It's bad enough that The Quiet Man lost its spot on this list last year, and now Red River is about to meet the same fate. As of this post, Red River is clinging on the IMDb Top 250 list, currently it is #250 with 3,689 votes and a weighted rating of 7.8. What is so frustrating about this is that I don't know of anyone who would claim that Spider-Man 2, Garden State, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, or Shrek is better then Red River. Yet people hand out 10's left and right to movies like these, and they are all rated higher then Red River. Please, everyone vote for this movie! And if you want a real "greatest film" list, visit:
It's true, you can't take that list serious. But it's nothing to worry about. 48 of the 250 movies in the list were made in the past 5 years. If they started the imdb250 in 1940, it would have looked different.
On hotel room tv's, you can watch classic movies like Red River, or you can watch porn. We all know what most people choose to watch. This doesn't mean that porn ephemera is about to push great cinema out of our cultural memory. Don't confuse the esthetic wasteland of the free market with the canon of those passionate about film as art.
I gave this movie a "10" just to help keep it in the top 250 although, realistically, I would have given it an 8. Joanne Dru's mouthy over-acting nearly killed this movie. Without her, it's a solid "10".
Looking at the list of the 250 movies, it's obvious that the voting has been hijacked by the soccer moms. "Shrek"??? Give me a break!!!
What a good post. You make a very important and informed point with a very nice analogy. Way to show IMDb Bulletin Board dwellers that many of us still have grey matter left behind our eye sockets.
http://www.filmsite.org/momentsindx.html list I've seen already it. The only difference is those on its list were not selected by public voting. IMDB's list is always fluctuating and the real problem, people these days do not get to know about great creators and actors like Cukor, Ford, Peckinpah, Huston, Wayne, Brennan, Bette Davis and many more outstanding personalities of hollywood. How many people would have admired the contribution of Russell Harlan's Cinematography, Tiomkin's exceptional music and Nyby's editing in Red River. It was Howard's greatest work and it was a tragedy to be not in top250, when some of hollywood's turkeys feature in the list. Very unfortunate.
In all honesty, people should have to qualify their opinion. A person flipping past this movie on their way to the celebrity poker game should not be allowed to vote.
I didn't give this movie a "1" but I just gabe it a "5", andt that may even be too good. Reasons: Good about the movie is the camera, most of the acting, the fine drawing of most of the characters and the slow yet not boring way of telling the story. BUT: Many young viewers won't completely understand the motivation of the characters, nor will they endure the slow way of storytelling. (It was my problem with the movie, when I saw it with about 12 years. My problem TODAY is different: in its conservatism the fil is despising men (I hope this can be understood, as my English isn't good). Cherry gets shot and it'S no problem to anyone. It only seems to matter, that Dunston and Matt accept there love for each other. That Dunston is a murderer doesn't seem to count at all. His whole behaving is disgusting: Robbing land and cows, killing men... It is impossible to identify with him, though it may be a clever drawn vharakter. But the message of the movie is rather weird. Cherry'S death may as well have been "no problem" because of the homophil scene between him and Matt, comparing their "Guns". Such a character - it may seem - may be killed without giving it a secondd thought.
as I recall, Cherry was wounded (he also shot Dunston) and Harry Carey's character comes to his aid as he stirs on the ground. So I don't think Tom has killed him.
The last thing in the world we should do is to put any serious thought or feeling into the IMDb Top whatever. Just think about the people you encounter on many of these message boards, the level of literacy is 19th Century Ozarkian. No, wait, people were much more literate in that century, and that would include the people who lived in the Ozarks. So of course they give a lot of awful pictures 10's because they have no sense of proportion and no taste. They would see Red River as a boring old-fashioned black and white movie where no one gets their head cut off, there are no boob shots, and nothing blows up. I don't put much faith in any Top whatever list including the one from AFI. That one is top heavy with baby-boomer and film school picks. People's own favorites are the best because we can each explain why we like them. Films are very personal things, after all. It depends on when we saw them, under what circumstances, with whom we saw them and what was going on in our lives at the time. It's harder to be objective about movies than many people think. I was raised in the film industry; my father was a contract player at MGM during the so-called Golden Years of Hollywood, so I was filled with a good deal of his opinions and those of fellow actors. It has taken me years to sort out what is mine and what was his. I sometimes teach screenwriting at a large San Francisco university and I try to keep from force-feeding my opinions to my students. I encourage them in their own but I do try to get them to explain their picks. So bugger the IMDb or any other Top 100 or 250 movies. They are fun to look at, but they need to be put into perspective.
It's all politics. The Duke is the most famous conservitive movie star of all time (Unless you want to count Ronald Reagan). How many times in Triva of Wayne's films is concern over Wayne and his many liberal co-stars getting along or not is mentioned, including Red River?