TIOMKIN: Red River
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Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979) Red River Film Score, 1948 Howard Hawks produced Red River, a saga of the cattle drives of old. The star [was] John Wayne, who...
Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979)
Red River Film Score, 1948
Howard Hawks produced Red River, a saga of the
cattle drives of old. The star [was] John Wayne, who
can move in the grand style among cowboys and
rustlers, a lord of the prairie. So there I was, musically
in the middle of the West again. A fellow Russian said
to me: 'How can you, a Russian from the St Petersburg
Conservatory, write music for a Western?'
'Well,' I replied in Russian, 'Did Johann Strauss,
when he wrote 'The Blue Danube,' know how to
swim?
- Dimitri Tiomkin
Ever westward, from the banks of the wide American
rivers--the Missouri, the Ohio, the Mississippi and the
Shenandoah--to the expanse of the Great Plains, to the
sweeping vistas of Monument Valley, to the flatlands
of Texas and the Chisholm trail...
And then beyond lies a continent of legendary
scores for Hollywood Westerns, a topography of myths
and legends.
Some are signposts, Garden of Evil (1954), Tribute
to a Bad Man (1956), Bite the Bullet (1975) and the
television mini-series, Lonesome Dove (1989). Then
others are huge territories marked with towering mesas
and massive cliffs--Max Steiner Territory, Alfred
Newman Territory.
And Dimitri Tiomkin Territory, where the Red
River T brand--T for Tiomkin--rules over an
expansive range of great film music that includes Duel
in the Sun (1946), The Big Sky (1952), High Noon
(1952), Giant (1956), Night Passage (1957), Gunfight
at the O.K. Corral (1957) and Rio Bravo (1959).
Here on this frontier where longitude and latitude
intersect, three great scores triangulate as cornerstones
for assessing any music for Hollywood Westerns: Max
Steiner's The Searchers (1956), Alfred Newman's
How the West was Won (1962), and arguably the
greatest, Dimitri Tiomkin's Red River (1948). All other
scores for Westerns surely follow these three great
works in both quality and cinematic application.
These scores are prime examples of music as
narrative literature. Proceeding from the premise that
all film music is linked to cinematic narrative, then all
music for films works best as orchestral narrative. Stray
too far into the abstract and the music becomes an
anonymous irrelevance when experienced away from
its source--or worse, it becomes a musical lampoon of
counterpoint. On the other hand, a great film music
composer can wed the abstract to specific orchestral
descriptions and cinematic flow--mindful of
symbolism and narrative--and create a truly rich,
rewarding and exciting listening experience quite apart
from the film.
An unabashed, self-admitted showman, eager to
please audiences, Dimitri Tiomkin became increasingly
adept at this--and in this respect, Red River is his first
really great personal score, the first to truly bear his
bold stylistic signature as he became one of the most
renowned maestros of Hollywood's Golden Age of
Motion Picture Music.
... Tiomkin has always had the ability to compose
music which pulses and surges, and he has attempted
whenever possible to be involved with his films while
they were being made, rather than wait until they
were completed before writing his music. His
characteristic of writing powerfully accented rhythms
in the bass clef is virtually a trademark, and what is
also characteristic of Tiomkin is his love of being a
film celebrity ... if nothing else, it has helped bring
attention to the otherwise somewhat neglected role of
being a film composer ...
- Tony Thomas
Film Score: The View from the Podium
Born in the Ukraine in 1894, Dimitri Tiomkin
spent much of his boyhood at his mother's side at the
piano as she taught him the power and art of music. By
age thirteen, he had entered the prestigious St
Petersburg Conservatory and studied piano with Felix
Blumenfeld. There, Tiomkin came under the influence
of Alexander Glazunov, the renowned Russian
classical composer who taught the young man
counterpoint and harmony.
As a student, Tiomkin earned money playing piano
for silent films, an after-school job that surely had an
impact on his later years in life as a film music
composer. What better way to understand the
relationship between film, music and an audience than
by accompanying the silent images on that larger-thanlife
silver screen? It was an experience that stayed with
him the rest of his life--and gave Tiomkin a rare
appreciation of that magical sublimation of sight, sound
and music that can occur when each facet of the
cinematic experience is melded into one memorable
emotion.
Like so many Russians, he emigrated to Western
Europe after the wrenching violence and politics of the
Russian Revolution. The young Tiomkin was featured
in a variety of playbills, including being a piano soloist
with the great Berlin Philharmonic. Traveling on to
Paris, the City of Lights, he became popular for
performing contemporary Russian, German and French
musical works.
