Literally the next day, on February 17, Howard Hughes notified MPI that any release of Red River would constitute an infringement of his rights, since the ending, in his view, plagiarized the climax of The Outlaw. Stating that Hawks had worked on the story of The Outlaw and was paid for it, Hughes concluded, “It would seem to an impartial observer that the similarity complained of must have been the result of taking from a common source,” or stealing. Hughes threatened immediate legal action.
At this, MPI officers suddenly became less eager to take over the picture, bewildered at what they might be expected to do with a picture with no ending. Monterey attempted to further stall by insisting that the combination of Hughes’s complaint and MPI’s move to take over the picture made it impossible for the company to send anyone to represent it at the arbitration hearing in New York. The arbitrators would have none of this, however, and proceeded to unanimously find in favor of United Artists. Monterey was thus forced to deliver the negative to the Pathé Lab in New York, but MPI warned that no prints should be struck until the ongoing dispute with Hughes was resolved.
Given Hawks’s lifelong casual attitude about “borrowing” dialogue and bits of business that had worked before, there was no question that Hughes had good reason for being miffed. Specifically, Hawks had lifted a memorable detail from the final showdown in The Outlaw in which Doc Holliday tries to force Billy the Kid to draw by firing at him, nicking his earlobes in the process, and there was no way Hughes was going to let him keep that. But the main reason Hughes moved against Red River was to settle a longstanding grudge: Hawks had done this to him before, when he helped himself to the ending of Hell’s Angels for The Dawn Patrol. Hawks fought him by having his secretary, Helen Ayres, compile a list of other Westerns with similar sequences—she came up with about a dozen, including the recent Randolph Scott feature Gunfighters—and, in a heated phone conversation, Hawks defied Hughes to prove that this sort of scene was not one common to Westerns. Still, Hughes was determined to extract his pound of flesh and compel Hawks to make the changes he demanded or face the prospect of a protracted lawsuit, which would hold up the release of Red River for as long as The Outlaw had been delayed.
Hughes had another motivation as well. Having just taken control of RKO studios, Hughes was looking for a way to pry three of his productions—The Outlaw and the as-yet unreleased Vendetta and Mad Wednesday—away from United Artists so he could reassume control of them. All through the weeks that he was pressing for changes in the ending of Red River, Hughes was dickering over these pictures with UA president Grad Sears, whose persuasiveness and willingness to accomodate the tycoon broke down Hughes’s stubborness and, more than anything, paved the way for Red River to come out both on schedule and in a form very close to what Hawks intended.
The precise manner in which the final release version of Red River was agreed upon is open to some question, since Hawks was vague about details and the stories Christian Nyby told about it are rife with contradictions. In his book Howard Hawks, Storyteller, the film scholar Gerald Mast quotes Nyby at length about how Hughes notified Monterey of his objections to the showdown sequence only a week before the film’s scheduled openings in the Southwest in August 1948. (It had already been reviewed by the trade press in July.) According to this account, Hughes came to the cutting room and made Nyby cut the scene in sixteen different ways, but never to his satisfaction. Fed up, Nyby offered Hughes the chance to cut the sequence himself. After some further slight adjustments, in the end Hughes was mollified by cutting fifteen seconds from the picture.
At the very least, Nyby compressed the time frame in which all this occurred, as Hughes filed his copyright suit in Federal court on August 13, and Red River didn’t open in Western territories until September 1. At the same time, Hughes misrepresented the similarities between the pictures, particularly in the matter of the earlobes: Dunson nicked Matthew on the cheek, not the ears; if the lobes had been hit, the result would presumably have been visible in subsequent shots, which were not reshot or replaced.
