2. Red River (1958)
The Happy Ending... Often hailed as one of the greatest westerns ever,
Red River stars John Wayne and Montgomery Clift as a feuding father and his adopted son, who head out across Texas on a dangerous cattle drive. The whole movie is about Wayne and Clift's increasing disenchantment of one another - it builds and builds towards what we believe will be a horrifying, blood-soaked climax. Then a female character named Tess (who appears in the last half hour) eventually steps in and breaks the pair up before they can do battle in the film's final scene. Realising their mistake, the pair laugh it off, and that's the end of
Red River.What We Really Needed...The whole movie has been building to this confrontation and thats it? I mean, the whole movie was driving towards the inevitable clash of these two personalities, and all we get is... a woman telling them to stop their bickering? And they just accept that? They put all their hatred aside because somebody they met a few days ago briefly scolded them? The original story on which
Red River was based, of course, ended with the Clifts character shooting Waynes character dead. And thats totally and utterly the right ending. Instead, we spend two hours building to a climax that is watered down for no real reason. With
this ending in place, the rest of the movie just feels like a complete and utter waste of time. None of the emotions we've seen thrown around for two hours amount to anything. If there's one ending in any Hollywood movie that's happy for the sake of it, it's this one.