The Birth of the Duke

The breakthrough year for John Wayne was 1948. He appeared in three pictures that year, all first-rate films by first-rate directors--Howard Hawks’ “Red River” and John Ford’s “Fort Apache” and “Three Godfathers.” This year moved Wayne onto the actors’ Top 10 list of moneymakers in 1949. He would not be off that list for the next quarter of a century.

Although “Fort Apache” was the first Wayne film to be released that year (in March), and “Red River” did not come out until September, Hawks had made the latter picture in 1946. (Its release was delayed by financial and legal problems.) Ford had helped Hawks in the editing of “Red River,” and saw what a powerful performance Wayne gave, before he even began filming “Fort Apache.” If Raoul Walsh was the discoverer of Wayne, Hawks was the one who made him a superstar.

“Red River” was Hawks’ postwar attempt to become an independent producer--an ambition shared by Ford and many others. He took many risks with the film, since it involved long and expensive location work in Arizona--work that in fact strained his resources beyond his ability to pay his workers. It is significant, therefore, that he cast Wayne in this crucial endeavor, since Wayne was not a great commercial property in 1946, when filming began. Only two years before, MGM had treated him as a minor player in “Reunion in France.” His best-received work so far had been in his three films with Ford--and “Stagecoach” was seven years in the past; “Long Voyage Home,” six years in the past, had given Wayne only a small segment of the film to shine in; and “They Were Expendable” was not a favorite with the public.

It might be thought that Hawks chose Wayne simply because he was making a western. But in 1946, only eight of Wayne’s last 21 movies had been westerns, and only one of those, “Tall in the Saddle,” had been impressive. None of Wayne’s prior roles was anything like the older, meaner part given him in “Red River.” Here Wayne would have no romantic partner--which was almost unprecedented for him. Hawks obviously saw something he could shape for his own purposes in Wayne’s ability to convey control and menace.

What were Hawks’ purposes? Why did he start his independent producing with an ambitious western? He was best known for urbane movies with sly dialogue. His outdoor stories had mainly been aviation films (reflecting his own interest in flying, and that of his frequent producer, the millionaire aviator Howard Hughes).

Hawks, having bought a western tale, “The Chisholm Trail,” by Borden Chase, had shaped a script from it even before Chase sold his tale to the Saturday Evening Post for serialization. The story had a historical theme: the first drive of cattle from Texas to Kansas. But Hawks wanted a more local and lurid accent. His first title was “The River Is Red,” from a piece of dialogue (later cut) referring to an Indian’s blood floating in the water.

The Chase short story has a male triangle:

* Tom Dunson (to be played by Wayne in the film) is a brutal Texas cattle owner, an immigrant sailor from the Liverpool area who served in the British navy where he received the lashes he gives out to rebellious drovers on his cattle drive, teaching them “the obedience I learned as a boy aboard a British man-o’-war.” Dunson heeds no one, even when men describe a shorter route for getting the cattle to market.

* Matthew Garth (to be played by Montgomery Clift) is a man Dunson found as an orphan and raised to be taller and tougher than he is. After Dunson whips drovers, and is shot by one, Matt takes the herd from him, to follow the shorter route. Dunson vows to stalk and kill Matt.

* Cherry Valance (to be played by John Ireland). A Creole gunfighter, a seductive Latin lover constantly singing “Chacun vit a sa guise,” Valance has joined the cattle drive as a rival to Matt. He goes with Matt when the herd is taken from Dunson, but leaves it to stay with a traveling brothel (on its way to service gold-rush miners). From that base he makes a night raid to steal the herd from Matt. Failing in that attempt, he returns to the brothel, where Dunson arrives and engages Cherry in a gunfight (since Cherry helped Matt steal the herd). A prostitute jostles Cherry’s elbow as he draws, so he only wounds Dunson (though the wound will prove mortal). Cherry dies as the prostitute tells him, “Chacun vit a sa guise.”

In Chase’s original story, young Matt is the center of the action, and Cherry’s role was much larger. As the scripts were developed, Cherry’s role shrank drastically. Borden Chase, who was on the set to rewrite scenes at Hawks’ command, but who did not get along with Hawks, later claimed that Hawks cut Cherry’s part out of dislike for the man playing him, Ireland. The dislike was real--Hawks said because of Ireland’s drinking, Chase said because Ireland took co-star Joanne Dru away from Hawks. (Dru and Ireland later married.)