And in that extraordinary creative milieu of art and
life, Tiomkin first encountered a lifelong love--
American jazz--and gave the brilliant European
première of Gershwin's Concerto in F major to raves
from critics and audiences alike.
Then Hollywood came knocking. Tiomkin sold
several original jazz compositions to Metro Goldwyn
Mayer. After playing Carnegie Hall and other
prestigious venues--as the Great Depression hit with
full force--Tiomkin and his first wife, Albertina Rasch,
set out for Tinseltown, where they had been invited to
produce ballet numbers for films. But ever shrewd, he
soon saw an exceptional opportunity in film music, a
new art for the new technology of talking motion
pictures. Tiomkin composed a score for an early
version of Resurrection (1931) and a charming
adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1933).
Hollywood was still comparatively primitive. One day
I looked out my bedroom window and saw a man
running along the street and a policeman chasing
him and shooting. The fugitive fell and a splotch of
red appeared on the pavement. Wonderful, I
thought--Hollywood realism. Then I noticed there
wasn't any camera ...
- Dimitri Tiomkin
Tiomkin's first great opportunity as a film
composer came in 1937, when a short, rapid-fire
cinematic genius named Frank Capra took a chance on
a Russian composer to score a major epic--the
Columbia Pictures production of James Hilton's
popular book, Lost Horizon. It was a creative
benchmark for Tiomkin and the beginning of a special
association with Capra: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It's a Wonderful
Life (1946). (Capra, however, hedged his hard-eight
throw of the dice on Tiomkin by hiring Max Steiner to
conduct the Lost Horizon score.) The bet paid off--the
music for Lost Horizon remains one of the greatest
scores ever written for a film.
At the Hollywood première [of Lost Horizon], I met
George Gershwin going into the theater. "They tell
me, Dimi, you have something special here," he said
... During the picture, I sat behind him and soon, he
turned and nodded, and gave the Broadway-
Hollywood sign of excellence--thumb and forefinger
making a circle. That, I felt, was tops in criticism ...
Lost Horizon brought me offers from various
producers including Sam Goldwyn ...
- Dimitri Tiomkin
Capra's influence on Tiomkin was considerable.
The director loved American music standards and folk
songs. It was a powerful way to connect an idea and an
emotion with audiences. "Buffalo Girls" marks the
main title of It's a Wonderful Life; American anthems
scroll through Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The
unused end titles composed for Meet John Doe are the
musical blueprints for Duel in The Sun (as well as
perhaps an indication of woes to come on It's a
Wonderful Life). Tiomkin learned a lot from Capra and
gained an extensive working knowledge of America's
favorite music and folk songs. But instinctually as an
artist, Tiomkin knew that there was more to scoring a
film than fitting folk songs into soundstage
performance.
... I was born into a family of concert musicians.
When you have thought in terms of music as long as I
have, it is easier to write original music than to bother
recalling appropriate bars of music written in the past.
After all, scenes and even sequences change so swiftly
on the screen that very often there isn't time for more
than a couple of measures. It is really simpler and
more effective to compose than to rummage around
classical music to find something that expresses the
idea ...
- Dimitri Tiomkin
During this formative period, in addition to
working with Capra, Tiomkin scored other films, none
of which matched the quality of Capra's movies. That
creative association--and close friendship--would
come to an end with It's a Wonderful Life. Tiomkin
adhered to the Capra formula for film scoring for some
of It's a Wonderful Life. The main title's "Buffalo
Girls" is romantic and nostalgic and there's notably a
poignantly powerful use of "Red River Valley" for the
relationship of hero George Bailey and his father. But
in the orchestral narratives that framed this rather dark
story of a good man who regrets missed opportunities
and faces scandal and suicide, Tiomkin stretched
beyond what he would normally score for a Capra film.
The music as originally intended by Tiomkin gives It's
a Wonderful Life a special depth of darkness--even
horror. But Capra didn't like it. At the last moment, he
scrapped major portions of the score, dropping in
standards and Hollywood left-overs and tossing huge
chunks of Tiomkin's music to the cutting-room floor.
Nothing was ever the same again between these two
great film artists.
Despite what he considered the artistic and
personal setback of scoring It's a Wonderful Life,
Tiomkin's reputation as a composer for films grew.
