly masculine cast, topped off by a withering job of acting a boss-wrangler done by Mr. Wayne. This consistently able portrayer of two-fisted, two-gunned outdoor men surpasses himself in this picture . . . on the way to becoming one of the best cowboy pictures ever made . . . sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days.”
Time
magazine called it “[a] rattling good outdoor adventure movie” and singled out Wayne’s performance: “Wayne’s consistently able portrayal of a two-fisted, two-gunned outdoor man surpasses himself in this picture . . .” that would “take its place among the other big, box-office important western epics that have come from Hollywood over the years . . . a spectacle of sweeping Grandeur.” And from
Variety
came this: “[a] film which is spectacle at its best although spectacle is by no means all of it . . . it is epic in its sweep and size of its canvas but the canvas is packed with hard-bitten detail rather than romantic flourishes.” Later on, Andrew Sarris, in the
New York Film Bulletin
wrote, “What is most impressive about
Red River
is Hawks’ concentration on character relationships and the swirling dust of horses and cattle.”

The film still impresses today. Andy Webster, writing about a 2013 Hawks revival, wrote that “Wayne plays Tom Dunson, an obsessed boss placing unreasonable demands on his crew, including his compassionate but defiant surrogate son, [played by] Montgomery Clift, every inch a star in his screen debut . . . Wayne may play a domineering father figure, but in conceding the spotlight to the ascendant Clift, he displays perhaps the highest virtue of all: humility.”

But it was John Ford’s “critique” that meant the most to Wayne. After seeing the complete version in a screening room, Ford turned to Hawks and said, “I never knew the big son-of-a-bitch could act!”
⁸⁸

Chapter 14

After his double Academy snub for
Fort Apache
and
Red River,
Wayne was convinced the Communist members of the Academy would fight to prevent him from ever winning. It was following the Awards ceremony in 1949 that Wayne decided to accept the presidency of the MPA.

Charles Feldman then sent him the script to
All the King’s Men,
loosely based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel of the same name that focused on the political career of Huey Long, the demagogic, charismatic governor and then senator of Louisiana who had his eyes on a run for the White House before he was assassinated in 1935. Wayne told Feldman he could take the script and “shove it up [director] Robert Rossen’s ass.” He believed that the producer/writer/director was trying to make a film to illustrate the failings of the democratic system. Wayne never regretted his decision to turn down the role, even though it went to Broderick Crawford and he won an Oscar for his performance, and the film (Rossen and Columbia Pictures) Best Picture. Wayne was so enraged by the script he wrote a letter to the MPA excoriating Rossen for trying to destroy the fabric of American life. A year later, Rossen was called before HUAC and his career in Hollywood was shut down for more than a decade.

After rejecting
All the King’s Men
, Wayne also passed on Henry King’s
The Gunfighter
(he had wanted to play the role of the aging gunfighter but the film was being made at Columbia, and he still held a grudge against Harry Cohn). Columbia then sold the project to Twentieth Century–Fox, where Gregory Peck eventually got the role. Wayne also said no Michael Curtiz’s
The Breaking Point
. The starring role in that went to John Garfield, his penultimate film before being blacklisted. Wayne also turned down
White Native
, a jungle script for RKO that eventually went to Johnny Weissmuller but was never made. John Ford and Merian Cooper then offered Wayne one of the three starring roles in
3 Godfathers
, which, of course he accepted.
⁸⁹