More perplexing is the question of why two distinct versions of Red River were made—one in which a written chronicle entitled Early Tales of Texas serves to connect the chapters in this highly episodic film, another in which voice-over narration by Walter Brennan’s character, Nadine Groot, bridges the gaps in time and place. Two Hawks specialists, Gerald Mast and John Belton, have analyzed the differences between the versions in great detail, with Mast, along with Leonard Maltin, preferring the diary version and Belton coming down in favor of the narration, as does Peter Bogdanovich. As this split opinion indicates, there are things to be said for and against each version. The diary version runs seven and a half minutes longer; in addition to cutting the shots of the pages, other cuts for the latter version included a lengthy description by Cherry Valance of a beautiful woman who told him about the railroad to Abilene and a scene showing Matthew’s nervousness at night as Dunson is catching up to him. There are also differences in the musical score, with the diary version containing more vocalizing than the voice-over edition. Most important, however, the showdown between Dunson and Matthew is significantly cut in the latter version. As Gerald Mast observed, all of Dunson’s initial dialogue—ordering Matt to draw, warning, “Then I’ll make you draw,” and so on—is missing in the voice-over version, leaving him to just fire away. Also removed are the progressively tight shots of Matthew’s unblinking eyes as Dunson shoots at him—only the last one remains.
There is no question that the diary version constitutes the picture in its earlier form, although, as The Big Sleep demonstrates, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is definitive. Hawks told Bogdanovich, “The one with the book was the first cutting and it wasn’t any good.” He explained, “It was meant to be with narration, which shortened it and brought it closer to you because we had a very distinctive voice doing it.” Hawks even claimed that he never saw the diary verison until it was on television.
Although Hawks seldom employed voice-over narration in his pictures, he had just done so to good effect in The Big Sleep and would use it again in The Big Sky and Land of the Pharaohs. That Hawks would passively permit a film so important to him to be printed up and distributed in a form that he expressly disapproved of testifies to several things: his habit of not following a picture all the way through postproduction, the general confusion that surrounded Red River in the final months before it came out, and the extent to which Hawks had, by that time, virtually washed his hands of it, since there was no financial incentive in his further involvement. Still, Hawks’s negative opinion of the diary version can perhaps be looked at partly as Monday morning quarterbacking, since, in most ways other than the pure enjoyment of Walter Brennan’s vocal commentary, the voice-over version represents a reduction of the first and longer cut, especially where the climax is concerned. In the absence of any documented reasons why two versions were created, it seems likely that the voice-over edition was made with an eye to foreign markets, where several minutes’ worth of English-language text on the screen would have been highly annoying. The voice-over version was also more suitable for television, although the diary version, to Hawks’s annoyance, frequently turned up on the tube with its hard-to-read written text. Ironically, the Red River released on video with the promotional line, “Restored Director’s Cut,” is the diary version, the one Hawks himself pointedly disapproved.
In any event, all this was done without any overseeing or even input from Hawks, who had trusted Nyby to shape the mass of diverse footage in the first place and had now left the final crucial decisions in his hands. Hawks left Los Angeles in mid-August and sailed from New York on the Queen Elizabeth on August 21, on his way to shoot I Was a Male War Bride in Germany.
Like a plane taking off under seemingly impossible conditions, Red River finally made its way into theaters at the beginning of September 1948, exactly two years after it had gone before the cameras. But even as it played strongly in the Southwest and the plains
states, squabbling continued in the executive suites where its destiny was being controlled. Hawks’s unwillingness to turn his picture over to UA had largely been predicated on his lack of confidence in the distributor’s ability to market it and secure the best theaters. In July, he was placated by an unusual agreement under which Goldwyn’s sales organization, headed by the shrewd James A. Mulvey, would handle Red River on a freelance basis in exchange for 3 percent of the gross. In mid-September, the verbal deal was called off, partly because Mulvey’s slow playoff pattern annoyed the MPI partners, but mostly because the Goldwyn sales arm was increasingly busy with A Song Is Born, which was competing with Red River for the same theaters in some cities, creating a conflict of interest. At this point, with Hawks’s endorsement, Grad Sears took personal control of the selling of Red River, which opened in New York and other major eastern cities on September 29, to huge business. By mid-October, when it finally debuted in Los Angeles, it was the number-three box-office film nationally, after Johnny Belinda and Sorry, Wrong Number, and two weeks later it moved up to number one.