Earlier, Tiomkin earned the opportunity to write music
for David O. Selznick's Duel in the Sun, his lust-in-thedust
super Western. (Selznick actually invited
Hollywood's great composers to compete for scoring
the film.) The epic oater was a box office success, a
critical yawn, and Tiomkin's music a smash hit. The
sensuous love theme and Tiomkin's grandiose, novel
orchestral narrative broke new ground for film music--
and for Tiomkin's reputation. Music from the film was
released in a popular three-record 78 rpm album
performed by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, an
unprecedented event for the times. Selznick then
engaged Tiomkin to adapt music by Debussy and write
original music based on those themes for the haunting
Portrait of Jennie (1949).
Dimitri Tiomkin was well on the way to becoming
one of the best known film composers in Hollywood.
Tiomkin's relation to the Hollywood scene was more
than incidental ... he was one of those expatriates of
immense energy, determination and resilience who
actually helped create the Hollywood myth ... those
like Tiomkin who blazed a trail in Hollywood were
actually winning the West all over again. This is
surely why Tiomkin's Western music has such a
dynamism and commitment, for in it he is surely
reliving a part of his own experience ...
- Christopher Palmer
Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait
And then there was Red River, Tiomkin's first
great personal score, a work that fully delineates his
matchless style and approach to composing music for
films. Echoes of folk songs are used here and there in
Red River but only rarely to deftly bridge Tiomkin's
truly original orchestral narrative. As he matured as an
artist and composer, the technique was dropped
completely. But Tiomkin kept a keen ear and
appreciation for the structure of those old songs as
evidenced by High Noon, which was built around an
original Tiomkin "folk song." Gunfight at the O.K.
Corral, Friendly Persuasion and Tension at Table Rock
(1956) continued that Tiomkin hallmark approach to
Westerns. It became, in fact, a sort of trademark of the
Tiomkin sound. Contemporary film music composer
Basil Poledouris, who wrote the score for Lonesome
Dove, once mused that the best approach to writing a
Western score was to create themes that sounded like
folk tunes but were actually original compositions.
Tiomkin developed that technique and made it
uniquely his own throughout his great Western scores.
For his last score for Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo
(1959), again starring John Wayne, Tiomkin revisited
his score from Red River, tying the two films and the
works of that great director and Wayne together in one
powerful film music experience. "Settle Down"
became "My Rifle, My Pony and Me," Rio Bravo's
main title, and went on to become a hit recording by
one of the film's stars, Dean Martin.
When John Wayne poured his heart and personal
fortune into filming The Alamo (1960), he looked to
Dimitri Tiomkin for music. For Wayne, the composer
created one of the greatest--and most admired--scores
of all time. Everything that Tiomkin knew--and
loved--about America is reflected in this epic score.
The music brims with Tiomkin "folk songs": "Here's to
the Ladies," "Tennessee Babe," the haunting "Green
Leaves of Summer," and the gallant "Ballad of the
Alamo." Shouldering the songs and the roaring onscreen
action is a brilliant, full-blooded orchestral tone
poem which eloquently portrays one of the most valiant
moments in American history.
But Tiomkin was much more than a composer of
music for Westerns; he wrote superb scores for
virtually every sort of Hollywood film. For the next
twenty years, Tiomkin's name would stand as a
keystone to the success of some of Hollywood's
greatest films by its greatest directors--notably Alfred
Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, George
Stevens and Stanley Kramer.
Among Tiomkin's masterful scores are Shadow of
a Doubt (1942), D.O.A. (1950), Cyrano De Bergerac
(1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Well (1951), I
Confess (1953), Dial M for Murder (1954), The High
and the Mighty (1954), His Majesty O'Keefe (1954),
Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Friendly Persuasion
1956), Rhapsody of Steel (1959), Last Train from Gun
Hill (1959), The Sundowners (1960), The Guns of
Navarone (1961), and The Fall of the Roman Empire
(1964). Tiomkin earned Oscars for High Noon, The
High and The Mighty and The Old Man and the Sea,
with nominations for twenty other scores. As the 1950s
and the Golden Age of Hollywood came to a close,
Dimitri Tiomkin was the highest paid composer--and
surely one of the best known.
During the latter part of his life and career, he lived
in London in comfortable retirement with his wife,
Olivia. Dimitri Tiomkin died in 1979.
