Some decades back, I interviewed the great Texas writer Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show”) at a cocktail party thrown in his honor at the University of North Dakota’s Writers Conference, which that year was focused on Western lit and film. And as an author whose works were being optioned for movies, the conversation wandered around to “Red River,” which was showing later that week at the conference, and a reason large scale Westerns like that (which McMurtry dabbled in) weren’t on Hollywood’s mind more.

Wide open spaces were in short supply. Larger than life actors who looked at home in the saddle were somewhat scarce (this wa pre-“Dances with Wolves”). And there aren’t enough “Longhorn cattle” to do a decent, historic cattle drive Western, McMurtry noted. “Damned near went extinct (as a breed) shortly before ‘Red River’ was made.”

So no, the 1866 cattle in this 1948 Howard Hawks film didn’t necessarily “look right,” which bugged McMurtry. But it’s hard to find many other faults in this Western masterpiece, an archetypal classic featuring an impressive cast and one of the great directors of his era perfecting his “Western” chops, which he’d use on “Rio Bravo,” a formula film he loved so much he remade it a couple of times under other titles (“El Dorado,” “Rio Lobo”) before hanging up his spurs.

Borden Chase was a novelist and short story writer (real name Frank Fowler) who gave us “Winchester ’73,””Bend of the River” and a few other Westerns in a career as ecclectic as Hawks, who aside from “Red River” is best known for comedies like “His Girl Friday” and “Bringing Up Baby,” horror (“The Thing from Another World”), Biblical epics and even a Marilyn Monroe musical (“Gentleman Prefer Blondes”).

“Red River” is a saga-length epic that follows a fictional story of the first Chisholm Trail cattle drive after the Civil War. We see Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leave a wagon train with his trusty sidekick, the original “Groot” (Walter Brennan) over the objections of the wagonmaster, aiming to head South into Texas. Unsentimental and ornery, Dunson leaves a woman (Coleen Gray) behind. She is later killed when the wagon train is attacked by Indians.

Dunson and Groot survive such an attack of their own, but lose all but one cow. Luckily, a shell-shocked teen (child actor Mickey Kuhn, wild-eyed and scary) escaped death in the wagon raid and he has a heffer. He’s already quick with a pistol, and Matt is adopted by Dunson.

We see Dunson take the land his ranch will be built on by gunning down a hireling of the Spanish Mexican Don Diego. A little Manifest Destiny rationalizing about who Don Diego “took” that land from, and the “Red River D” ranch is born.

Fourteen years later, Matt (Montgomery Clift) has returned from the Civil War, lean and antsy, unused to seeing Dunson “scared.” He’s “broke,” and the only way his vast herd is worth anything will be through driving it to a railhead north and East.

“Take’em to Missouri, Matt,” are his orders.

On the thousand mile/”ten miles a day” drive, there’s a river crossing, Indian attack and “STAMPEDE!” as the ordeal makes Dunson paranoid and prone to punishing or even executing those who challenge him.

Some day, at some point, Matt’s going to have to “be a man” and step in.

A movie like “Red River” did wonders for John Wayne’s acting reputation. He’s mean, playing a rare (soft-edged) heavy, and holds his own. But Brennan effortlessly upstages him, young Kuhn crackles in his two scenes, “soft” and sensitive Clift puts in the work to prove he wasn’t miscast, and John Ireland, one of the great character actors of his era, balances Clift’s “soft” touch with a gun-slinger’s swagger as itinerant cowhand-shootist Cherry.

The two actors allow a hint of the homoerotic to slip into their first meeting moment, comparing guns, for instance.

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Ireland even makes Cherry’s more butch follow-up sound like a come-on.

“There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good… Swiss watch?“

Ireland attended an Old Western Stars convention in Tennessee that I covered, and after asking him about Kubrick and “Spartacus,” I queried him about that subtext or not-subtext in the film.

“If Mr. Hawks put it in there,” he smiled, and left that hanging.

“Red River” is a movie of long Old West monologues of Shakespearean sweep. The Duke never played Hamlet. But he did have this.

“Give me ten years, and I’ll have that brand on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house will be down by the river, and the corrals and the barns behind it. It’ll be a good place to live in. Ten years and I’ll have the Red River D on more cattle than you’ve looked at anywhere. I’ll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make ’em strong, make ’em grow. But it takes work, and it takes sweat, and it takes time, lots of time. It takes years.“

Hawks was famous for his “Hawksian women,” and Joanne Dru brings fire and breathless chatiness to Tess Millay, who won’t shut up even as she meets Matt in the middle of an Indian raid on her “gamblers and women” wagon train.

Hawks and Chase invented or perfected most of the tropes of cattle drive tales with this classic film, which McMurtry leaned on for “Lonesome Dove.” Images burn into the memory — the sweep of the San Pedro River Valley, Arizona landscapes, the flaming arrow that hurtles in out of the darkness at Dunson and Groot, the “shootin’ contest” between Matt and Cherry and the epic brawl between tiny Clift and big’ol John Wayne.

The way the cattle drive’s beginning is edited — close-ups of the various hollerin’ cowboys (Hank Worden, Noah Beery Jr., Paul Fix, etc) — the humor of Groot losing partial custody of his “store bought teeth” to the Indian named “Quo” (Chief Lowachie), the rising paranoia and sadism of Dunson faced with success or ruin, all put this 1946 film, released in ’48 because of interference from Howard Hughes head and shoulders above most every Western you can think of, then or more recently.

It’s got a lot of the things that modern historians and films like “Unforgiven” have revised in the historical record. “Don’t leave any of’em (Native Americans) alive,” the quick turn to deadly violence and gun fetishizing of this film that has to be one reason the NRA and its Congressional lackies don’t want gun “ownership” studied as a mental health issue.

It’s faintly racist and genocidal, but also more representational than most Westerns of the day. Those big speeches are so old fashioned that they make the movie feel years older than it is.

IMDb’s page on “Red River” has a simple error, referring to Noah Beery, Wallace Beery’s son, as “Noah Beery Jr.” And somebody at some point promoted British second unit director Arthur Rosson to “co-director” in recent years. Did the DGA approve this? The Library of Congress apparently didn’t. I can’t find an origin to this alteration, just a similarly crowd-sourced credit reference on Rosson’s Wikipedia entry.

I’d love to know the story of that, and until I hear a convincing reason for this “demotion” of producer-director-auteur Hawks, I’m calling “Bull-s—“ on that bit of sleight of hand.

But as “Red River” has been remade (with James Arness), re-released at various lengths and even colorized, somebody’s got to stick up for this American masterpiece by an American master.

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan, Noah Beery Jr., Harry Carey, Harry Carey Jr., Chief Lowachie, Paul Fix, Hank Worden and John Ireland.

Credits: Directed by Howard Hawks., scripted by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, based on a short story by Chase. An MGM (owns the rights now) release on Tubi, Youtube.

Running time: 2:13