"He's a little queer, don't you think so?" John Wayne remarked to his secretary after meeting Montgomery Clift, his co-star in Red River, for the first time in Hollywood.
Wayne reacted with considerable scepticism to the idea that a neurotic, New York Method actor like Clift could make a plausible cowboy. Clift, for his part, professed to find the posturing of Wayne and his acolytes alien in the extreme. "The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary," he later recalled.
The two stars ended up respecting one another. "Any doubts I had about that fellow are gone. He's going to be okay," Wayne eventually conceded after completing a key scene with Clift, who had gone on a crash course in horse-riding and gun-toting to get in trim before shooting began.
The younger actor, then 26 and in his first major film role, realised that he'd be blown off the screen if he tried to compete with Wayne on his own terms. His trick was to underact. Years before Paul Newman portrayed Billy The Kid as a misunderstood delinquent in The Left Handed Gun, he proved that it was possible to play a western hero as flawed, introspective and psychologically complex without seeming like an East Coast phoney.
Director Howard Hawks may have been startled by Clift's elaborate, Stanislavsky-like preparations for the film and dismayed by his inability to wallop Wayne in a satisfactory manner, but he was won over by the young star's professionalism. In Hawks' universe, people are judged by whether they do their job properly, and Clift was always a very hard worker.
The attritition between Wayne and Clift gives what might otherwise have seemed a conventional yarn about an epic cattle drive its mythic dimension. Writer Borden Chase freely admitted that this was Mutiny On The Bounty done with saddles and stirrups.
Wayne's character, Tom Dunson, was the bullying, Captain Bligh-like martinet; as his surrogate son, Clift is a dead ringer for Fletcher Christian.
There is only one scene which rings hollow: the extraordinarily camp, homo-erotic interlude in which Clift and fellow gun slinger John Ireland compare gun-sizes. (This was presumably Hawks' little private joke at the expense of the Hollywood censorship czar Joseph Breen.)
The west has seldom been more evocatively photographed. There's one astonishing scene in which cinematographer Russell Harlan's camera captures cowboys, wagons and hundreds of cattle in one majestic, sweeping shot. yet Harlan wasn't even first choice; Hawks wanted Gregg Toland (of Citizen Kane fame) and only hired Harlan under sufferance.
Wayne was also a second pick (Hawks tried to get Gary Cooper to play Dunson) but he has never been better. As his old mentor John Ford quipped after seeing the movie, "I didn't realise the sonofabitch could act!"
Geoffrey MacNab - Time Out (London) November 21-28 2001
