Red River BD

In a Wayne Western, the alpha male character is one that is easily identified by the viewer and someone that everyone cheers on throughout the majority of the movie. A hardboiled alpha male cowboy is not the quintessential hero that the audience falls in love with throughout the movie; he is one that has a darker side that adds some resentment by the audience at various points during the film. However, in the film Red River, the alpha male cowboy is not readily identifiable aside from the fact that John Wayne is playing the lead. Wayne’s character, Tom Dunson, portrays many of the qualities of the alpha male at the beginning. However, he does show that he has love in his life and it is expressed by him instead of assumed by the audience, which is the case, the majority of the time. Dunson also settles down on a piece of land in order to leave something behind for his foster child, Matthew Garth. This goes against a main point brought up by Sue Matheson in her article “The West-Hardboiled: Adaptations of Film Noir Elements, Existentialism, and Ethics in John Wayne’s Westerns” when she states that “the noir narratives of Wayne’s West are concerned with man’s savage nature rather than mankind’s ability to domesticate nature itself…” (Matheson 891). These qualities and actions are not generally seen from the alpha male cowboy.

Half way through the film, Dunson becomes more of the sociopathic villain than he does the alpha male cowboy by shooting his men when they attempt to leave his cattle run and having others track down deserters. At this point, the audience looks to Dunson’s foster child, Garth, to become the alpha male cowboy and hero. However, he too does not possess the usual qualities of this role. He has feeling which are described in the film as “being too soft” when he merely wounds a man and does not take his life. Jane Tompkins describes a man in her book West of Everything as “to be hard, to be tough, to be unforgiving” (Tompkins 73). This does not describe Garth because he does have feeling towards his men, his father and his lover in the end.

Despite these setbacks in the film, both Dunson and Garth can be described as the alpha male cowboy. They cannot, however, hold this title from beginning to end, nor can both have it at the same time. There is no true antagonist in the film, so when one is needed, Dunson drops the role of the alpha male and takes the reigns as the villain. Also, when the film becomes absent of its hero, Garth is there to fill in with his own take on the alpha male; a more modern, relatable character. He is one who is not hardboiled and is seen as possessing compassion and understanding, but is still the alpha male because he deserts the woman he loves, lives out on the frontier, and completes his task of driving the cattle at all costs. Dunson can also claim the alpha male title at points because he is a “damaged and isolated paternal figure who gathers in one place the allure of violence, the call away from home, and the dark pleasure of soured romanticism” (Matheson 889). While possessing some characteristics not common of the alpha male, he is still able to capture the title with many of his traits being that of the alpha male cowboy before he becomes the sought after antagonist of the film.