The mess at UA, along with the additional cutting Nyby was doing and Hawks’s daily chores on
A Song Is Born
, enabled Hawks to put off any decisive action regarding
Red River
until the fall. The moment he finished shooting the Goldwyn picture, Hawks left for New York,
Red
River
in hand, and proceeded to set up screenings for friends, including Monty Clift, who saw it there for the first time and was one of the few who was less than pleased. The actor found his own performance “mediocre” but told a friend, “I watched myself in
Red River
and I knew I was going to be famous, so I decided I would get drunk anonymously one last time.” Among those whom Hawks pointedly
did not invite to the showings, which he impudently held at the United Artists projection room, were UA’s executive staff, with the exception of the company’s new president, Gradwell Sears. This created
great ill will internally and marked an admission, as far as the lawyers were concerned, that Hawks had at last finished the film. While Hawks was still in town, attorneys representing UA contacted
him at the Warwick Hotel to demand delivery of the picture, along with 236 positive prints that had been contractually due on August 1. Unless he delivered within thirty days, Hawks was told, he would be considered in breach.
As usual, Hawks ignored such threats; having failed to sell the picture to a different distributor, he at least wanted plenty of assurances that it would be handled in the
major way it deserved. Through it all, Hawks hadn’t a leg to stand on legally, as UA’s contract was airtight and clearly entitled the company to the film’s negative—once it was finished. But Hawks returned to Los Angeles and continued to play games, pretending the film wasn’t really finished and otherwise stalling for time. He spent Thanksgiving in Palm Springs with Eddie Small and his wife, and
at the end of the month received word that UA was demanding arbitration, in view of its own good faith and belief in the indisputability of its claim to the film. Outrageously, Monterey responded that the film was still not finished, that considerable work remained to be done, and that it desired a change of venue from New York to Los Angeles because the company was in debt and had no funds. Nonetheless,
a hearing was shortly set for the American Arbitration Association on March 3, when three men—arbitrators selected by Monterey, UA, and an impartial third party—would settle the fate of
Red River
.
In the meantime, members of the MPI group were becoming extremely restless. In February, with the arbitration still a month away, MPI vice president Maurice Cohen served notice on Monterey that Hawks’s
failure to complete the film on schedule “has caused us great and irreparable damage for which we will be forced to hold you responsible.” In essence, MPI, as the primary financing party, threatened to take
Red River
away from Hawks and deliver it to UA themselves. In response, Monterey charged that the film was made under MPI supervision and pointed out that MPI itself was now in breach for failing
to meet the deadline for payment of John Wayne’s guaranteed $75,000 profit share.
Literally the next day, on February 17, Howard Hughes notified MPI that any release of
Red River
would constitute an infringement of his rights, since the ending, in his view, plagiarized the climax of
The Outlaw
. Stating that Hawks had worked on the story of
The Outlaw
and was paid for it, Hughes concluded, “It
would seem to an impartial observer that the similarity complained of must have been the result of taking from a common source,” or stealing. Hughes threatened immediate legal action.
At this, MPI officers suddenly became less eager to take over the picture, bewildered at what they might be expected to do with a picture with no ending. Monterey attempted to further stall by insisting that the
combination of Hughes’s complaint and MPI’s move to take over the picture made it impossible for the company to send anyone to represent it at the arbitration hearing in New York. The arbitrators would have none of this, however, and proceeded to unanimously find in favor of United Artists. Monterey was thus forced to deliver the negative to the Pathé Lab in New York, but MPI warned that no prints
should be struck until the ongoing dispute with Hughes was resolved.
