Red River

John Wayne found one of his greatest roles in Howard Hawks’s first western, as an embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher whose tensions with his independent-minded adopted son – Montgomery Clift, in a breakout performance – reach epic proportions during a cattle drive to Missouri. The unerringly macho Wayne and the neurotic, boyish Clift make for an improbably perfect pair, held aloft by a quick-witted, multilayered screenplay and Hawks’s formidable direction.