John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [58]
Red River cost nearly $2 million, the biggest film Wayne had made so far. After three months of filming, Red River was completed at the Goldwyn studios just before Christmas.
Wayne loved working with Hawks, calling him “the best director”
he’d ever worked with alongside of Ford. He said, “He gave actors the feeling that they were really a creative part of the process in any scene. He let actors come up with ideas, then he’d go away and write them into the script. Pappy would never have allowed that, but his way of working was so different.
“Howard would sometimes give an actor lines without telling the other actors in the scene, and that way he got actors to respond naturally. He liked spontaneity. He never had anything written in stone.
“He told me, ‘Duke, if you can make three good scenes in this picture without annoying the audience, you’ll be okay for the rest of the time.’ So every now and then, I’d say, ‘Is this one of those scenes?’
His usual reply was, ‘This is a scene where you get it over with as quickly as you can and don’t annoy the audience.’”
Without a doubt, Wayne had given his finest performance to date in Red River, and it was also the best film he had made so far. It is flawed, however, by two things: the first is the awful score composed by Dimitri Tiomkin which had a male chorus break into a terrible song every time the herd was moved on.
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The second, and most unforgivable, was the ending which had Wayne and Clift, having just tried to kill each other in a ferocious fight, sit side by side grinning inanely up at Joanne Dru who tells them off. The film would have had a stunning and classic ending if Clift had shot Wayne dead.
But Howard Hawks would not accept that as a valid criticism, telling me, “I don’t believe in making pictures where a picture ends with the death of one of the protagonists. The ending we had was the only one you could have with those characters and their relationships.”
I’m only one of many, it turns out, who has aimed that same criticism at the film.
Red River was held up for release through problems that have never been made totally clear. One account says that Howard Hughes sued Hawks for stealing the climactic fight scene from The Outlaw. Hawks started directing The Outlaw but walked out early in production over “artistic differences” with Hughes, and Hughes had finished the picture himself. To satisfy Hughes, Hawks had his editor cut and recut the fight scene, overlaying it with new dialogue, until Hughes was satisfied with the finished product. Hughes, it was said, was just getting even with Hawks.
Wayne had another version for the holdup: “I filed a suit against the backers because they’d promised me $75,000 plus a percentage of the profits, but they didn’t even come up with the $75,000. So I asked that the defendant be restrained from distributing the film until they paid up.”
Hawks told me, “I actually withheld Red River from release for about a year because I thought the people running United Artists were a bunch of cheats.” He didn’t elaborate further, and the film did not get released until July 1948.
Chata complained that Duke was spending too much time working as he was busy setting up his own production, Angel and the Badman.
For the first time, Wayne was producing his own film from a script written by a former journalist, James Edward Grant. He also acquired a secretary, Mary St. John, whom he had known for many years.
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Grant had arrived in Hollywood a few years before and established himself as a screenwriter with films such as Boom Town and Johnny Eager. “I liked his style of writing,” Wayne told me. “He seemed able,