Releasing through Hughes-controlled RKO, Goldwyn launched A Song Is Born in New York and Chicago on October 19, to some unusually nasty reviews. But even though the musical didn’t ring up the colossal numbers of Danny Kaye’s earlier crowd pleasers, the film did very strong business, playing for more than two months in some of its first-run engagements. Strikingly, in the first week of November, A Song Is Born was the number-one box-office film in the nation, and Red River was number two. In those days no mention was made of the fact that the same man directed both films, nor was Hawks around to promote the fact himself, but the double-barreled success did testify to Hawks’s remarkable and unbroken commercial winning streak that now stretched back across nine films and ten years. The two films remained in the top dozen box-office attractions through Christmas, and Variety announced that Red River, with domestic rentals of $4,150,000, was the number-three film of the year, just slightly behind the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby smash Road to Rio and MGM’s lavish musical Easter Parade. Hawks was declared the number-six “money director” of the year. The film was Hawks’s most popular since Sergeant York.
All this did Hawks little good financially, since he had long since spent himself out of a meaningful share of the profits. Because he had worked on a deferral, Hawks didn’t receive any of his $125,000 salary until the picture officially went into profit after the 1952 reissue, and even then his share was only $56,405, the rest going to Athole, Slim, and Feldman; subtract taxes, and Hawks cleared less than $30,000 for all his work, which makes it more apparent why he felt forced to accept A Song Is Born and his subsequent contract at Fox. For its part, A Song Is Born ultimately took in $2.4 million at the box office, very good but not good enough compared to the unnecessary amount Goldwyn spent on it.
But the book was far from closed on Red River and Monterey’s problems. From the time the company departed Arizona to years after the film had come and gone from theaters, the filmmakers were beseiged with lawsuits from creditors whom Hawks, in line with his usual treatment of everyone from bookies to the corner grocer, had left in the lurch. Among the twenty-eight claimants were an assistant director, Southern Pacific rail, thirty-one actors, and the rancher who had rented them the steers. The most egregious grievance was that of John Wayne, whom one would have thought no one in Hollywood would want to alienate. Despite UA’s agreement to compensate the star first, full payment of his guaranteed profit was not forthcoming until 1952, although Famous Artists placated him with loans in the interim. As of 1952, creditors were still owed approximately $175,000 by Monterey.
Most incredible of all was the company’s failure to reimburse Pathé Laboratories for its processing and printing of the film. In order to not hold up the film’s release any further, the lab generously turned out the full order of more than four hundred prints in 1948 without immediate compensation. Unfortunately, no one—not Monterey, MPI, or UA—took responsibility for the bill (it was actually MPI’s obligation), and it got to the point where, at 10 A.M. on July 20, 1951, the lab held an auction to get what it could for the film’s negative and soundtrack. The catch was that the buyer would not own the rights to the picture, but the true owner, for lack of the elements, would be effectively prevented from making 16mm or TV prints. Even though Pathé was owed less than five thousand dollars, up to the day of the auction, the interested parties were all acting like cagey poker players, bluffing one another by not stepping up and paying off the small debt. In fact, the ploy worked for MPI, which managed to buy the thirteen cans of negative and sound at auction for fifteen hundred dollars. But Pathé then immediately announced plans for another auction, on August 21, at which an enormous amount of other Red River material would be sold to the highest bidder. Hawks’s business associate Ed Lasker won with a bid of $2,777, the price of the lien plus costs. Hawks had Lasker buy the material because, since it was not copyrighted, he and Feldman were afraid that another buyer would use it in another film or television show. In any event, it remains astonishing that the makers of so great and valuable a film could treat their creation, and those who helped them achieve it, in such a cavalier fashion, with so little regard for its condition and eventual fate.
