Part 1 – Red River (1948), the next film we are going to study, is interesting to compare and contrast with Stagecoach (1939). This is fun to do because you are all now such experts on Stagecoach that you could teach the film, don’t you think?

There are many similarities between the films. Both films are about journeys taken by groups of people who find themselves transformed by that journey. In Stagecoach, Dallas and Doc start the film as outcasts but redeem themselves by assisting Mrs. Mallory who also changes from being a prejudiced snob to a woman who feels compassion and respect for a less fortunate woman, Dallas. Hatfield also redeems himself even though it costs him his life and, of course, we have Mr. Gatewood…the poison…who cannot be redeemed, but does finally have justice served to him. Mr. Peacock, always a good man, stays just the way he is to remind us some people don’t need to change.

Part 2
My dictionary defines an epic as:
1: a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero. E.g. the Iliad and the Odyssey are epics
2: a novel or drama about a legendary or historical hero
3: a series of events or body of legend or tradition about a legendary or historical hero”
We can add to this list :
4: A movie about a legendary or historical hero”

Epics also tend to be long stories that take place over  great distances and involve important events in history. With Red River we hit all three of these.
Before we take a look at the first excerpt, I want to tell you about the most obvious thing Red River has in common with Stagecoach: John Wayne. Stagecoach was the film that made John Wayne a Hollywood star, but for many people, including John Ford, Red River was the film that proved he was also a talented actor.
After seeing Red River, John Ford famously said, “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!” Ford was joking of course, because Wayne had acted very well in Stagecoach. But his character in Red River is a far more complex character than The Ringo Kid. Shall we meet him? Let’s go to Excerpt #1 where Thomas Dunson and Nadine Groot leave the wagon train. 

Part 4 – So, while Stagecoach has a happy ending, Red River has a very sad beginning. Thomas Dunson will never be reunited with the woman who told him “the sun only shines for half the day” because she has probably been killed in the Indian attack on the wagon train…that is  if she were lucky enough to have been killed quickly. The film does not play on the same fear that Stagecoach plays on; that a white woman taken prisoner by the Indians would be raped and tortured before being killed, but we know she has met a bad end because Thomas finds his bracelet on the wrist of the warrior he has killed.

Wagon Master is based on real history. The Mormons were a relatively new religious group who were violently persecuted in the midwest states of Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. To escape religious persecution, they began to head to the west in 1846. Ford’s film is based on the much later Mormon expedition known as the San Juan Mission or the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition, which took place in late 1879 and early 1880. They were headed towards what is today southeastern Utah. Interestingly, the events in this film happen at almost exactly the same time as the fictional events in Stagecoach.

Part 5 – Dunson and Groot have found the only survivor from the wagon train, a fourteen year old boy named Matthew Garth who was chasing his lost cow when the Indians attacked. Obviously, Thomas Dunson and Nadine Groot have been together for a long time because when the Captain of the Wagon train asked “are you going with him?” Groot starts to explain, “Captain, me and Dunson…well, it’s me and Dunson”. Now they are taking Matthew with them and one interpretation is to see them as forming a kind of family group….except that this wasn’t exactly what families were supposed to look like in Hollywood movies in 1948. One way to make this family more acceptable or “normal” looking is to assign each member a traditional “role” to play. Rather than being three men (or two men and a boy) of different generations, audiences might imagine (and the writer might suggest) Tom as the Father, Matthew as the son and Groot as either a grandfather…or perhaps even as the “mother”, seriously. I will talk about Groot as Mother figure in later lectures. 

The real ages of the actors corresponded closely with the ages of their characters at this point in the move: Wayne was 39, Walter Brennan (Groot) was 50 and Mickey Kuhn (playing young Matt) was 14. Are they just three males helping each other to survive in the old west or do they form a kind of family?

Part 6 – When they arrive at the place Dunson wants to make his ranch they build a fire in order to “brand” the cattle. What was this all about? Take a good look at that landscape. It is mostly grassland with no trees or even stones, just wide-open range. As Dunson says, the land is good for raising cattle because there is plenty for the animals to eat. But the problem was that there was no way (at this time) to fence the animals. So, how would you know which cattle were yours and which belonged to someone else? You would brand your cattle to know which were yours. The word “brand” dates back to Old Norse, the ancient North Germanic language from which modern Scandinavian languages derived. Brand originally referred to a piece of burning wood. As the word came to be used in Old English it evolved to mean ‘burning’ and eventually in Middle English to the verb sense ‘mark with a hot iron’, which in turn gave rise to the noun sense ‘a mark of ownership made by branding’ (mid-17th century). For your homework you will be reading about brands and branding.

Part 7 – So, Tom is very clear about how he feels about written contracts. He believes in them and he says that if he had signed one he would obey it. But he also makes it clear that since he didn’t sign a contract he is free to do as he pleases and nobody is going to force him to do what he doesn’t want to do because, as he delicately puts it, “I’m too good a gun for you to argue with”, (i.e., he will defend his rights with that gun). Well, yeah, this is the wild West and men (and women) protected themselves and protected their rights with guns. But let’s see how Tom uses that gun in the very next scene after the cattle are branded.

Part 8 – Let me explain the background to this confrontation. Both the United States and Mexico had once been colonies, of England and Spain, respectively. But both countries fought and won their independence in wars against their mother countries: the U.S.A. Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the Mexican war of Independence (1810-1821). However, in 1836 the Mexican state of Texas rebelled against the central government of Mexico and declared itself to be an independent country, The Republic of Texas (1836-1845). In 1846, The Republic of Texas voted to become a state within the United Sates of America and this triggered The Mexican-American War (1846 -1848). The result was that the United States not only acquired Texas, but also the present-day U.S. states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, the western half of New Mexico, the western quarter of Colorado, and the southwest corner of Wyoming. Mexico lost 55% of its territory to the United States in that conflict. It was the single largest permanent conquest of land by war in the last five hundred years.