Given Hawks’s lifelong casual attitude about “borrowing” dialogue and bits of business that had worked before, there was no question that Hughes had good reason for being miffed. Specifically, Hawks had lifted a memorable detail from the final showdown in
The Outlaw
in which Doc Holliday tries to force Billy the Kid to draw
by firing at him, nicking his earlobes in the process, and there was no way Hughes was going to let him keep that. But the main reason Hughes moved against
Red River
was to settle a longstanding grudge: Hawks had done this to him before, when he helped himself to the ending of
Hell’s Angels
for
The Dawn Patrol
. Hawks fought him by having his secretary, Helen Ayres, compile a list of other Westerns
with similar sequences—she came up with about a dozen, including the recent Randolph Scott feature
Gunfighters
—and, in a heated phone conversation, Hawks defied Hughes to prove that this sort of scene was not one common to Westerns. Still, Hughes was determined to extract his pound of flesh and compel Hawks to make the changes he demanded or face the prospect of a protracted lawsuit, which would
hold up the release of
Red River
for as long as
The Outlaw
had been delayed.
Hughes had another motivation as well. Having just taken control of RKO studios, Hughes was looking for a way to pry three of his productions—
The Outlaw
and the as-yet unreleased
Vendetta
and
Mad Wednesday
—away from United Artists so he could reassume control of them. All through the weeks that he was pressing for changes
in the ending of
Red River
, Hughes was dickering over these pictures with UA president Grad Sears, whose persuasiveness and willingness to accomodate the tycoon broke down Hughes’s stubborness and, more than anything, paved the way for
Red River
to come out both on schedule and in a form very close to what Hawks intended.
The precise manner in which the final release version of
Red River
was
agreed upon is open to some question, since Hawks was vague about
details and the stories Christian Nyby told about it are rife with contradictions. In his book
Howard Hawks, Storyteller
, the film scholar Gerald Mast quotes Nyby at length about how Hughes notified Monterey of his objections to the showdown sequence only a week before the film’s scheduled openings in the Southwest in August 1948.
(It had already been reviewed by the trade press in July.) According to this account, Hughes came to the cutting room and made Nyby cut the scene in sixteen different ways, but never to his satisfaction. Fed up, Nyby offered Hughes the chance to cut the sequence himself. After some further slight adjustments, in the end Hughes was mollified by cutting fifteen seconds from the picture.
At the
very least, Nyby compressed the time frame in which all this occurred, as Hughes filed his copyright suit in Federal court on August 13, and
Red River
didn’t open in Western territories until September 1. At the same time, Hughes misrepresented the similarities between the pictures, particularly in the matter of the earlobes: Dunson nicked Matthew on the cheek, not the ears; if the lobes had been
hit, the result would presumably have been visible in subsequent shots, which were not reshot or replaced.
More perplexing is the question of why two distinct versions of
Red River
were made—one in which a written chronicle entitled
Early Tales of Texas
serves to connect the chapters in this highly episodic film, another in which voice-over narration by Walter Brennan’s character, Nadine Groot,
bridges the gaps in time and place. Two Hawks specialists, Gerald Mast and John Belton, have analyzed the differences between the versions in great detail, with Mast, along with Leonard Maltin, preferring the diary version and Belton coming down in favor of the narration, as does Peter Bogdanovich. As this split opinion indicates, there are things to be said for and against each version. The diary
version runs seven and a half minutes longer; in addition to cutting the shots of the pages, other cuts for the latter version included a lengthy description by Cherry Valance of a beautiful woman who told him about the railroad to Abilene and a scene showing Matthew’s nervousness at night as Dunson is catching up to him. There are also differences in the musical score, with the diary version
containing more vocalizing than the voice-over edition. Most important, however, the showdown between Dunson and Matthew is significantly cut in the latter version. As Gerald Mast observed, all of Dunson’s initial dialogue—ordering Matt to draw, warning, “Then I’ll make you draw,” and so on—is missing in the voice-over version, leaving him to just fire away. Also removed are the progressively tight
shots of Matthew’s unblinking eyes as Dunson shoots at him—only the last one remains.
There is no question that the diary version constitutes the picture in its earlier form, although, as
The Big Sleep
demonstrates, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is definitive. Hawks told Bogdanovich, “The one with the book was the first cutting and it wasn’t any good.” He explained, “It was meant to
be with narration, which shortened it and brought it closer to you because we had a very distinctive voice doing it.” Hawks even claimed that he never saw the diary verison until it was on television.