For Howard Hawks, the most important thing about an actor was what he called his “attitude.” When an interviewer mistook “attitude” to mean the actor’s “outlook” or mental state, Hawks corrected him: He meant his physical attitude, his bodily carriage how he walks and how he moves. He felt that Humphrey Bogart radiated insolence by his whole manner, and Cary Grant moved like one watching himself move. Gerald Mast knew that “for Hawks, to walk is to be.” That explains his interest in Wayne. Wayne’s generally graceful movement was most evident in his walk, though not much had been made of that until 1944, when he made “Tall in the Saddle.” Actor Paul Fix, who claimed to have invented Wayne’s walk for him, wrote the screenplay for that movie. The walk preexisted the film, but Fix did emphasize it for the first time in the scene where Wayne comes down the town’s main street toward a drunken gunman, not bothering to draw his own gun, intimidating the other man just by the easy purposefulness of his stride.

For “Red River,” Dunson in the original magazine story was a character practically unplayable. He is such an unsympathetic figure that it is hard to understand why Matt does not shoot him at the end. So Hawks began by inventing for Dunson some human ties. Chase sent him off alone to start his ranch, but Hawks gives him a friend to travel with him, Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan). This is the key change in the plot. Groot is the figure connecting Dunson to normal human feelings.

In the scene where the boy Matt is found, Groot’s presence means that he is joining a family, with Groot in a maternal role. If Matt is puzzled by Dunson, Groot can explain the older man’s troubled past. After the war, Groot is the chronicler of what went on in Matt’s absence. When Matt takes the herd away from Dunson, Groot, by siding with Matt, legitimizes his rebellion in family terms.

Having created an interior life for Dunson and Matt, Hawks then cut out the explicit statements about the relationship, so his actors would suggest it. Is there a deep tie between the two men? It comes out, not in words, but in one little gesture. Verbally fencing with Cherry, Matt rubs his thumb alongside his nose. Only later, when Wayne does the same thing, do we see where he got the gesture. It is a mark of Hawks’ subtlety that he does not give us this pattern in its expectable sequence--Dunson doing it first, then Matt imitating him (which could be happening for the first time). We have to infer a long-standing relationship, seeing the results before we see the cause.

While Dunson doesn’t state his dependence on Matt--in fact, Hawks told Wayne not even to smile in this role--the fact is signaled in Wayne’s acting. After the war, when Matt has returned, Wayne slumps, dispirited, as he talks of his financial plight. When he is ready to rise, he reaches instinctively for Matt’s help, which is given. This is not Wayne of the determined walk. When Wayne, 39 years old, asked Hawks how to move like an old man, Hawks joked, “Just watch me.” (Hawks was 50 in 1946). Wayne moves in a gingerly way, lets Matt light his cigarettes for him, pulls himself heavily onto his horse.

Hawks told him to show fear in this scene, but Wayne refused. Wayne was right. Dunson, even if he felt fear, would not show it. As soon as Wayne goes off-camera, Matt says, “He’s afraid!”-- another sign of how close they are, how well Matt knows Dunson.

Hawks said Wayne refused to do one other thing on the film. All the scripts show a concern for handicapping Dunson before he goes into the final struggle. Chase’s story had wounded him just once, but mortally (when Cherry shoots him in the camp of the gambler Tess, played by Joanne Dru). The scripts wound him more superficially, but twice each time by gunshot. Looking for some variety, Hawks says he wanted Dunson’s finger to get caught in a rope during his punishment of the man, leading to its amputation.

If the beginning of the drive shows us a physically deteriorated Wayne, the running of the herd shows a spiritual deterioration. This is not so much a matter of aging as of Wayne’s growing gaunt, hollow-eyed, semi-insane with worry. Dunson broods in the camp, drinking too much, sleeping too little, driving others so they will be too tired to rebel, but driving himself so hard that he suspects rebellion all around him. When Dunson is about to whip a man, he is wounded by Matt. It made clear that Matt is now faster on the draw than Dunson; but he defers to the older man as long as he can, in the classic situation of a son replacing the father, but not wanting to make that obvious.

Left behind by the herd, wounded, Dunson has to heal while he collects gunmen to ride with him and fulfill his oath to kill Matt. Rested, he begins to heal spiritually as well as physically. When Dunson meets Tess, he recalls his own lost love--the wagon train he abandoned (unlike Matt, who risked the herd to come to the rescue of Tess and her gamblers). Dunson and Tess reach their unspoken accord when Tess does not try to use her hidden derringer on him.

