“Would you believe John Ireland?”: Red River and why celebrity gossip matters
Were the leads of 1948 homoerotic cowboy movie Red River having 1948 homoerotic cowboy sex? Who knows! Does it matter? Yeah!
Audiences are known to conflate love between characters and between actors — when the chemistry on screen is too good, when they share smiles in interviews, when professional shippers start the portmanteaus. This fiction-reality speculation is especially intense with television programs because of the longevity of the shows and press tours (take The Bear, The X-Files, The Americans, among others). Movies get that interest in spurts. Recently, there was the lovely story of Zendaya and Tom Holland, who met on Marvel’s Spiderman, going from dating rumors to engagement. Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are exemplary for taking commercial advantage. Decades after Star Wars, Carrie Fisher revealed a long-speculated affair with Harrison Ford in her memoirs.
Going further back, one of the most famous on-screen couples in Old Hollywood weren’t openly together, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The most famous were married, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. There are also a number of on-screen pairings that have had their share of titillations, one well-known pair being Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who shared two films in 1932 and 1940 and a house between that time.
But unlike Hepburn-Tracy and Bogart-Bacall, Grant-Scott weren’t ever confirmed — and never will be. If there’s anything to confirm. They are almost outside living memory, accounts have been mined to exhaustion — but speculation lives on. It colors their legacy in both life and film. Their two films together are largely notable for their friendship.
There’s a novel subtext with speculation. Was that line a hint? That look? Other associations factor in, chiefly debates and dramas of sexuality. You can especially see this effect in Cary Grant’s films. Understandings of reality are related to understandings of film — this is true of any realities, but I’m focusing on celebrity relationships in this little case study. I have no strong pure correlation argument (reality perception changes film perception or vice versa), so I argue for an association in either direction.
The most withstanding undisclosed rumors are those built on close public friendships: Grant-Scott, Damon-Affleck, Ariana-Cynthia, also veering outside same-sex couples like Fiennes-Binoche. Some are based on strong performances, like the X-Files leads. Some on slash shipping, like TV fandoms from Supernatural to Yellowjackets. And that’s just the actors.
All this comes together in the case of one Old Hollywood film, Red River. Two friends had such great chemistry in the film that they made Gay History and maintained affair (and homophobic backlash) rumors 80 years later, completely reshaping the film. But it isn’t a big pop culture piece like all the other relationships I outlined above — it’s barely even substantiated either on screen or in real life.
Despite its limits, writing about/researching this quite relevant 1940’s film was way more fun than doing a contemporary example. All the cards are laid. I hope it’s as fun to read. The conclusions I got out of this exercise can be applied to anyone on any film or TV show, brand new or long gone.
Introductory reading of Red River
Red River (1948) is one of those must-watches for both American nationalists and Queer Cinema aficionados (FDR’s Top Gun). If you’re unfamiliar, I compiled some clips below that show what people read into. The film is a cowboy movie about a rancher (John Wayne) and his adopted heir (Montgomery Clift) fighting over where to take their huge herd of cattle after the Civil War tanked the Texas economy. It’s a classic, well-regarded Western with all the Western attributes of manifest destiny, anti-Indigenous violence, and hypermasculinity.
It was the first unsympathetic role Wayne played and the first movie Monty Clift filmed (though it was released after his second). Like a number of films from the time, the meat of their performances is in their contrast. Clift being a harbinger of a new, youthful, destabilized acting style and Wayne an icon of Old Hollywood stability. It’s inextricably tied to representations of (and lived) masculinities.
Red River is equally famous nowadays as a “gay subtext” film, in the same thread of its release year-mate Rope (1948). Like Rope, the real life gayness of its actors (Clift in Red River, both leads in Rope) influences subtextual readings in a positive feedback loop. I want to delve into the encoding/decoding practices of queer readings. Is the material inherently meaningful? Did the actors embed meaning? Did the directors or writers embed meaning? Did film readers embed meaning? Did they derive meaning from the material or extratextual circumstances?