Howard Hawks and Red River
Hawks consciously shoots most of his scenes at the
eye level of a standing onlooker. Consequently, even
his spectacles are endowed with a human intimacy
which the director will not disturb with pretentious ...
shots. Hawks will work within a frame as much as
possible, cutting only when a long take or an
elaborate track might distract his audience from the
issues in the foreground of the action. This is good,
clean, direct, functional cinema, perhaps the most
distinctly American cinema of all ...
- Andrew Sarris
Howard Hawks wanted to make a Western. Artistic and
personality clashes had prevented him from finishing
Viva Villa! (1934) and The Outlaw (1941). And making
a Western appealed to him and his anti-authoritative
outlook. Stoic, silent, with a hint of sullenness, Hawks
stood over six feet tall and was fence-rail thin. Some
called him the silver fox. One of the best screenwriters
that Hollywood has ever known, Ben Hecht, called him
both a friend and "... a mysterious, drawling fashion
plate, purring with melodrama." He was drinking
buddies with the two greatest authors of the twentieth
century, Hemingway and Faulkner. As a producer and
director, Hawks was the consummate professional: he
was good at what he did. A self-described storyteller,
he directed films that consistently made money at the
box office, a lot of money. Critics praised him as well.
That gave him an incredible autonomy shared by few
directors, notably his old friend and peer, John Ford.
But if Ford made screen art that endured as movies,
Hawks made movies that became art, singularly
stamped by a keenly identifiable point of view and a
definite way of seeing life and living. The great French
director, François Truffaut, said that Hawks was the
most intelligent director who ever stood behind a
camera. The transformation from Hollywood
professional to cinematic artist was celebrated by such
renowned American critics as Andrew Sarris and
Manny Farber, in addition to the legendary gang at
Cahiers du Cinema--Andre Bazin, Truffaut, Jean Luc-
Godard and Claude Chabrol. In a general way, the very
essence of modern cinema can be traced back to
Hawks' no-nonsense, straight-on approach to film, in
directorial style and in oblique dialogue. It worked in
every genre--drama, action-adventure, Westerns. And
Hawks virtually invented screwball comedies, a
cinematic form that is as entertaining today as it was in
the 1930s.
Hawks' dominant personality pervades every
frame of his films and the memorable men and women
who worked for him in front of the cameras are
reflections of who Hawks was as a man and an artist.
Who was Howard Hawks? His persona is vividly there
in Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and, of course, John
Wayne. The performances of these three men in a
Hawks film are markedly different from their work in
other films, displaying a special masculine tension and
practicality--and in each Hawks film, the actor seems
to hold up a mirror to Hawks' own individuality and
cast the image back on his own performance. In every
movement and inflection, there's a little bit of Howard
Hawks. There's that ineffaceable, easy sense of
professionalism, friendship and loyalty that marks any
Hawks hero. Says Lauren Bacall: "Howard was a great
storyteller; you could sit and listen to him forever ... He
took me to lunch and told me about his directing
experiences with various actresses. It was always what
he said to them or Howard Hughes, to Jack Warner--
he always came out on top, he always won. He was
mesmerizing and I believed every story he told ..."
I never liked the sort of women who sat around
drinking tea in the parlor; the women in my films are
the sort of women I like, women who can hold their
own with anybody ...
- Howard Hawks
During the 1940s, the height of Hollywood's
Golden Age, you could well find anyone who was
anybody over at Hawks' house for weekend cut-throat
croquet, where a lawn-game became a deadly serious
exercise in skill and upmanship, a perfect metaphor for
Hawksian humor and life. Or you could see Hawks, Vic
Fleming, Clark Gable, William Wellman and other
Hollywood superstars roaring over canyon roads
astride motorcycles.
Indeed, if you were part of Hollywood then and
you were really good at what you did, you might be
lucky enough to work for Howard Hawks. And if he
liked you, you became a part of the group who worked
with him often. There were, of course, prerequisites to
entering that inner circle:
You had to be good at what you did;
You had to be fun to be around;
And most importantly, you had to know who was boss.
If you crossed Howard Hawks, you were out.
Permanently. In the early 1960s, Tiomkin did just that.
When Hawks hired Tiomkin to score Hatari!, the only
thing he asked of the composer was: No strings.
Typically, Tiomkin came in with a score that included,
yes, strings. Hawks got angry, Tiomkin was fired, and
Henry Mancini went on to score Hatari!; Hawks never
worked with Tiomkin again. Hatari! was a smash hit,
one of Paramount's biggest money-makers and the
soundtrack LP pushed its way to the top of the charts.
