Click here to copy URL

Red River

1948

Howard Hawks, Arthur Rosson

John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru ...

7.8

12,834

Western Tom Dunson (John Wayne) builds a cattle empire with his adopted son Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift). Together they begin a massive cattle drive north from Texas to the Missouri railhead. But on the way, new information and Dunson's tyrannical ways cause Matthew to take the herd away from Dunson and head to a new railhead in Kansas. Dunson, swearing vengeance, pursues.

	Media	Author	Review
		Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"'Red River' is one of the greatest of all Westerns (...) Hawks is wonderful at setting moods (...) Watch the subtle way Hawks modulates Tom Dunson's gradual collapse (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"
		Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"Hawks has used real Western scenery for its most vivid and picturesque effects (...) He has also got several fine performances out of a solidly masculine cast"
		Philip French The Guardian	"It's a landmark film that brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career."
		Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"One of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle."
		Variety	"Howard Hawks’ production and direction give a masterful interpretation to a story of the early west and the opening of the Chisholm Trail"
		Jordan Cronk Slant	"The psychology behind the rebellion is expertly built and realized by Hawks (...) [It] shifted the moral viability of the western genre all at once (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Mike D'Angelo AV Club	"Great (...) The screenplay’s explicit filial conflict (...) works just fine."
		Matt Brennan IndieWire	"That the narrative comes to its speedy and surprising end not in Missouri but in Abilene, Kansas (...) seems to me a perfect emblem of Hawks’ humane understanding that nothing is inevitable"
		Tony Sloman Radio Times	"This magnificent western is one of the greatest achievements of American cinema (...) Howard Hawks created a rich masterpiece that repays frequent viewings."
		Kim Newman Empire	"Beautifully directed with a lovely visual lyricism, this film packs a western punch with perfect performances and a fine script (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Richard Brody The New Yorker	"This is the measure of Hawks’s remarkable intelligence: he sees relations between people in terms of a remarkable density of implicit angles, of psychological force fields."

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.