In the case of Rope, multiple factors contribute to a now definite gay reading outside close reading (both lead actors were gay and so was the screenwriter and the real life source material, and director Hitchcock often portrayed homosexuality, and also everyone involved talked about it as a gay story). Red River has similar factors: the film text, Monty Clift’s overexposed life, auteur director Howard Hawks’s signature gender & sexuality play. But there’s a big difference in all these elements being inferences or hints rather than statements, as in Rope. Of note, Rope received pointed notice from the Production Code censors to play down the homosexuality while Red River was only asked to remove illicit heterosexual sexuality. Red River’s limited documentation is more typical of the “gay subtext” film.
Interestingly, Red River can possibly be read as a gay film through text alone. Howard Hawks worked on The Outlaw (1943), another Western, before quitting/getting fired by producer Howard Hughes, who chose to direct the film on his own. With no gay personnel or auteurist signature, current audiences still read a homosexual love triangle. The text has this and more in similarity with Red River. Hughes sued Hawks for plagiarizing the ending. Still, Hawks and Red River are part of the film’s extratext. Notably, The Outlaw is not regarded as a must-watch by anyone.
Clift. Brando. Dean.
I’d been aware of Red River since I saw it featured on The Celluloid Closet (1995) as a kid, then again as I explored Howard Hawks’s oeuvre, and again as I became more interested in Westerns. Many years, many opportunities. The final straw was my renewed awareness of Montgomery Clift as a consequence of my interest in James Dean; Dean idolized Clift.
These fifties heartthrob-artists are a linked chain, if you get into the history. I enjoy the entire mainstream studio period, 1929 to 1969 or what have you. I don’t think of the early studio period, Cary Grant’s up-and-comer period, as inter-involved as this fifties period. The actors who began in the late 40s, early 50s were the first post-sound generation of actors; with their directors, writers, and producers, they developed a novel form of acting that began on stage (“the Method” and the Actors Studio were a part of this). It was more collaborative than it was authoritative as it was in the film studios.
Cary Grant, for example, developed his acting in movies throughout the thirties until he finally got the hang of it at the end of the decade. Actors like Monty Clift, Jimmy Dean, Paul Newman seem like they appeared on screen fully formed, though they certainly evolved. It’s how James Dean can go out with only three films and have each one be a classic still talked about seventy years later. Who is talking about Grant’s film debut This is the Night (1932)? To be fair, not many are interested in Newman’s flop 1954 debut either. His first successful movie was his second two years later, the boxer film Somebody Up There Likes Me — which was supposed to be Jimmy Dean’s film (it also stars Pier Angeli and Sal Mineo).
Dean’s roles in East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Giant (1956), and his cancelled roles in films like Somebody Up There Likes Me and This Angry Age (1956), were all contested by similarly sensitive white young actors: Monty Clift, Tony Perkins, Tab Hunter (to a smaller degree). I can’t imagine Clift doing what Dean did in Giant or Dean doing anything Clift did, but they’re closer to each other than they are to Clark Gable. This old-new, hard-soft, reserved-sensitive contrast is a metatextual motif in their work (like in Red River, Gable and Clift illustrated this difference in The Misfits (1960)).
Rock Hudson was of that last Old Hollywood breed — learned as he went along, quantity over quality. His huge break was a few years into his career, with Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Giant. Hudson’s work on the latter earned him his one Oscar nomination. Dean too earned a nomination, his second, both posthumous.
Hudson was especially Old Hollywood in the masculine put-on. The dominant idea is that “Clift, Brando, Dean” brought male emotionality & sensitivity to film and therefore the American public. Stanley Kowalski’s violence is made scarier by his strategic vulnerability. When Charles Boyer “gaslights” Ingrid Bergman, the horror is in his actions. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the horror is in who Stanley is. When Hudson plays a flawed husband to Liz Taylor in Giant, he is what is parodied about the fifties man. The strong, stable, dominating man. The masculine ideal. James Dean was the opposite of ideal. Starting the film as Hudson’s ranch hand, Dean is an explosion waiting to happen. They were in the same film. It’s the acting more than the writing.