Although Hawks seldom employed voice-over narration in his pictures, he had just done so to good effect in
The Big Sleep
and would use it again in
The Big Sky
and
Land of the Pharaohs
. That Hawks
would passively permit a film so important to him to be printed up and distributed in a form that he expressly disapproved of testifies to several things: his habit of not following a picture all the way through postproduction, the general confusion that surrounded
Red River
in the final months before it came out, and the extent to which Hawks had, by that time, virtually washed his hands of it,
since there was no financial incentive in his further involvement. Still, Hawks’s negative opinion of the diary version can perhaps be looked at partly as Monday morning quarterbacking, since, in most ways other than the pure enjoyment of Walter Brennan’s vocal commentary, the voice-over version represents a reduction of the first and longer cut, especially where the climax is concerned. In the
absence of any documented reasons why two versions were created, it seems likely that the voice-over edition was made with an eye to foreign markets, where several minutes’ worth of English-language text on the screen would have been highly annoying. The voice-over version was also more suitable for television, although the diary version, to Hawks’s annoyance, frequently turned up on the tube with
its hard-to-read written text. Ironically, the
Red River
released on video with the promotional line, “Restored Director’s Cut,” is the diary version, the one Hawks himself pointedly disapproved.
In any event, all this was done without any overseeing or even input from Hawks, who had trusted Nyby to shape the mass of diverse footage in the first place and had now left the final crucial decisions
in his hands. Hawks left Los Angeles in mid-August and sailed from New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
on August 21, on his way to shoot
I Was a Male War Bride
in Germany.
Like a plane taking off under seemingly impossible conditions,
Red River
finally made its way into theaters at the beginning of September 1948, exactly two years after it had gone before the cameras. But even as it played strongly
in the Southwest and the plains states, squabbling continued in
the executive suites where its destiny was being controlled. Hawks’s unwillingness to turn his picture over to UA had largely been predicated on his lack of confidence in the distributor’s ability to market it and secure the best theaters. In July, he was placated by an unusual agreement under which Goldwyn’s sales organization, headed
by the shrewd James A. Mulvey, would handle
Red River
on a freelance basis in exchange for 3 percent of the gross. In mid-September, the verbal deal was called off, partly because Mulvey’s slow playoff pattern annoyed the MPI partners, but mostly because the Goldwyn sales arm was increasingly busy with
A Song Is Born
, which was competing with
Red River
for the same theaters in some cities, creating
a conflict of interest. At this point, with Hawks’s endorsement, Grad Sears took personal control of the selling of
Red River
, which opened in New York and other major eastern cities on September 29, to huge business. By mid-October, when it finally debuted in Los Angeles, it was the number-three box-office film nationally, after
Johnny Belinda
and
Sorry, Wrong Number
, and two weeks later it moved
up to number one.
Releasing through Hughes-controlled RKO, Goldwyn launched
A Song Is Born
in New York and Chicago on October 19, to some unusually nasty reviews. But even though the musical didn’t ring up the colossal numbers of Danny Kaye’s earlier crowd pleasers, the film did very strong business, playing for more than two months in some of its first-run engagements. Strikingly, in the first
week of November,
A Song Is Born
was the number-one box-office film in the nation, and
Red River
was number two. In those days no mention was made of the fact that the same man directed both films, nor was Hawks around to promote the fact himself, but the double-barreled success did testify to Hawks’s remarkable and unbroken commercial winning streak that now stretched back across nine films and
ten years. The two films remained in the top dozen box-office attractions through Christmas, and
Variety
announced that
Red River
, with domestic rentals of $4,150,000, was the number-three film of the year, just slightly behind the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby smash
Road to Rio
and MGM’s lavish musical
Easter Parade
. Hawks was declared the number-six “money director” of the year. The film was Hawks’s
most popular since
Sergeant York
.