Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (74 page)

The financing for
Red River
was set up by Feldman, with Hawks’s full complicity and knowledge. After considering the names Sunset,
Wilshire, and Ambassador Productions, they settled on the more evocatively western monicker of Monterey Productions for their company, which was incorporated at the end of 1945 with Hawks, Slim, and Feldman as the principal shareholders. In exchange for their ownership positions, the principals all loaned Monterey amounts totalling nearly $80,000 for initial operating expenses, specifically the
purchase of Chase’s story. Feldman, who would serve as executive producer, and Hawks initially set the budget at an unrealistic $1,258,000 for a seventy-two-day shoot, but by May this was increased to $1,750,000. Hawks would receive a relatively standard $125,000 to produce and direct, but he and his wife also stood to rake in 57 percent of the profits based on their majority ownership of Monterey.
Feldman, who would receive 24 percent, began shopping the project around to several prospective partners, including Universal Pictures, Sam Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Joseph Schenck at Fox, and even Joseph P. Kennedy, who hadn’t been actively involved in the film business in more than a decade.

Instead, Feldman worked out a scheme by which the film would be funded by a combination of private
financing and bank loans. A crafty former actor and agent, Edward Small had for twenty years been a successful but artistically undistinguished independent producer working mainly with United Artists. Knowing Feldman and Hawks well, he rounded up a group of eight other wealthy show-business figures, mostly lawyers and distribution executives, to form a syndicate blandly known as the Motion Picture
Investors Corporation. To cover the rest of the film’s budget MPI agreed to
advance $675,000, with an additional $900,000 supplied by a loan from Security-First National Bank in Beverly Hills. Shortly thereafter, the picture landed at United Artists under a multipicture deal Eddie Small made for his productions. UA would receive its distributor’s share first, followed by MPI and the bank; only
after they were paid off would Monterey receive its monies.

At first, Hawks figured on shooting the picture on its natural settings in Texas. Governor Coke R. Stevenson assured the company of the state’s complete cooperation in everything from water, power, and transportation, “lenient application of State Humane Laws in ‘stunt’ scenes,” “cooperation of the Labor Commissioner’s Office in avoiding
interference by unions,” and advantageous prices on cattle. But Hawks needed a location where the diverse terrains for the separate sections of the story would be easily available, to prevent time-consuming moves of the base camp and cattle. Potential locations were scouted in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Mexico before an ideal spot turned up in Arizona. Businessman C. H. Symington of Detroit, whose
brother had gone to Yale with Kenneth Hawks, owned a large spread in the remote southern part of the state, twenty-five miles from the Mexican border. The town closest to the property was Elgin, population seven, which was on a large plain with an elevation of five thousand feet. Nearby were the Whetstone Mountains and Apache Peak, and the area’s scenery was so diverse that the company never
had to range farther than fifteen miles from camp.

At once, the ranch was transformed as if it were an army encampment. The Anderson Boarding and Supply Company put up seventy-five portable tents equipped with electricity and running water for the cast and crew to stay in. No one could complain about the accommodations at Camp Anderson, or the food, which was uncommonly outstanding for a location
shoot. The only set needed in Arizona was for the picture’s climax at Abilene, which consisted largely of false fronts, but construction work started on four stages at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood on sets for the interior and night scenes that would be shot there subsequently. The costumer Joe De Young quit before production began, but not before making dozens of sketches of the proper outfits
for the various characters, with special attention to distinctive hats, since Hawks believed that this was the easiest way for audiences to recognize otherwise undifferentiated characters, such as the cowboys. Characters in
Red River
wear a stovepipe and derby in addition to the regular cowboy hats, and when he arrived in Arizona, Hawks was so pleased with Clift’s dedication to learning cowboy
ways that, as a vote of confidence, he
gave his young star an old hat Gary Cooper had given him, and its weather-beaten look was perfect for the picture.

