The Storytelling Score of Red River (1948)

I never used to pay too much attention to the score of Red River. I thought of it as fairly nice, rousing, but generic music that mostly took a back seat to the action of the movie. But last year when one of my sisters got the soundtrack CD (a full recreation by the Moscow Symphony Choir and Orchestra), and I was able to listen to the full score independent of the film for the first time, I realized with some surprise what a great score it really is—and most of all, how cleverly composer Dimitri Tiomkin used his various themes to underscore the different elements of the story.

The backbone of the score is made up of three melodies: two original songs by Tiomkin with lyrics by Ned Washington, “Settle Down” and “Off to Missouri” (at least I assume that’s the title), and the folk song “Old Chisolm Trail.” From the beginning of the film, the vigorous, swinging waltz tune of “Off to Missouri” is linked with cattle—branding them, raising them, rounding them up, and finally throwing them on the trail north—it’s the theme for the cattle drive itself, accompanying the trail scenes in a dozen different moods and tempos. The sweeping melody of “Settle Down” seems to be linked with the Red River itself, as well as Dunson’s Red River D brand named after it, and gradually becomes the over-arching theme for the whole story.

(I should mention here that I’ve never been able to decipher most of the lyrics to “Settle Down” or “Off to Missouri”—I figured it was just a combination of dense choral arrangements and muddy audio that kept me from understanding the Hall Johnson Choir on the film soundtrack, but I found I couldn’t understand the Moscow Symphony Choir on the re-recording either. All I can make out is that “Off to Missouri” presumably begins with those words and ends with, “…we’ll be in Missouri someday,” and I think there’s a line somewhere in the middle that runs, “Nights are so long and the days are so weary…” Anyway, while working on this post I did a little searching online and found a forum thread with a post by composer John Morgan, who restored Tiomkin’s score for the Moscow Symphony re-recording—he reveals that no one actually knows what the lyrics are because they were apparently never written down! For the restored version they had to make do with listening to the original and improvising where they couldn’t understand it. So it’s not just me after all.)

“Old Chisolm Trail,” meanwhile, accompanies the shots of an old handwritten manuscript that guide us through the story, in an arrangement of horns, a rippling harp and the hum of choir that creates a nostalgic, time-traveling effect. It also crops up more subtly here and there throughout the score at key moments relating to the cattle drive. One could say that while “Off to Missouri” is the theme for the actual work of the drive, the grit and sweat and danger, “Old Chisolm Trail” underscores the historic aspect, the sense of achievement. There’s a great moment in one of the best tracks on the soundtrack, at 2:19 in “Birth of Red River D,” where the two songs are played together in a triumphant counterpoint, at the moment when Tom Dunson (John Wayne) brands his first two cattle—a foreshadowing of what’s to come. And is it an even subtler bit of musical foreshadowing that further back in the beginning of the film, when Dunson makes his assessment of the young Matt (Mickey Kuhn) with a laconic “He’ll do,” the music in the background (1:51 in “The Lone Survivor”) is a determined cue of “Old Chisolm Trail”?

Besides all this, there’s a pretty self-explanatory Indian-attack theme, cued whenever the threat of attack materializes or hovers just over the horizon, and a beautiful love theme, introduced at the beginning in “Dunson Heads South,” and surfacing again later whenever the script hearkens back to Dunson’s lost love (Coleen Gray)—e.g. “Out of the Past” and “Memory of Love.” And one of the marvelous things about the score is the Russian-born Tiomkin’s grasp of American folk songs and the deft way he uses them to highlight the action, even if it’s just a few notes—a bit of “Turkey in the Straw” to accompany a wagon train; “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” for the railroad; a dash of “Oh, Susanna” for a celebration; and of course the single bittersweet use of “I Ride an Old Paint” in “The Missing Cowboy.” More prominently featured is “O Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” which beautifully scores several scenes of just such a burial as the song describes, beginning with “Mexican Burial.”  This scene, incidentally, I’ve always felt to be a bit of foreshadowing in itself—the way that Groot (Walter Brennan) and young Matt stare after Dunson as he leaves the graveside, seemingly a little taken aback that he can turn so quickly from a funeral back to work. It’s almost a hint at what Dunson will become in the future.

But there was one discovery I made listening to the soundtrack CD that really impressed me. Early in the film, Tiomkin introduces a brief but beautiful little melody, one that seems to evoke a sense of the wide-open plains, of optimism and promise for the future. It’s Dunson’s own theme, and it’s only heard a few times in its original form. It appears for the first time at 1:11 of “Dunson Heads South,” and is developed most fully at 1:35 of “The Lone Survivor,” at the key moment when Dunson hands young Matt back his gun. It’s one of my favorite bits in the score, and I thought it was a shame that it’s only heard so briefly. Listening further, however, I realized that it does reappear—made over in a minor key, it becomes the ominous, threatening march that’s heard for the first time in “Latimer Burial,” at the first hint of Dunson’s impending tyranny, again in “Cottonwood Justice” when his men finally defy him, and finally builds to a crashing crescendo in “The Challenge” for the final confrontation. (What I colloquially refer to as the Dunson Gets Mad theme.) It’s still Dunson’s theme, but Tiomkin has made it over to reflect the gradual darkening and hardening of his character as the film goes on. It continues to follow Dunson as he pursues his revenge (“The Spectre Takes Form”), and haunts scenes where he is off-screen but uncomfortably present in the minds of other characters (“In Wait” and “Vigil in the Night”).

Without getting too deep into spoilers, the ending of Red River—changed from the magazine story it was based on—is one of my biggest quibbles with the movie. Not necessarily the way the writers chose to wrap up the plot itself, but its abruptness and sudden change of tone. If you’re aiming for redemption, okay, but something still has to be done with all that rage and tension that’s been building for the second half of the film—it’s got to be blown off somehow. It’s a little like watching a fuse burn up to a stick of dynamite and then having it go off with a pop instead of an explosion. In a musical sense, if Dunson has come full circle, shouldn’t we hear his musical theme restored to its original form too? But we don’t; there simply isn’t time. Which possibly begs the question: does it really make sense for Dunson to have come full circle at all?

But all of that is hardly Tiomkin’s fault. And what his music does for the film as it stands is really wonderful. For instance, after you’ve listened to the score by itself, if you go back and watch the conversation between Dunson and Tess Millay (Joanne Dru), the scene accompanied by the track “Out of the Past,” you realize that all throughout it Tiomkin is subtly invoking a few bars of the different musical themes, one after another, to match what they’re talking about. I love it when a film score becomes an instrument of storytelling like that. I just hadn’t realized that, under all the noise of bawling cattle, the score of Red River did it so well.