The MoFo Top 100 of the Forties: The Countdown

He's in the hospital

That is certainly a valid excuse.

When I was a kid, countdowns counted down a lot faster than this.

I am just letting you guys know that I am not home right now. To be honest, I am currently at the hospital for my mother. I am going to be here for the next couple of days for sure because I rode with her to the hospital in the ambulance, and I have no way to get home right now (I don't even have enough for a cab). So it is going to be a while before I can get home and get back to this but I will.

I apologize for it but this is more important right now.

...So I want to get caught up with this countdown. Especially if I can't get a chance to get back to it again in the very near future. If you guys don't mind, I would like to post the movies for the past 4 days, along with today's films. That way we can be caught up, and even if I spend enough time at the hospital, maybe we won't fall so behind again.


I will get the first film posted now (this would've been originally posted on Saturday).

Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945) Classic Rating

The original horror anthology film still delivers the goods, with sparkling acting, a taut script and a large house in the country providing a perfect setting for chills and thrills, which are masterfully held off until the striking ending. The framing story of the architect dreaming about coming to the house and knowing almost everything which will happen is a great way to pin all the subsequent stories which range from the humorous (the golfing ghost) to the incredibly eerie (the ventriloquist and his dummy). If you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to remedy that and see where many classic horror scenarios come from. Michael Redgrave gives an awesome performance as the ventriloquist.

Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)



Spectacular western epic about the first cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail is actually a thinly-veiled retelling of Mutiny on the Bounty. But years earlier, Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) breaks free from a wagon train with his longtime friend Groot (Walter Brennan), a wagon, a bull and some horses. Dunson tells his fiancee (Colleen Gray) to continue on with the train and that he'll send for her when he's ready. By the time the two men make it to the Red River in Texas, they realize that the wagons have been attacked by Indians. After the Indians attack them at night, young Matt arrives at their camp with a cow but he's half-crazy having witnessed the Indian attack on the wagon train before escaping. Years later, after the Civil War, Matt (played by Montgomery Clift as an adult) returns to help Dunson and Groot drive the herd of almost 10,000 cattle west to Missouri, although there are rumors that there's a railroad in Abilene, Kansas, which would eliminate the danger of Missouri raiders stealing the herd and killing the men. Dunson wants to take them to Missouri though and becomes despotic on the drive, causing many of the men to grumble and question his authority. Eventually, there is a mutiny and Dunson is left behind injured and embarrassed while Matt leads the herd to Abilene. Dunson vows to kill Matt once he recuperates and comes after him.

Red River is full of action, male bonding, Indian attacks, gunfights, fistfights and the recreation of a full-fledged cattle drive where all the principal actors actually are involved in transporting a huge herd. It's also a character study of a bitter man who hasn't reconciled himself to a new postwar world where he needs more help than he ever has before but is too proud to ask for it since it will make him seem weak. I'm not going to go into the details about the films ending which has been discussed here recently, except to say that it makes total sense to me and is the only ending I can think of which does in the light of the way the two main characters have been presented for over two hours of screen time. If you want to see a father kill his son in a western, go watch The Big Country where it makes sense, but don't ask an epic western about the founding of a great cattle empire to end with one of the founders dead over a stubborn old man's misplaced sense of pride.