Hawks also gave all the principals in the film “Red River D” belt buckles based on the design Wayne’s Tom Dunson draws in the ground. Hawks went to a silversmith in Nogales to have these gifts made, and each of the beautiful buckles, on which
gold inlays marked the banks of the river, was initialed for its intended recipient, with the men, including Wayne, Clift, Walter Brennan, Russ Harlan, David Hawks, and a few others, getting full-sized buckles and the women, Joanne Dru, Slim, and Barbara Hawks among them, receiving smaller versions. Wayne wore his in many subsequent pictures, and at one point, he and Hawks exchanged buckles in a
gesture of friendship. Hawks lost his—the one initialed J.W.—but David Hawks was extremely impressed years later when he noticed that the enormous sculpture of the Duke in front of the airport in California’s Orange County that bears his name correctly has the initials H.W.H. engraved on the buckle’s facsimile.

The company originally intended to start shooting by August 26, but there were too
many loose ends for Hawks to get away that soon. Clift, Joanne Dru, and Coleen Gray were cast only at the last minute, the logistics were demanding, and the script needed more work, which would persist right through shooting. Even the title continued to be a topic of much back-and-forth. Chase’s original
Break Of Dawn
had been abandoned in favor of the more historical
The Chisholm Trail
, which
is the title the
Saturday Evening Post
wanted to use for its serialization. It was Hawks who came up with
Red River
, which everyone else objected to for many reasons: it had only incidental relevance to the story, it didn’t begin to suggest the epic scope the film would have, and it smacked of such previous Republic B Western titles as
Red River Valley
and
Red River Renegades
. Feldman hated it
so much that he tried to buy the title of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s aviation novel
Wind, Sand, and Stars
and, when that proved impossible, implored his staff to come up with a close approximation. At one point,
Stampede
was announced as the new title, but Monogram already owned it. Hawks, who naturally wanted the serialization to serve as advance promotion for the picture, was upset when the
Post
refused to substitute his title for Chase’s.

There were also uncertainties about key production personnel. Hawks desperately wanted Gregg Toland, who had done such dramatic work with western landscapes and parched faces on Ford’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, to
be his cinematographer. Toland had just finished Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
and was technically available, but Sam Goldwyn, to whom
he was under contract, knew very well Hawks’s tendancy to go way over schedule and, needing Toland to be free for
The Bishop’s Wife
, declined to loan him out. Instead, Hawks picked Russell Harlan, who had been shooting for ten years but was just beginning to move up from B Westerns to more prestigious projects. This began a close association that continued through seven films and seventeen years.
A rugged, no-nonsense former stuntman with a rarified artistic side, Harlan could easily have played one of the parts in the film.

Hawks debated at length whether or not to shoot in color, as Selznick had done with his giant Western
Duel in the Sun
, but he felt that color film at that time still looked “garish” and was not as conducive to evoking a period look as black-and-white. To compose the
score, Aaron Copland’s name was advanced; he had just won a Pulitzer Prize for
Appalachian Spring
, but Hawks, who liked the music in his films to be minimal and self-effacing, went instead with his good friend Dimitri Tiomkin, who had first worked for him on
Only Angels Have Wings
. Tiomkin created an outstanding soundtrack for him this time and would go on to score four more pictures for him.

Just before leaving Los Angeles, Hawks also had to spend a great deal of time on the screenplay to placate Joseph Breen, who found it “wholly unacceptable” for approval under the Production Code for numerous reasons: the various killings by Dunson and Matthew seemed like outright, unpunished murders; Dunson was unduly brutal in general; the women were all clearly prostitutes; Matthew and Tess Millay
clearly had “an illicit sex affair,” and animals seemed to be in store for abusive treatment. On August 23, Hawks had a long meeting with Breen, at which he assured the industry’s morality watchdog that all of those problems would be reversed, to the point of consulting the American Humane Society regarding the animals.