How to end the story was always its great problem. The unsatisfactory “freezing” of Matt’s arm was what Hawks addressed in most of his major changes to the plot. But that still left him in a quandary. If Dunson was no longer to die, how could he and his son have their showdown and still be reconciled? Cherry is still involved in the final script, since Dunson no longer kills him in Tess’ camp.

An early solution was to have Cherry draw on Dunson, forcing Matt to shoot the gun from Cherry’s hand. Then, after Matt refuses to use his gun on Dunson, Dunson beats him to a pulp, taunting him with the challenge to “Use your left.” Only when Groot turns Matt’s inert body over does he notice that Cherry’s bullet had entered Matt’s left shoulder. But Dunson knew it-- hence his taunt: “Do you think I’d have fought him with fists if he hadn’t [been shot]? He’d have killed me. Don’t forget, I taught him to fight. Get me a bucket of water.” The father can, in effect, step down from his superiority only after beating Matt to satisfy his own oath to kill him. Few can regret the loss of this ending.

In the far better resolution of the film as it stands, Cherry calls out to Wayne, is shot by him, but wounds Dunson (not Matt) in the exchange. This settles one thing. After Cherry’s erotic byplay with Matt was almost entirely eliminated, Cherry’s one function was to keep up suspense over a showdown with Matt to prove who is faster. Since Matt is faster than Dunson, and Dunson beats Cherry, even from the disadvantaged posture of having to turn completely around as he draws, that makes Matt the fastest man on the field. The two men perform each other’s feats, moving with a common impulse.

In the situation as Hawks had reconfigured it, it is clear why Matt does not draw when ordered to by Dunson. He knows Dunson too well to believe that Dunson could kill him. Dunson takes the gun from Matt’s holster, throwing it aside: “You once told me never to take your gun away from you.” That recalls the first meeting between Dunson and Matt, when the orphan’s gun was wrested from him without warning. “Don’t ever trust anybody until you know him,” Dunson says--then returns the gun and turns his back on him, showing that he trusts the boy. The whole of that interchange lies behind Dunson’s reference to the boyish threat: “Don’t ever try to take it away from me again.” This time, Matt trusts.

In a scene right after that early one, Dunson sees that a Mexican is on the point of drawing his gun and shoots him first. The boy asks how he knew what the man was doing. “By watching his eyes. Remember that.” In the buildup to the final fight scene, as Dunson shoots at Matt, Hawks does repeated close-ups of Matt’s eyes, confident above his slight grin. As Dunson knew the Mexican would draw by “watching his eyes,” he knows that Matt will not draw.

In “Red River,” love is not homoerotic but familial, as Groot makes clear by cheering Matt on, legitimizing the rebellion--the son must challenge the father in order to be mature, to resume relations with him as an equal. What has happened, almost against Hawks’ first intentions (signaled by his making Matt the pretty boy gunman), is the replacing of the first male triangle (Matt-Cherry-Dunson) with a different one (Dunson-Groot-Matt). The external challenge, of saving the Dunson ranch financially by means of the drive, has gone along, step by step, with an internal challenge and development, that of securing an orderly succession to the ranch’s regime--something finally settled when Dunson reshapes the Dunson brand to give Matt an equal “M” on it. When Dunson says, “You’ve earned it,” in this roundelay-story of continual recurrences, we are taken back to the scene where Dunson promised Matt a place on the brand “when you earn it.”

At every level the plot has a “ring composition.” Dunson deteriorates in the first half of the play then heals--both physically and spiritually--in the second. The wagon train of Tess recalls to him the woman he left on the first wagon train, when he had been “wrong,” as both the woman and Groot told him. The softening toward Tess, the bracelet’s memories, take Wayne back to his youth. He is being rejuvenated as Matt is reaching his maturity--just as Odysseus is restored to vitality when he sees his son show manhood. They have both traveled to this joining of their forces. In “The Odyssey,” not only does Athena give Odysseus back his strength--even Odysseus’ father, Laertes, goes out again in armor and, by Athena’s aid, throws the first lance with a force that breaks the enemy’s spirit. The young man (Telemachus) prevails by the power of those who preceded him and live on in him.

Hawks solved the problem of making Wayne a member of the older generation without making him powerless or “fatherly” in a condescending way. The Wayne only partly glimpsed in “Tall in the Saddle” comes into full view in “Red River.” In that sense, “John Wayne”--all we make of that name from this time on--was Hawks’ invention. He may or may not be the auteur of the movie. He authored the star.