Plantin' and readin'

Red River

(1948)

No, I'm not going to talk about the homoeroticism--that's clear to anybody who pays attention, and to many who don't, but that's most important as a first-act adolescent rite of passage.

Rather, what impressed itself upon me this time was just how godawful the whole Joanne Dru bit is--how inept her acting is, but also how embarrassingly bad the writing of her part is, such that no Barrymore could have rescued it--but how none of that matters, because she delivers the authorial voice that needs to be delivered when it needs to be delivered. Could it have been handled more subtly with equal effectiveness? We'll never know, but as is, it gets the job done.