Ironically, Mancini's score included strings.
Like several directors--George Stevens, William
Wyler and Frank Capra--and other stars at the time,
Hawks formed his own production company and began
looking for a story set in the Old West. The story of the
King Ranch, founded by a riverboat captain who came
to Texas and stayed to make an empire, appealed to
him. But disagreements with the ranch derailed the
project.
"They wanted me to do some PR story ..." he once
recalled.
Then Hawks came across a five-part serial in the
The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine where you
could find not only Norman Rockwell, but writers like
Borden Chase, A. B. Guthrie, Jr--who would later cowrite
the script for Shane (1953) and pen novels like
The Way West (1967)--and James Warner Bellah, who
would craft the saber-edged stories that became John
Ford's legendary Cavalry Trilogy, Fort Apache (1948),
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande
(1950). The hard-drinking Borden Chase and Hawks
were acquain-tances--both loved horses and Chase
was hired by Hawks for $1,200 a week to write Red
River.
Chase's story, "The Chisholm Trail," offered a
framework for Hawks' vision of the Old West--a rawhide
patriarch and empire builder, a romantic young
hero and a heroine with a heart of gold and a tarnished
past. Chase could build a plot, but he needed help with
dialogue. Hawks applied his distinctive style of having
everyone saying something at once without directly
saying anything but, in the process, revealing
everything an audience needed to know about what was
happening on the screen.
Hawks originally wanted Gary Cooper, rodeo
champ Casey Tibbs and Cary Grant for the leads in Red
River. Cooper declined--the role of Tom Dunson was
too dark; the role of Cherry Valance was too small a
role for Grant. Casey Tibbs seemed to lack the screen
presence and acting skills for the role of Matthew
Garth.
Hollywood agent Charles Feldman pitched his
client John Wayne to Hawks. Wayne had made an
impressive hero for John Ford in Stagecoach (1939)
and in leads for top-drawer Westerns like Tall in the
Saddle (1944). Ford liked Wayne and the actor had
learned a lot from Ford. The price was right--$50,000
for the role, and for every week over schedule, $10,000;
then 10 percent of the film's profits with a guarantee of
$75,000. But Wayne hesitated; he seemed to balk at the
idea of playing an older man.
"You're gonna be one pretty soon, Duke, get used
to it ..." drawled Hawks.
For the role of Matthew Garth, Hawks wanted Jack
Buetel, the star of The Outlaw, the film that Hawks
began with screenwriter pal Jules Furthman for
Howard Hughes. Hughes became obsessed with co-star
Jane Russell and building her a special bra; the quirky
millionaire then decided that he could best direct her
and everyone else and dismissed Hawks from the film
which, except for its notoriety, would go on to become
a notable box office bust. But Hughes owned Buetel's
contract--and wouldn't release him for Red River.
Leland Hayward, who knew Hawks' wife Slim,
suggested a new kid, Montgomery Clift, who was a hit
on Broadway. Clift actually had balked at the idea of
coming to what he called "Vomit Town." As the
starting date of filming for Red River approached,
Hayward sent a script to Clift, who was somewhat
amused at the prospect of a film with John Wayne--but
immediately saw possibilities in the role of Matthew
Garth and working with Howard Hawks. Clift came to
Hollywood. Slim arranged to have Hayward bring the
young unknown actor to lunch at the Hawks house.
There, Hayward slyly brokered a lunch into a
sweetheart deal for Clift--almost as much money as
Wayne was getting for his role. Hawks signed his new
discovery and told him to learn to ride. Montgomery
Clift went to Arizona to learn the fine art of wrangling
and range riding.
A tough, energetic young actor, John Ireland, was
cast as gunman Cherry Valance. After starts and stops
with a number of actresses, two Hollywood beauties
were cast for the female leads in Red River. For Tom
Dunson's long wife-to-be, Fen, Colleen Gray, and
Joanne Dru would play the smoldering Tess Millay,
Matthew Garth's love.