Advanced reading of Red River
Which brings me back to Red River. Before watching, I was aware it was homoerotically charged. I didn’t remember with what characters, so I spent the first act thinking it was between Monty Clift and his father figure John Wayne. And there is tension! Vito Russo actually only talks about this relationship in his groundbreaking book on queer cinema, The Celluloid Closet. But when Cherry Valance, played by John Ireland, meets Clift’s Matt Garth near the end of the first act, they fan the flames to a near obvious, near intended degree. The documentary adaptation of Russo’s book references this relationship.
The scene after their meeting, Cherry and Matt exchange guns and complement each other’s equipment and shooting. It’s explicitly a set up for a tussle, the film says so. The sexual ambiguity is a Hawks signature, present in a number of his films: the hunky homoerotic number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Cary Grant’s “gone gay all of sudden” in Bringing Up Baby (1938), the gender-swapped His Girl Friday (1940), the strong-male-friendship focus in The Big Sky (1952) and A Girl in Every Port (1928). The interest was entirely comic or macho.
Reading the dialogue, I can imagine two stools doing the scene in a way that would elicit a minimum amount of inference. The script is baseline suggestive (there’s no escaping the phallus). But it’s the acting more than the writing. The smiles, pauses, looks. It’s hard to explain, like any look of interest or love. If you see it, you see it.
Video description: A series of scenes from Red River, showing the relationships between Wayne, Clift, Ireland, and Dru — the romantically-coded bracelet, the Matt-Cherry promised tussle, and the final Matt-Dunson tussle
Throughout the film, Matt is criticized by Cherry for being “soft.” But Clift has to be “soft” for it to make sense when people in the story point it out — which is to say, the audience has to know before it’s said. In turn, it doesn’t have to be said to be known. The best thing a film can do for me is communicate suggestion.
Clift goes soft for Ireland in the film — the expected shoot-out never happens between them. Even a third act love triangle between the pair and a woman (Joanne Dru) doesn’t result in any tension. Wayne gets more involved with the girl than Ireland! The siphoning of Cherry Valance is apparent.
Beyond the nature of narrative, extratextual drama is regarded as a primary agent. Editor Christian Nyby (Oscar nom’ed for this film) confirms in Post Script (Fall 2005) that “because Hawks made so many changes, you couldn't cut to the script,” insinuating both Hawks’s authorial dominance and Nyby’s critical role as editor. Director Hawks says he chose to cut Ireland out of the film for his drinking, among other unruly behaviour. His account of the matter in Film Comment (5-6/1974) was in response to screenwriter Borden Chase’s allegation that the cuts came from romantic jealousy over Dru. Ireland married Dru three years after Red River in 1949, during which time he was getting a divorce and dating around & she was married.
(Aside: I feel it’s necessary to acknowledge Ireland was not good to the women in his life. Seemingly, a physical fight led him and Dru to divorce in 1957. Ireland dated teen girls when he was middle aged. It’s crazy. John Wayne is an icon of ultra American Conservatism. I’m sure there’s more. My point is just to acknowledge that in our savoury fun, there is an ugly reality that should be known).
Ireland echoes Hawks’s claim in Ronald Davis’s Wayne biography. He says he was disciplined for his and Clift’s drinking — they spent time together since they knew each other in New York. Both men were put off by others on set, as Ireland remembered: “Duke Wayne was with his buddies who drank a lot and played cards a lot and stayed up late. Monty and I worked more. … We didn’t seem to fit that mold” (“Crazy About the Movies” Clift documentary, 1989). Clift told a friend with similar sentiment: “They [Hawks and Wayne] laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary” (Patricia Bosworth’s Clift biography).
Shelley Winters, then unknown, dated Ireland around the time Red River was filming. She had a brief appearance in the film when Ireland suggested it to Hawks. She later co-starred with Monty in A Place in the Sun (1951). In her autobiography, she speaks on Ireland, Clift, their “very good” friendship, and her relationships with both. She also insinuates Ireland had a gambling problem and a problem with staying sober (to the point she told him to “do this one [All the King’s Men (1949)] stone-cold sober”). From what I understand in Bosworth’s book, what would become Monty’s infamous substance abuse only really began in 1949. This is to say that Hawks’s claim is well-supported, most importantly by Ireland.
