An Action Scene Revisited

An ongoing conversation with a friend about the subtle but considerable merits of Hollywood master Howard Hawks (1896–1977) led me to revisit a paper I wrote for Professor Stefan Sharff's "Analysis of Film Language" course at Columbia way back in the '70s. Professor Sharff required us to take a single scene from a movie we had viewed in class and break it down shot by shot. I chose Scene 3 from Hawks's great epic Western Red River (1948). Analyzing it according to Professor Sharff's instructions gave me an enormous appreciation for the intelligence of Hawks's technique. It's an action scene which, in its visual coherence and expressiveness, puts to shame the chaotic slam-bang effects of today's action movies, in particular those tiresome, CGI-heavy megaproductions that clutter the multiplexes every summer (and, increasingly, throughout the year).

My friend was curious about what I had written, but I had long since lost the paper. My memory of it was still pretty sharp, however, so after rewatching the scene in question on DVD, I produced a new version (in greatly condensed form, of course).

Red River tells the story of a monumental cattle drive during the early days of Texas ranching. Its first few scenes take place years before the main action, showing how the future cattle baron Thomas Dunson establishes his empire and how he comes to mentor a younger man, Matthew Garth. In Scene 3, Dunson and his sidekick, Nadine Groot, having departed from a California-bound wagon train to start their own herd in Texas, engage with a band of Comanche warriors. Click here for what I wrote about it.