Support players would include a roster of the best
faces in Hollywood. Oscar winner Walter Brennan
would characteristically threaten to steal any scene he
was in; Paul Fix and Noah Beery Jr. came on board;
Chief Yowlatchie, a 55-year-old Yakima Indian, would
sign on; Frank Worden, one of John Ford's stock
company, was on hand as a wry, off-the-wall cowboy, a
role that presages his brilliant performance as Ol' Mose
in The Searchers; Harry Carey Sr. would turn in a
performance that demonstrated his stature as a Western
superstar of yesteryear; and Harry Carey Jr. would
prove memorable as a doomed young cowboy who sets
off a sense of rage in Tom Dunson. Red River would be
the only film that the father and son would appear in
together.
For the score of Red River, Aaron Copland's name
came up during pre-production discussions. Copland
had written memorable music for such films as Of Mice
and Men (1939) and a brilliant score for Sam Wood's
version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1940). But
Hawks preferred someone else. The lanky director had
an uncanny ear for film scores. And Hawks had
enjoyed working with Dimitri Tiomkin on Only Angels
Have Wings (1939), a knockout box-office success that
starred Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in a tense story
about pilots and air mail flights in South America.
Hawks liked Tiomkin; he knew that Tiomkin was good
at what he did--composing exciting, colorful music,
the sort of score that a great Western needed. Tiomkin
liked Hawks as well and delighted at the possibilities of
scoring a true horse opera and what was shaping up to
be a classic Hollywood movie.
The little Russian composer, who talked fast in
broken English and was a walking burst of imagination
on and off the soundstage, was back in the saddle.
Red River loomed as a blockbuster Western,
perhaps the first super Western following the end of
World War II. Hawks sensed that audiences wanted
what a Western offered after the horrors of the war--a
sense of straightforward morality where myths and
legends give reason to life and liberty.
The plot of Red River was a tour de force: an
odyssey of an immigrant's trek West to build an empire
of dreams, hopes, riches--and, most importantly, a
family. It was an epic marked by tragedy and
highlighted by what intrigued Hawks most: Strong men
and friends, all professionals, banded together to
accomplish a seemingly impossible task. In Red River,
that task would be the first great cattle drive up the
fabled Chisholm Trail, named for a man who blazed a
way all through the Indian nations.
Howard Hawks had his Western. Now all he had to
do was get it on film.
Red River brought an example of the unexpected
mishaps that can bedevil the motion picture business.
In the filming of the Texas cattle drive, hundreds of
cows died from hoof and mouth disease contracted
from some Mexican cattle, and the ranchers from
whom the herds had been rented had to be
reimbursed. Howard Hawks was a champion bowand-
arrow fisherman, magnificent at shooting an
arrow into a fish in water, but not so good at swinging
a lasso ...
- Dimitri Tiomkin
Hawks ordered color tests for Red River but
preferred a more realistic look in black and white. To
bring the film to the screen, Hawks sought out Gregg
Toland, the great cinematographer who filmed The
Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Citizen Kane (1941).
Toland had finished up The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) for William Wyler, but Sam Goldwyn refused
Hawks' request, fearing that Red River would run past
schedule and Toland would be unavailable for The
Bishop's Wife (1947). Hawks hired Russell Harlan, a
rugged-looking cameraman who had spent ten long
years filming a roster of B-Westerns. Harlan would
give Red River a sense of epic sweep and pictorial
beauty rare in a Hawks film. It would be the start of a
creative association that would last over seven films
and nearly twenty years.
Take care of my boy Duke and get a great picture ...
- John Ford
Months of filming began in Elgin, Arizona, some
forty miles from the Mexican border. Rains delayed the
shooting schedule. Script woes brought Borden Chase
out on location where he drank a lot and angered
Hawks, who brought in Charles Schnee to help things
out. Hawks took out a yellow legal pad and went to
work on dialogue himself.
As the days stretched on, tension broke out among
the cast. Wayne was irritated with Clift and Clift with
Wayne. And worse--the cattle refused to do what
anybody told them to do--more than 9,000 head, a herd
that stretched almost a mile long and a half-mile wide.
Just try and tell those ... damned cows what the hell to
do!
- Howard Hawks
But Hawks liked what he was getting on film, and
he liked the performance he was getting from
Montgomery Clift.
For the climactic fight scene between Dunson and
Matthew, Clift encountered a big problem: he didn't
know how to fight. Wayne was amused, the director
wasn't. Hawks later said that he "... wore an arm out
showing the kid how to throw a punch."