In his biography on Howard Hawks, Gerald Mast sardonically posits that these claims are “the sort of gossip that seems to delight a certain kind of cinephile who believes that such explanations really explain things” — Mast’s explanation for the cuts is “Hawks’s narrative sense.” Beyond conceivable sense, evidence supports this interpretation. Garry Wills points out in his book John Wayne’s America that Cherry’s role was steadily cut down during scripting. Though a significant measure of rewrites and cuts were made during filming. Nyby vaguely says in Post Script that “... the [Cherry Valance] part was trimmed, more or less, to fit him [Ireland].” Despite its rational dressing, it’s just another interpretation, this time based on the guild of auteurism.
This is the basic extent of what I know about Ireland’s time doing Red River. I only know all this because I was investigating claims online that Clift & Ireland were carrying on an affair — and that accounted for the subtext, the cuts, and other stories behind the film like the Clift-Wayne tension. It’s on the IMDb trivia page of the film (recently edited out curiously), on social media and reviews, on random film fact sites.
Different pieces of trivia as directly pulled from IMDb:
“At one point Wayne tried to have Clift replaced when he heard that his co-star was having an affair with John Ireland.”
“The famous scene where Montgomery Clift and John Ireland compare their revolvers was allegedly a reference to the affair they were having in real life.”
“[On the gay subtext:] It has been speculated that Valance's gradual disappearance from the story after being introduced as a major character was Hawks' response to seeing the dailies during production.”
I’m sure it’s a case of circular reporting as IMDb plays a large role in disseminating trivia. Comparing archived pages, I can discern that the first “affair” fact was added to IMDb sometime between 04/2004 and 01/2006. With no clear citation, I suspected it was an assumption based on the gay subtext or paratext. But I wanted to know if there was a biographical or at least non-internet source. I wanted to know, substantiated or not, what the use of this rumor was.
Gossip, titillating
I’m not exactly shocked there are affair rumors related to a movie production. This isn’t even the only torrid affair rumor of this production. But verifying information is hard. I like to triangulate, connect findings from separate sources. For example, there’s random talk of Natalie Wood and/or Sal Mineo having relations with James Dean during Rebel Without a Cause. However, the vast documentation behind this film doesn’t corroborate these claims, so accuracy can at least be estimated.
In contrast, there is no Red River Tell-All. John Ireland is an enigmatic guy. He’s best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in 1950 Best Picture All the King’s Men, but he remained very active in movies until his death in 1992. The most I learned about him outside obituaries was limited newspaper searches, Winters’s memoir, and Laurence Harvey biographies which documented their close friendship. There’s a fair number of Clift, Wayne, Hawks biographies, but Ireland is only mentioned in a page or two if at all.
I am not particularly interested in figuring out if a relationship happened or not either. I mostly don’t care. Not for any valiant reason, it just wouldn’t change my perception of Red River, Clift, Ireland, Wayne, or anyone else. Least of all the ever-present sexuality debate. But the rumor does have a documented impact on audience perception — this I care about.
Sometimes the interest is in who’s making the claim. Some Rebel-related rumors are more notable for coming from Gore Vidal or Kenneth Anger than their accuracy. Those famous-by-association can be equally interesting characters. Sometimes the interest is in determining a celebrity’s sexual orientation, or connecting artistic and personal history, or in fantasizing about famous attractive people, or pure titillation. This all applies to Jimmy Dean (anything does!) but none of it has anything to do with John Ireland (who is not Clift-famous) or Monty Clift (whose fanatics have a harder time with his heterosexual leanings). Which is to conclude, there is little star interest in this Clift-Ireland claim. (Aside: There isn’t even shipping interest — that Grant-Scott, Martin-Lewis, Fonda-Stewart interest. If you know!)
Claims are shorthand for something else the claimant is interested in. Of course, sex is the most fun gossip; “gay affair” is a step up, “gay 1940s Hollywood affair” sells. The conceptual origin of this specific rumor is simple, outside possible hearsay origins. Attractive male stars, one known to be gay, acting out suggestive scenes, in a macho Western, that were cut, is a compelling set up.
