Red River is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I expected to enjoy the source material: a six-part serialization that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post December 1946-January 1947, later published as a novel. I did not, however, expect the novel to best the film. The characterizations are more thoroughly explored, and the ending is genuine and moving (and mercifully absent Joanne Dru's shrill interference). The economic desperation of post-war Texas and its role in Dunson and Mathew's motivations is something the film only brushes against, while it is a driving force of the book. The prose edges into pulpy sometimes but only when it intends to. And of course the film ends more happily than the book, but both resolutions have their points of merit. Personally I love each incarnation of this story for exactly what it is.