Version where Groot narrarates...

Howard Hawks probably looked better when his wife told him what to wear. The diary version is the best for me. I first saw Red River at a drive-in theater in about 1952. When it started showing up on TV in the late fifties, it was still the diary version. I read somewhere once the Walter Brenan narraration was added at a rather late date to shorten the movie for TV showing. For me the turning of the pages with Dimitri Tiomkin's bouncey version of Texas, Our Texas (the state anthem) playing goes more with the epic, mythic mood of the picture. It doesn't bother me that the song wasn't written until the 1930's, and I'm sure it didn't bother Dimitri, if he even knew it!

To me the narraration version is a mutilation.

He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good... St. Matthew 5:45

I first saw "Red River" in 1964, as a 10 year-old in Dallas at my neighborhood theatre, owned by one of John Wayne's Texas friends, Gordon McLendon. McLendon liked to occasionally trot out old prints of Duke's past gems for a week-long run at one or another of his theatres. He may have personally owned some of the prints.

I say this because the print of "Red River" I saw was the Brennan-narrated version. Later, during the VHS period, I bought a copy of the alleged "Director's Cut" and found it was the "diary" version. At the time, I assumed my childhood memory of Brennan narrating the film was simply wrong and that the film had always used the diary. Later, I read somewhere that there had actually been two versions, and that the narrated version had been the first one released to theatres.

There are many conflicting versions of what follows next, but this is what I first heard: Howard Hughes filed a lawsuit against United Artists, alleging that "Red River" plaigerized his 1943 film "The Outlaw", which Hawks had partially directed before being replaced by someone else (maybe Hughes himself?). I'm not sure what part of "Red River" was at issue in this suit, as various versions of this story cite different scenes as being a rip-off of "The Outlaw." However, UA remedied the situation by paying a sum of money to Hughes in an out-of-court settlement and calling in all release prints of "Red River." At what point in R-R's release cycle (first-run or second-run) this event occurred, I do not know. The original prints were supposedly destroyed and new ones struck off with the diary motif added as written pages superimposed over transition scenics.

McLendon's print may have been his personal possession because, obviously, the UA zone office in 1964 was not supposed to be in possession of a print that was supposed to have been destroyed by company order in 1948 or '49. However, if any prints had been struck off for private sale (and this was occasionally done for industry or company insiders) before the originals were called in, this might explain the existence of such a print as late as 1964. What the UA zone office thought about the print being projected commercially at that date is anyone's guess, unless the copyright had been allowed to expire (unlikely, given the film was less than 20 years old at that time).

For what it's worth, my memory of the picture quality of the projected image is that it was not very good - bad contrast, quite scratchy, a few skips - i.e., pretty standard for release prints of old movies at that time (quite possibly a print made from another print), and not at all up to the quality of a first-generation print from an excellent pre-print source.

Consider the now-famous story of the last known 70mm roadshow-length print of "The Alamo" being found in a Toronto UA zone office 26 years after all such prints were ordered returned to the home office for destruction; the Toronto office simply thought they had the 35mm 161-minute version because it was stored in the wrong size can, with the running time mislabeled, and they had never actually inspected the film! So, I guess it's possible that the Dallas office, too, had something other than what they were supposed to have when the Walter Brennan-narrated 35mm version of "Red River" packed 'em in at the Casa Linda Theatre in 1964.