The subtext is clear, to the point intent is assumed. In Celluloid Closet, Arthur Laurents (screenwriter of Rope) said this about their gun measuring scene: “Monty Clift and John Ireland knew what they were doing. I think that's why the scene is, I think funny… because of their delight in playing the sexuality of the gun.”
Laurents probably had some idea considering all of them were in the same circle per a section in his 2000 memoir about how “stars wanted sex with new stars on the cusp.” (Aside: he also writes about how Clift was asked by Hitchcock to play the dominating lover role on Rope but rejected it for the sexuality bit! Which says something about the limits of subtext — Red River was Monty’s first film role and his most homoerotic. Twenty years later, he was to play an explicitly gay character in an adaptation of Reflections in a Golden Eye but he passed before production began). More implicitly, Laurents suggests this reading was not retroactive but contemporaneous.
The podcast You’re Missing Out hosted by Mike Natale and Tom Lorenzo (which is one of the few film podcasts I enjoy) explores the National Film Registry year by year. Red River was inducted only the second year of the Registry in 1990. In their episode on the film, they talk about this Clift-Ireland affair rumor and spiral into theories of this relationship and its manifestation on screen as the reason behind the tension and cuts. The episode is an apt demonstration of the decoding playground.
Even hyperbolized or misinformed, claimed or assumed, there are limits to what can be said and spread about someone (at least when it isn’t related to James Dean). I never read anything about an affair between Ireland & Laurence Harvey (aside: Christopher Isherwood actually makes an off-hand comment about this in a Feb. 6, 1961 diary entry. He writes of how Gavin Lambert made him laugh when he told him that Harvey “announced” at a party he got married [he’d just been divorced] and “that John Ireland was his mistress.” Isherwood concludes: “He really is sympathetic.” He who?) — or Clift & his other co-stars (Liz Taylor is another Dean). “Gay 1940s Hollywood affair” sells because it takes some work to figure that out when no one was out. It also serves a purpose. Titillation is limited!
Gossip, functional
The two non-internet sources I’ve seen mention a Clift-Ireland affair are the rumor-aggregate books by Darwin Porter and a Rock Hudson biography by David Bret that doesn’t have bibliographic notes. Though both sources are secondary, my analysis is about the perception. I’ll update if I find a primary source.
Bret’s book came out first in 2004, around the time the IMDb trivia was first added. The trivia site and the book parallel. The biography states: “In 1946, upon being told that Montgomery Clift was having an affair with third-lead John Ireland, Wayne had gone berserk and tried to have Monty fired from Red River. This so upset the younger star that their fist-fight in the film had been for real, with Wayne coming off worse for once.”
This story is similar to an incident involving John Huston discovering Monty and another man together during the production of Freud (1962). As Huston relayed it in Bosworth’s Clift biography: “The incident seemed trashy — I felt Monty had insulted me. It was messy. … I can’t say I’m able to deal with homosexuals.” Huston absurdly restricted Clift from having relationships with men or older women, or from drinking or taking pills — which Clift agreed to (Robert LaGuardia’s Clift biography). Brooks Clift, Monty’s brother, implicated Huston in Monty’s death for his equally absurd “impeded production” lawsuit against Monty (which Huston lost legally but Monty lost socially by becoming uninsurable) (Making Montgomery Clift, 2018).
Besides a possibility of conflation, I want to point out in at least this instance and the Rope refusal, Clift purposefully chose the path of avoiding involving his sexuality in a role. It isn’t anything definitive, but it can be a basis of an argument against Clift risking implicating himself by playing purposeful subtext.
Returning to Bret’s claim. It’s true that Wayne was homophobic, and he and Clift didn’t get along. But there’s no documented connection between the two facts. Clift wasn’t out but his slight figure and neuroticism othered him. Upon meeting Clift, Wayne called him “a little queer” to his secretary (quoted in Randy Roberts’s Wayne biography), a purposefully ambiguous term. They still somewhat socialized outside of set. As previously quoted, Clift said that he was repelled by the “machismo” of Wayne and Hawks when they tried to draw him in. Wayne took Clift and Hawks’s son on a disastrous bear hunting trip which Clift wrote about to a friend, ending the letter: “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?” (Bosworth).