John Wayne turned in a breathtaking performance
for Hawks. It would be the bedrock of future
performances, notably that of Ethan Edwards in John
Ford's great masterpiece, The Searchers. From the way
John Wayne walked, to the way he looked at other
actors, to the broad shouldered angst of a strong man
out of step with his times and his world, he would
become the great cinematic icon that he was destined to
be--and is still today--that lonely, heroic figure, riding
forever between the winds of an endless horizon
bordered by American empire and agrarian ideals.
And if you look hard enough at John Wayne's
rugged face, you'll see traces of two men: John Ford
and Howard Hawks. And perhaps of the two, it is the
Red River D that tips the balance of Wayne's enduring
image toward Hawks' influence.
I didn't know the big sonuvabitch could act ...
- John Ford
Shooting ran long, bills piled up, and loans were
taken out. The weather, the rewrites and Hawks'
deliberate, insistent pace threw the production over
budget to almost $3 million.. An extra month of filming
compounded the costs. The mammoth stampede
sequence, filmed by associate director Arthur Rosson,
took thirteen days to shoot; seven men were hurt and
animals suffered as well. In the end Hawks would get
$125,000 for his role as director/producer. It would be
years before Red River turned a profit.
In post-production, Tiomkin went to work on the
score. One of the difficulties in scripting Red River was
in providing characters with reasons for what they did
without tedious exposition. Hawks tried building the
script with indirect references to motivations but
scrapped most of the lines. Tiomkin used music to
make it all work and illuminate character and drama.
The composer saw where he could help the film build
emotion--and bring characters and story together.
If I ever see another cow, it will be too soon ...
- Dimitri Tiomkin
Had Tiomkin not scored another Western after Red
River it would still stand as almost an apotheosis of
the genre in the grand manner of the Old Hollywood
West, epitomizing the "idyllic sublime," with its
romance of cowboy songs (both original and quoted)
sung by a soaring soulful chorus, and with far less of
a Russian accent than Tiomkin's own speaking voice.
- William Rosar
The Journal of Film Music
The critical success of his first Western pleased
Hawks. The entire project had been a personal triumph,
if not a financial one.
"I called Ford and told him about the scene where
Duke reads over the dead cowboy and that shadow
passes over the mountain. I said, 'I've done one that's
almost as good as you' ..." Hawks later recalled.
He now understood Ford's affection for making
Westerns--it was a great excuse to get away from
Hollywood and the suits, camp out with your friends
and create an exciting film.
What next? His imagination ever restless, forever
seeking a good story, Hawks came across a book by
that Saturday Evening Post alumnus, A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
It was a heroic story about two friends who risk all to
join a group of adventurous men making a seemingly
impossible trek by keelboat up the wide Missouri
River, a trek that carries them all through the great
Indian nations of the American frontier.
Hawks liked the idea; he began thinking about who
would play the leads in the film. Among those
considered, a young Robert Mitchum. And the other?
Well, someone told him about a new kid on Broadway,
someone named Marlon Brando. Eventually, Dewey
Martin and Kirk Douglas would be cast as the friends.
And music?
There were no doubts. Hawks would turn again to
someone who was good at what he did, someone he
liked--Dimitri Tiomkin--to compose a breathtaking
hush of an epic score, one of his greatest, for ...
The Big Sky ...
Jack Smith
Red River Music Notes
When Bill Stromberg, Jack Smith and I were throwing
around ideas for a Dimitri Tiomkin CD, we felt several
prerequisites would have to be met. First, we wanted to
do one of his truly great scores for a great film.
Secondly, we felt it was necessary to record a score that
hadn't been previously recorded to death and one that
the original music tracks were not sitting around in
good enough condition to be released. Red River met
those criteria in addition to being a rich, exciting, and
colorful score that varied enough that we had no
qualms of recording every cue composed for it.
Additionally, the original score was recorded optically
on film, which has a limited range, exacerbated by the
relatively low music volume as heard in the film's final
sound mix. So, we felt, a new digital stereo recording
would present this music in its best light, bringing out
the timbre and subtleties that previously were only
heard when Tiomkin was standing in front of the live
orchestra conducting this music to picture.
During the forties, Tiomkin was honing his craft.
Evidently the composer felt no film was beneath his
talent, and so, dotted among classics such as Meet John
Doe, Duel in the Sun, and It's a Wonderful Life, we find
Tiomkin scoring such cinematic gems as China's Little
Devils (1945), Whistle Stop (1946), and The Dude Goes
West (1948). With these modestly budgeted affairs, the
composer was able to experiment both musically and
dramatically without conforming to what was expected
of him for major studio productions. He never had a
long-term contract with any studio, which enabled him
to develop relationships with important directors who
worked both independently and under a particular
studio umbrella.
