Saturday, January 28, 2023

Peter Bogdanovich on John Wayne in Howard Hawks and Borden Chase’s Red River

By N.S.

Wayne didn’t just play “an unsympathetic character,” he played a murderer. How many men did Thomas Dunson murder, in the course of the picture?! And how on Earth did this picture ever pass the censors?

(It look as though the screen won't work, but it will.)






2 comments:

  1. I've never seen it.Usually,in Hollywood,if you go against type,you win an Oscar such as Paul Newman in "The Verdict".Was the "Duke's" politics a factor or was the movie character too violent for it's day to consider it for an award?
    Probably both,as they say.


    --GRA

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  2. GRA:In 1998,Roger Ebert reviewed "Red River" and generally gave it rave reviews--"just the scenes with the women fall flat."

    Ebert concluded:

    Wayne is sometimes considered more of a natural force than an actor, but here his understated acting is right on the money; the critic Joseph McBride says John Ford, who had directed Wayne many times, saw “Red River” and told Hawks, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act.”

    --GRA

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