In 1953, in the wake of the reissue, some profits began trickling in, with 69 percent going to MPI, 25 percent to Monterey, and 6 percent to John Wayne. The following year, Monterey actually received $15,602 in profit participation, of which 18½ percent went to Hawks and 10 percent was given to Slim. Despite periodic offers for the television rights, Monterey finally sold Red River outright to UA in 1957 for $225,000. MPI had been dissolved the year before after making its partners a great deal of money, while Monterey, whose shareholders did considerably less well, followed suit two years later, but not before having to pay off the $18,000 still due some creditors. Thus ended, with a whimper, Hawks’s long-abandoned dream of being a true independent producer in total control of his own destiny.
Critically, Red River was as well received as any straightforward Western was permitted to be in the 1940s or 1950s. During those two decades, when Westerns were at their greatest and most abundant and therefore taken entirely too much for granted, the only Westerns nominated for the best-picture Oscar were The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon, and Shane, the first two among the most socially conscious Westerns ever made. Essentially, if your aspirations did not include political and symbolic commentary beyond the normal scope of the genre, you could forget serious consideration from the critics and tastemakers. The same went for John Wayne, who got very good reviews for Red River—Variety spoke for many when it said that he “has his best assignment to date and he makes the most of it”—but the lion’s share of the attention went to Montgomery Clift, who became the raging heartthrob of millions of teenage girls.
Still, time and perspectives change and, as good and unusual as Clift was in the film, the film historian Jeanine Basinger more recently made the incisive point that “a nonmovie lover is the person who walks out of Red River talking about Montgomery Clift.” Hawks always liked to say how John Ford, who allegedly helped edit certain sequences in Red River, told him upon seeing Wayne’s performance as Dunson, “I never knew the sonofabitch could act.” Wayne backed the story up, stating that, “Jack never respected me as an actor until I made Red River,” and it was immediately thereafter that Ford starred Wayne in a series of roles that were much more complex and demanding than any he had offered him previously. In any event, nothing Wayne had done before quite prepared the viewer for the sheer force and turbulence of his performance as Dunson; there is no question that it was his breakthrough role.
Like the similar independent ventures of Capra, Wyler, Stevens, Sturges, Hitchcock, Lang, and others, Hawks’s didn’t last long—just one film. Because of the tremendous autonomy Hawks had commandeered at the studios prior to this, he didn’t have appreciably more artistic freedom on Red River than he’d had on any of his earlier pictures, nor did he have the slightes
t inclination to use his freedom to make “art” films, such as Ford’s The Fugitive, or message pictures even in the mainstream vein of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. The secret of Hawks’s enduring success was that there was no difference between the manner of films he wanted to make and what the studios craved; he just wanted to make them on his own terms, without the interference of meddlesome producers and executives, and at maximum profit to himself. Being left to his own devices, and exposing himself financially to his investors when he hadn’t nearly the expertise or self-discipline to beat them at their own game, proved fatal to his dreams of continued independence. But he made a classic film in the process, and Red River introduced him to the only place other than the modern world he was ever to find accommodating to his imagination: the American West.
29
Skirting Trouble: I Was a Male War Bride
Although time would prove her wrong, Slim felt that Hawks was being very civilized about the divorce. And the feeling was mutual, for, although she could have tried to clean her husband out, she didn’t feel motivated to do so. In their property settlement, Slim agreed that she could be supported “in her customary manner” by just five thousand dollars in alimony from Hawks per year, to terminate in the event of her remarriage, and six thousand dollars in annual child support for Kitty. She would also keep her two cars, the money in her personal checking account, her interest in Monterey and some other business ventures, selected furniture, silverware and bric-a-brac from the house, and her clothing and jewelry. The jewelry, much of it bought by Hawks or, at least, with his money, consisted of more than fifty items and was worth in the tens of thousands of dollars. With Slim poised to marry Leland Hayward as soon as both divorces came through, perhaps it seemed pointless for her to press for too large a settlement, although something could have gone wrong with Hayward. As far as Hawks was concerned, once Slim moved out, he washed his hands of her and Kitty; his view on his little daughter was that since she would never remember him anyway, she could be raised as Hayward’s own.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 60