Funnily, maybe this can be connected to how John Wayne derided Midnight Cowboy publicly (Playboy 5/1971 interview: “Wouldn't you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies [as perverted]?”) but told his wife Pilar Pallete, “Hell, you know it’s not my kind of story, but I know a great performance when I see one — and I just saw two [Hoffman & Voight]” (Pallete’s My Life With the Duke). Homophobia, itself irrational, operates on irrational terms.
Hawks’s own homophobia isn’t mentioned in talk of set conflict. When asked about people reading gay inferences into his films, he said to Film Comment in 1974: “I’d say it’s a goddamn silly statement to make. It sounds like a homosexual speaking.” Similar to Hitchcock, breaking boundaries in the vein of Victim (1961) was not the goal. The perverseness yet prevalence of nonnormative sexuality created a humorous edge. Male and homosocial focuses are not inherently sexist, but Hawks’s pre-existing sexism surely did not deter him from the setting. (Aside: women are often used in Hawks Westerns in service of the male characters. The actresses' diminished roles made them critically susceptible as the weakest links).
There’s a chasm in the chain of understanding the story behind Red River. The premise of Bret’s full claim that homophobia created set conflict is reliant on a Clift-Ireland affair to trigger the homophobic reaction (since Clift was neither “obvious” or “out”). Some speculation (the IMDb page, the You’re Missing Out episode, stray comments online) bases the eroticism of their scenes on a relationship, intentional or accidental. Some speculation extends that to explain why Cherry/Ireland was cut.
Rumors act as bridges of reasoning. “Why?” is the primary question answered by this Clift-Ireland affair claim. Questions of the screen tension, the set tension, the cuts. The claim verbalizes an assumed homophobia that isn’t actually documented.
Gossip, decoding playground
Darwin Porter, an author who worked in Hollywood, has published One Thousand celebrity “biographies” that are taken as real person fanfiction. When Vanity Fair interviewed Lauren Bacall in 2011, they brought up a Porter story about her late husband Humphrey Bogart involving Truman Capote and a blowjob, to which she replied: “Oh, please. You must be joking.” (She then recounted a counter-story about Bogie turning down Noel Coward). I’m critical of relatives’ accounts of their famous loved ones, but I can believe this one.
These Porter books can be pretty influential, in either creating or popularizing rumors. One of the most pervasive James Dean Fun Facts is that he, Eartha Kitt, and Paul Newman engaged in a lurid threesome. The source of this is lost in recent posting, but older articles linked it to Porter’s 2009 Newman book (also disparaged by widow Joanne Woodward). Porter writes Eartha told him the story in 1986 when she was filming the adaptation of his book Butterflies in Heat. Besides my suspicion this wouldn’t happen, the platonic nature of Kitt’s relationship with Dean was important to her. I’d rather follow her story.
Like much of RPF, facts make dressing. In a Marilyn Monroe-inspired book published in 2012, Porter’s Monroe and photographer Milton Greene discuss Truman Capote’s little black book. “Who did he tell you had the biggest one in Hollywood?” Marilyn asked. Milton replied, “Would you believe John Ireland? At least according to the Truman Capote Bible. Ireland fucked Monty Clift when they made Red River, that picture with John Wayne.”
Not taking them as biographical fact, breadcrumb or otherwise, these documents (later solidified by IMDb and the internet) are markers of interest. To return to previous logic, no one is writing about Monty Clift & John Wayne having a secret affair. There’s no interest to strengthen plausibility. Maybe while lost in the woods bear hunting, they had a Brokeback moment? Maybe the fight in the end was fueled by a lovers’ spat? Who knows? Is this interesting? Would you believe that?
Reading “Would you believe John Ireland?” for the first time made me laugh at its irony. Removed from context (which is another story, big enough to be mentioned in Ellroy’s American Tabloid), what a perfect summary of celebrity gossip. This article was born out of that line. The living memory of Red River probably died in 2022 with Mickey Kuhn, who played young Matt Garth. Monty died long before then in 1966. Ireland’s children live on. Neither were bothered by a Vanity Fair interviewer about this floating salacious trivia item. If they were, they would probably give the Bacall response. Probably truthfully. Then would you believe John Ireland? In another sense, would you believe John Ireland… altered the trajectory of this nationally preserved motion picture through a secret relationship with his co-star and friend?