We were extremely fortunate to have had access to
the original orchestrations by Tiomkin's long-time
associates Lucien Cailliet and Paul Marquardt. We also
had most of the vocal arrangements by Tiomkin's
choral director, Jester Hairston, who first worked with
the composer on Lost Horizon--thus beginning a
twenty-year association. Hairston formed the first
integrated choir used regularly in films. He also was an
actor, appearing in such films as To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Being John
Malkovich (1999), to name but a few. He died in 2000
at the age of 99.
A great deal of preparatory work went into this CD.
As is customary with film scores, many changes are
made at the actual recording sessions. These
modifications are often purely technical where timings
need to be adjusted, bars of music cut or added to, or
instrumental alternatives made, owing to a conflict with
dialogue or sound effects. For these, we went back to
the original version of the orchestrated score. Other
changes are more subtle and problematic. Tiomkin was
known to tinker with the orchestration on the recording
stage to get the exact effect he was after. Some of these
changes are amended in the music, most are not. After
careful comparison of the film's soundtrack and
surviving acetates of the music alone to the full score, I
implemented as many of these changes as possible. A
good example of this is the last part of Dunson Heads
South. As Tiomkin originally conceived the music, the
orchestra accompanied the chorus right to the end of
the cue. Since the chorus and orchestra were recorded
separately and then combined together at a later mix,
Tiomkin made the decision to fade out the orchestra
early and have the chorus complete the music, a
cappella. The acetates have the orchestra going until
the end and only by way of the film's soundtrack does
one realize what Tiomkin did by letting the beauty of
Jester Hairston's choral arrangement end the cue. It is a
magical moment.
The Red River orchestra, although large, is not
outlandish by Tiomkin's standards. Woodwinds
consists of two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, and
one bassoon, doubling their customary instrumental
partners. Four horns, four trumpets, four trombones,
and tuba make up the brass section. The percussion is
normal orchestra battery for four players, although
three sets of timpani are needed for Stampede. Several
indigenous percussion associated with the American
West are also used, including the whip, horse hoof,
train whistle, and cow bell. There is one piano,
doubling celeste, one harp and strings. (As usual for
scores of this period, the strings were under-built in
relation to the other instruments, so for this recording
we utilized a larger string section to better balance the
sound acoustically.) Finally, a full choir, banjo, and
accordion are used in several sequences.
Both Bill Stromberg and I felt a certain deja vu
while recording this score. We were doing it in Russia
with Russian musicians who immediately recognized
the kinship they had with the music of Russian-born
Dimitri Tiomkin. To top it off, we were recording at the
same studio (MosFilm) that Tiomkin conducted his
final film project, Tchaikovsky, in 1971. We felt
Tiomkin's spirit hovering over us making sure the
tempos and nuances were on the mark. After all, his
music from over fifty years earlier was finally
performed in his homeland.
John Morgan
Red River (1948 film score restored by J. Morgan) (more info)
-
Main Title - 1:30
-
Dunson Heads South - 4:47
-
Camp - 1:29
-
The Red Menace Strikes - 1:34
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The Lone Survivor - 2:15
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Birth of Red River D - 3:15
-
Mexican Burial - 0:58
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Growth of the Dunson Empire - 1:46
-
Roundup - 0:27
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Suspense at Dawn - 1:07
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On to Missouri - 1:36
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The Drive Moves North - 3:04
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The Brazos Trail - 0:31
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Stampede - 2:46
-
The Missing Cowboy - 2:36
-
Latimer Burial - 1:01
-
Thunder on the Trail - 0:45
-
Ahead - 1:26
-
Crossing - 2:01
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Cottonwood Justice - 0:59
-
Dunson Swears Vengeance - 1:24
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Comanche Arrows - 0:40
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In Wait - 1:35
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Fight for Life - 2:20
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Vigil in the Night - 1:01
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Foggy Night Surrender - 1:54
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The Spectre Takes Form - 0:43
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Interlude - 0:22
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Out of the Past - 1:47
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Memory of Love - 1:31
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A Joyous Meeting - 1:53
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Approach to Abilene - 1:50
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A Big Day of Abilene - 1:40
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The Spectre Closes In - 1:02
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A Message for Matt - 2:50
-
The Challenge - 3:22
-
The New Brand - 2:22
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