Generic Conventions and Gender
It should be observed at this point that Millay's intervention in the conflict between Dunson and Matt and the comedic resolution that it makes possible (the film's ending in the promise of marriage) are clearly inappropriate in terms of the conventions of the Western genre, according to which one of the two men should be killed. Nor is this ending in any way commensurate with the depth of the conflict established between the two characters over the course of the film. More than one critic has complained that Millay's actions and the sudden disappearance of hostility between Dunson and Matt provide a weak and implausible ending to a story that seemed from the outset to be heading toward a much darker, more pessimistic terminus. As is, Red River seems to offer a typical Hollywood "happy ending." For Hawks, such compromises were understood as simply one of the necessary exigencies of commercial filmmaking. Yet such a violation of audience expectations indicates the extent to which
Hawks was willing to use the conventions of the Western genre as a mere frame for his own explorations of gender and sexual identity.
Yet such objections aside, the implications of Red River are clear: the sexual symbolism on which Hawks structured his story inescapably leads to a critique of the masculine values at the center of both the Western as a genre and the director's personal vision. The film suggests that men who think they can live without the companionship, guidance, and help of women who are their equals often are doomed to an obsession with work (read: "career") that isolates them from a larger community of shared human values to which women provide access. The excessively masculine ethos of Dunson (his impulse to dominate and control the all-male group, his belief in the technicalities of ownership and legal obligation) is shown to be sterile, literally a historical dead end; the "feminine" presence of Millay and, as coded in the film, Matthew Garth provides a humanizing set of values essential to nation-building, a central idea in this film and a recurrent theme within the Western genre. Red River is Hawks's clearest statement concerning his characteristic interest in exclusive male groups, precisely because of the way it interrogates the meaning of such a group, showing its impossibility in social and historical terms and pointing to the origins of this "all-boys club" in adolescent male fantasy and regressive wish fulfillment. Red River makes clear the psychic and emotional costs to men of such fantasies. In so doing, the film speaks eloquently about the need for an equilibrium between women and men, articulating an unconscious esteem for the different but equally necessary characteristics of the "feminine" and the "masculine."
Red River provides an essential key to understanding the interplay and exchange between genders that figures so prominently in Hawks's films, as well as offering a meditation on the meaning of masculinity and femininity in the Western—a genre overcrowded with stalwart male characters who are often willing to underestimate or ignore the role of women and "feminine" values in the settling of the West. It is worth noting that the title Red River was of Hawks's own choosing and that he insisted on it over the objections of everyone involved in the production of the film, all of whom feared it sounded too much like a "B-movie" (McCarthy 418). Hawks was right. For such a work as this, the liminal space of a river—which is like that of gender, another natural boundary to be crossed in the process of discovery—was the most appropriate emblem and title for the film.
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