I was browsing a Monty Clift fanpage on Instagram and in one of their comments they explained that in their view: “... the experienced film pros [in Red River] were a bit intimidated by the young bucks from the Broadway stage. This contributed to the friction and some sore feelings behind the scenes as Clift & Ireland were literally running away with the picture. Ireland’s scenes were cutdown most likely for this reason and not all the false rumors created years after the film.”
Like the whirlwind of jealousy, affair, homophobia, mischief, and auteurist rumors — supported by both biography and speculation — artistic trouble is another playground. There’s an element of fan aggrandization centering idol idiosyncrasy. A focus on the craft conflict is connected to a focus on the craft within the film. Clift and Ireland “running away with the picture” is more subjective than it’s put, seeing as how Wayne is notably praised for his performance (like Ford’s famous comment after seeing Wayne in Red River, “I didn’t know the son of a bitch could act”).
The “decoding playground” is how different perceptions can be played with to produce different interpretations. A focus on actor’s craft is a focus on performance style and industrial conflict; a focus on jealousy is a focus on the interactions of the offending players; a focus on gay relations is a focus on not only the subtextual insinuation but the knowing that Arthur Laurents describes. The knowing is a private & honest understanding between actor and audience. The script and even direction becomes less trustworthy and certain elements become more prominent, like non-dialogue performance & narrative rewriting (i.e. what would the story have been like if machismo-homophobia didn’t interfere). The results of this interpretation are fundamentally opposed to the outcome of auteurist worship. Within the context of the production, moments can be read as an in-joke or as resistance; it can be read as “getting away with it” or as persecution. As more than it seems. An understanding of the film is shaped by beliefs surrounding it.
I mapped out extensively (but not exhaustively) biographical information I can verify, but even most of that is hearsay and incomplete, hindered rightfully by privacy. It is more accurate to say nothing went on and Hawks cut Ireland for disturbing set and the actors just did their jobs. It’s more stimulating to say something went on, to theorize and explore and indulge. When you control what you believe, you control what you see.
My site of stimulation is in revealing the mechanics of understanding. “Revealing” undercurrents is part of gossip aiding meaning production — it can be assumed that base structures like homophobia, rivalry, art development, personal relations, work relations are ever-present. Audiences want to figure out how. “Do you believe…?” provides more information than the initial “did they…?” question.
A note on data
If you will indulge a final aside: I’m worried that with the impermanence of online data, valuable firsthand insights into audience reception (like the Instagram comment and podcast I referenced, and the websites that threw me into this) will disappear. A devastating loss of media history is impending. All internet data is vulnerable but this specific selection of data is especially discardable for data hosts like Meta, data hoarders, and the people posting it. As I mentioned, this speculation over a Clift-Ireland affair was wiped from the IMDb trivia page after fifteen-plus years of spreading it around (the trivia was on IMDb as late as 2022). If reposts and the Wayback Machine didn’t exist, the source of dissemination would be forever lost. Online evidence is very valuable and very fragile.
One of the hardest parts of Old Hollywood research is figuring out what audiences really thought. For example, evidence viewers interpreted the relationships in Red River as homoerotic appeared far after release. We don’t know how viewers took it in 1948 — we don’t even know how anyone involved understood it. Primary materials like that Film Comment 1974 interview with Hawks and Celluloid Closet interview with Laurents are landmarks. I was able to reference the magazine because it was digitized and accessible through my university library. I would have had to buy the physical magazine or a subscription to the database otherwise. Primary data is so important. We will mourn lost internet data the way we mourn lost silent cinema — the majority will be destroyed.
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I will continue to write about movies, Old Hollywood, spectatorship, dead celebrities, gay art, data, and pretty much Everything I Wrote About Here … & More. Hopefully in a novel, interesting, and engaging way. Subscribe to my Sub-Stack (free) to get it straight to your email. Share it online. Comment if you have thoughts. Thanks, bye!