Breen, however, still had dozens of specific objections to the script, which
in its first draft was, for a Western, unusually loaded with sexual references. In particular, Walter Brennan’s character of Groot, the cook, was constantly making off-color comments, such as “It’ll make a better man out of me in less time it takes a rooster to make a chicken grin,” and “Women don’t seem like much till you ain’t been getting none,” all of which had to go. Groot was also used as
an exasperated witness to Dunson and Fen’s leave-taking,
making faces as Dunson tells his woman he loves her and will send for her, then fingering his long black whip as they embraced and kissed; Breen didn’t care for this at all. Cherry Valance and Matthew also got off quite a few suggestive remarks, and in general, the original script was spilling over with what, for the time, were very frank
and natural remarks from men without women—dreams, fantasies, braggadocio expressed in terms unlike anything ever heard in a Hollywood Western. Hawks was forced to eliminate the Donegal’s women because they were all, bluntly, whores, as well as to cut anything that suggested that Matthew and Tess slept together, especially the night before Dunson was to arrive in Abilene, when Tess tried using sex
to convince Matthew not to face the older man; in the finished film, the only tip-off as to the extent of their relations is the reappearance of Fen’s bracelet on Tess’s arm. Breen was also upset that Tess agrees to bear Dunson a son with no mention of marriage, and any number of references to Matthew’s many past affairs had to go. In short, the
Red River
script, originally so sexed up, was almost
entirely sanitized by Joe Breen.

Hawks finally got away at the end of August and stayed briefly in Tucson before moving on to Nogales and finally Camp Anderson at Elgin. Filming started September 3, on a seventy-six-day schedule, with scenes between Dunson and Groot and then the introduction of Clift’s Matthew. John Ford had sent along a fare-thee-well note to Hawks saying, “take care of my boy
Duke and get a great picture.” With Wayne, Hawks’s main challenge was helping him find a comfortable approach to playing a man who was, presumably, fourteen years older than he was. At first, Hawks felt that Wayne was overdoing it, and as he had done before, notably with Walter Catlett and Katharine Hepburn on
Bringing Up Baby
, he asked Walter Brennan to give the Duke some pointers. But Wayne
rightly rejected Brennan’s suggestions to shuffle and slump more when he walked, feeling it would detract from Dunson’s stature. In fact, Wayne had never looked bigger on-screen than he did in
Red River
, and he subtly conveyed middle age through the exertion necessary for his physical scenes and his fatigue at the end of the day.

As for Brennan, Hawks remembered his initial meeting with Brennan
at the start of
Barbary Coast
and asked the actor to work “without”—teeth, that is. Brennan initially balked but Hawks goaded him into it, resulting in the funniest running gag in the picture, in which his Indian pal Chief Yowlachie wins his dentures in a poker game and gives them back to Brennan only at chow time. But Hawks could not talk Wayne into performing a scene in which Dunson gets his
finger caught between a saddle horn
and a rope and some of the boys cut it off. Wayne didn’t think it was funny, and it is hard to imagine Dunson submitting to this, but the Duke admitted he was wrong when he saw how well the gag worked for Kirk Douglas in
The Big Sky
a few years later.

In a very short time, Clift had acquired the look, the saddle skills, and the diffident attitude of a fine
cowboy; Hawks himself taught him the distinctive little hop he made into the saddle’s stirrup and suggested the business of putting a strand of wheat in his mouth, rolling cigarettes and lighting them for his costar, and rubbing the side of his nose while in thought. But while the skeptical Wayne soon came to see he was working with a good actor, he simply couldn’t believe that compact, refined-looking,
five-foot-ten kid could stand up to him or look believable in a fight with him. “He’s a little queer, don’t you think?” Wayne had asked his secretary after his first, off-putting meeting with Clift in Hollywood.

Hawks’s initial direction to Clift was to not compete with the big man on his own level. “No, don’t try to get hard, because you’ll just be nothing compared to Wayne,” the director instructed,
suggesting instead that Clift underplay his scenes with a pensive cool that Hawks was betting would contrast well with Wayne’s ferociousness and overpowering physicality. Clift’s stage-trained approach, in which he studied his lines for hours, was “baloney” to Hawks, and he decided to cure him of it at once by performing an improvisation with Wayne on a subject of Clift’s choosing. For Hawks,
it was a character’s attitude that mattered more than the specific lines, and that the actor be alive to the possibilities of a scene and the other actors; The last thing he wanted was an actor who was locked down, in another world. The improvisation opened Clift’s eyes; as Slim had predicted, he would learn a lot working with Hawks and the Duke.