Red River (1948) Queer Film A-

DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks

One of the greatest Westerns ever made,Red River takes us along the infamous Chisholm Trail on the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas. Directed by Howard Hawks, it features John Wayne in one of his most emblematic roles as Thomas Dunson, the iron‑willed rancher who launches the drive, and Montgomery Clift as Matt Garth, his adopted son and eventual rival. Their clashes—beautifully shaped in the screenplay by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee—give the film its emotional backbone.

The year was 1948, and Clift was exploding into stardom. In Red River, his film debut, he holds his own against Wayne with astonishing poise. That same year he dazzled audiences in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search and, soon after, as the painfully shy gentleman caller in William Wyler’s The Heiress. But Red River is where he first announced himself as a new kind of American leading man—sensitive, intelligent, and quietly erotic.

And then there’s the flirtation. Clift’s scenes with John Ireland as gunslinger Cherry Valance are among the most overtly homoerotic moments in any classic Western. Their gun‑comparison scene—Mine’s bigger, Let’s see—is legendary, a moment of queer electricity that Hawks lets play without comment. The two men become inseparable, their bond a sly counterpoint to Dunson’s authoritarian masculinity.

The supporting cast is superb: Walter Brennan, Noah Beery Jr., Joanne Dru, and Coleen Gray. Both Dru and Gray are unusually vivid presences for a Western of this era, giving the film not one but two memorable female characters. The stunning black‑and‑white cinematography is by Hawks’s favorite cameraman, Russell Harlan, whose images of dust, sky, and cattle feel mythic. The rousing score is by Dimitri Tiomkin, and the editing by Christian Nyby gives the film its muscular rhythm.

Adapted from Borden Chase’s 1946 story The Chisholm Trail in The Saturday Evening Post, Red River remains a towering achievement—part epic, part psychological drama, and part queer Western avant la lettre.

Monterey Productions (Howard Hawks)

United Artists

STREAMING: Amazon Prime and Apple TV+

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