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RED RIVER (1988)
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
This RED RIVER would be a solid TV Western if it wasn’t impossible not to compare it to the Hawks masterpiece.
No one can fill John Wayne’s boots but James Arness can at least put them on and walk around. His performance as Dunson is the best part of this remake; he brings a heft and grit to the part that I can’t see any other actor from that era (and definitely no one from now) being capable of. Bruce Boxleitner isn’t bad but he actually compares worse to his predecessor. And the rest of the cast is evidence that character actors from the 80s were good but not nearly as good as the stock companies that Ford and Hawks cultivated.
What bugs me most about RED RIVER is how it’s shot. It’s clear they were working on a limited budget since many scenes box the actors into close ups and then cut to stock footage or b-roll of real cowboys pushing the cattle. Now, that’s a trick everyone uses and I’m sure it was done in the original RED RIVER but Hawks and his team made us feel like Wayne and Clift were really there with the herd, whereas these folks don’t have the shooting and editing skills to do so. It makes the film feel cheap and prevented me from getting involved with the characters’ journey. But most of this 80s movie does work, especially when the script diverts from the original and does its own thing. I wish they’d made the ending even more different than the Hawks version because only Hawks can pull
Like the 1986 remake of STAGECOACH which I recently watched, this effort from 1988 has some fine qualities but doesn’t measure up to the movie it came from.
Watched on Tubi
