Western Movies

I got Red River from Netflix a while back, and finally got to watch it last night. I had remembered the film very fondly as being one of the better Duke westerns I had seen.

I don't know if time has changed my approach, but I admit to a certain level of disappointment. It's a good film, but it doesn't have the impact I remember it having. There's a great deal of sort of "Western Panorama" kind of thing, which I suspect works nicely in a movie theater but not so well on TV. After a while, though, it gets kind of dull.

There are some tense, dramatic moments in the movie that work very well. The scene where the mutiny finally happens and Duke is surrounded by all these people an inch away from killing him is terrific. Then the whole thing ends in a completely unrealistic, funny approach that I think was completely out of context. Duke did funny films, where the humor is perfectly fine, but it sounds a wrong note here. The final fight scene is highly charged and climactic, and then it ends flat.

I guess '40s westerns all needed happy endings, but I think this one would have been a better film without it.