Red River (1948)

This is maybe the best John Wayne movie I’ve seen, which doesn’t come from anything particularly different that Wayne is up to, but his whole deal being channeled through to the petty tyranny of the colonizer/small business owner. There’s a lot at play here, from the way he casually shoots his way into “owning” a large tract of land to the way he is both the executioner of his men who break the rules or try to desert and the pastor over their funerals, to the way he doesn’t give a good goddamn about the killing of his fiancée, to his fallen samurai hair when a mutiny against him finally goes through, to the cruelty of his pledge to kill the chief mutineer, Matt, who is also his adopted son, where Wayne and Hawks are hollowing out some of the myth making Wayne was responsible for, finding something closer to a hard truth about the men of the frontier and the lives they lived. Eventually Wayne is wearing a black hat and it’s like yeah, you motherfucker, that’s who you are. That’s who you’ve been this whole fucking time. It’s a shame about the ending, but that’s the nature of Hollywood filmmaking sometimes. 

As a Star Trek nut who can’t stop thinking about that show/its “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch, I’ve got to shout out how much influence Walter Brennan’s Groot must have had on the character of Leonard McCoy, a frontier medicine man type whose love of his commanding officers is only rivaled by his love of finding new ways to say racist shit about folks he sees as subhuman. It’s … not exactly the best aspect of Star Trek, and it’s made a bit more squirm-inducing seeing it here without the varnish of Spock being a Vulcan or whatever. 

As a homosexual I have to give a shout to the Celluloid Closet, which always seems to find the homoeroticism of two dudes hangin’ out that I cannot. What’s a little suckin’/fuckin’ between buds on the range?