Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Gruff man and his all-male coterie head north on the Chisholm trail with a heck of a lot of cattle, and find a lot of hardship.
Biased, pithy comments: 1948. A time when a nation of men, weary of war, turn their thoughts back to idyllic days, but find the craziness of wartime decision making and arbitrary, pointless death invading their dreams. This is a movie like that---it seems clear as a metaphor for the grinding drive of the land war in Europe, and the moral choices seem to come from within the madness of modern soldiering. Likewise, women are securely removed from most of the show with arrows and Indians, so we can concentrate on the bizarre relationships among the lead men. The movie isn't exactly *gay*, in a Joel Schumacher sense, but there are a series of sexual-tense lines about being partners for 17 years and some seriously Freudian business in the beginning about Wayne taking away the boy's gun. I'm reading too much in, I know; it's supposed to be a Saturday Evening Post story about a man who wanted a son and never had one, but doesn't know how to deal with the pseudo-son he has. The movie does take some odd twists and turns, a lot of which suprised me (like the time jump near the beginning), but the ending of the film (which revolves around the fast-talking Dru) undercuts the threatening storm that had been building; I practicaly heard the ``Leave it to Beaver'' ending theme underneath their lines. Wow. Weird, weird, weird. Still, it's never boring, and Wayne actually *acts* in this film, even if he acts like an arrogant crazy white male who thinks he owns everything.
Other Notes: It is one of the greatest cattle-drive movies ever, I suppose, but the spectacle of all those cows is undercut by the Beef Council-written lines like, ``Healthy beef, for good people!'' and ``Soon [this land] will be covered in beef!''
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: John Wayne, Montogmery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan, Coleen Gray, Harry Carey, John Ireland.
Directed by: Howard Hawks