The dialogue is from the Nugent screenplay, each line faithfully rendered. But the silent grace notes—the coat, the gentle farewell, Clayton’s noble discretion—were improvised on the set. The result is classic Ford—understated, ambiguous, bathed in silent emotion. We learn many things: about Ethan’s disrespect for authority, his and Martha’s enduring secret love, his sway over other men, Clayton’s surprising sensitivity, Martha’s hidden feelings. Most of it isn’t expressed in words. “Show, don’t tell” is the narrative writer’s and filmmaker’s first commandment. Ford, who was a natural storyteller, knew it by heart.
Later that same day, Ford filmed another classic moment, the scene in which Aaron, Martha, and their children realize they are about to come under attack by Comanches. This is the opening scene of Alan LeMay’s novel, the starting point that Ford and Nugent decided to delay until later in the movie. They take LeMay’s structure, setting, and intent, but add their own little cinematic twist. While Aaron is outside, checking to see if anyone’s hiding in the brush, his older daughter, Lucy, innocently lights an oil lamp inside. A panic-stricken Martha, knowing Comanches will see the light, snuffs it immediately and reprimands her. From the sharp, anxious tone in her mother’s voice, Lucy suddenly realizes the mortal danger they are in. Ford’s camera tracks in on Lucy’s face as panic seizes her, too, and she screams. To silence her, Martha slaps her hard. Then mother and daughter collapse in each other’s arms, an embrace of mutual terror and despair.
The tender farewell between Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan), his sister-in-law and the forbidden love of his life, while the Rev. Samuel Clayton (Ward Bond) pretends not to notice.
It is a devastating exchange. Martha, played by Dorothy Jordan, is a small, gentle woman who deeply loves her children. Just as in the novel, we know she is strong spiritually: Aaron has told Ethan in an earlier scene that she is the driving force that has kept them on the land despite many hardships. Now we see her steely core. Ford knew exactly what he wanted, and he carefully briefed Dorothy Jordan to make sure he got it.
“She slugged me,” Pippa Scott recalled. “I swelled terribly the next day. I knew she was gonna sock me. We gently rehearsed it, but I think Pappy took her aside and said really let her have it, and she did.”
The two actresses were so effective that nine-year-old Lana Wood, Natalie’s younger sister, who was playing the young Debbie, was badly shaken. “I remember being very unnerved by it,” she recalled five decades later. “There was a real sense of gut-wrenching terror to it that I know I reacted to very strongly.”
Ford despised excessive camera movement—he felt it called attention to itself and was distracting to audiences. He once told Fred Zinnemann, the director of High Noon and a two-time Academy Award winner, that Zinnemann would be a hell of a filmmaker if he’d just stop moving the camera around. But Ford violates his own cardinal rule in the scream scene; he wants us to share the sense of fear that suddenly crashes down upon the Edwardses as they realize they are about to die.
The film company spent another month on the soundstage, shooting not only interior scenes but also a number of purportedly outdoor scenes that Ford had not been able to capture to his satisfaction in Monument Valley. Much of the outdoor stuff looks exceedingly phony; Bosley Crowther of the New York Times later wrote that some of the scenes “could have been shot in a sporting-goods store window.”
Along the way Ford found a reason to move the camera again for another revealing close-up. It was Monday, August 8, and Ford was shooting a pivotal moment in the tangled psychology and morality of The Searchers. Journeying through a snow-laden stretch of Oklahoma in their search for Debbie, Ethan and Martin have come across the smoldering shell of an Indian village, where they find the bodies of men, women, and children slaughtered by Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. Even Ethan is shocked by what he sees: it’s clear that white soldiers are as capable of wanton brutality as Comanche warriors. He and Martin make their way to a military outpost where soldiers have forcibly hauled the surviving white female captives rounded up during the massacre. Like Cynthia Ann Parker, these woman have been twice brutalized—first by Indians during their original abduction, and now by the soldiers who have destroyed their village and killed most of those living there. Most of them seem crazed, either from living with Indians or from the horror they’ve just witnessed, or both. In a preproduction note, Ford makes clear that the women have been defiled by their Indian masters. Some of the captives, writes Ford, “have been enslaved so long, raped by so many bucks, that they no longer care and can only stare at the whites with dead eyes. They are too beaten to feel anything. Even their sense of shame has left them.”
As Ethan and Martin look around the room to determine if one of the captives is Debbie, they must wade through the madness and grief. “It’s hard to realize they’re white,” a soldier declares.
“They ain’t white anymore,” Ethan replies, slowly and deliberately, and Wayne renders every word like an oath. “They’re Comanch.”
In filming the scene, Ford mixes and matches bits of dialogue from the Nugent screenplay with his own improvised direction, but the key moment belongs to him and Wayne: as Ethan moves away from the living captives to examine the corpses of those who were massacred, one of the deranged women cries out. Ethan stops and turns his head toward her as Ford moves the camera in to capture his expression. Ethan looks toward the woman, lowers his eyes slightly, and turns away. His facial expression burns with distress, sadness, anger, pity, resignation, maybe even despair. As he walks away his shoulders seem to slump. Does he resolve here and now to kill Debbie when he finds her? Or is something more complicated churning in his psyche?
Ford never tells us. But Wayne understood that this was meant to be a morally ambiguous moment. “Helluva shot,” he later told Peter Bogdanovich. “And everybody can put their own thoughts to it. You’re not forced to think one way or the other.”
The scene is the richest and most troubling in The Searchers and perhaps in all of American Westerns. Two civilizations, white and Indian, have collided murderously and the surviving captives are the legacy—the collateral damage, sexually abused to the point of madness. Like ambassadors without portfolio, Ethan and Martin have been traveling the dangerous no-man’s-land between the two sides. They are representatives of the white world, yet have become untethered from it. They are on their own, each of them sticking to the quest for a different purpose. Ethan is searching for vengeance and retribution, while Martin is trying to restore the remaining pieces of his lost family. His search is for love and redemption. Most of all, Martin’s mission is to prevent Ethan from wreaking vengeance on Debbie if and when they find her. At the burned village and the fort, they see the worst damage that each side can inflict on the other, and they struggle to understand what it means and to carry on with their search. Neither of them can turn back.
The fort scene is one of the few moments in The Searchers where the shadow of Cynthia Ann Parker plainly hovers. She and Prairie Flower, her baby girl, were ripped violently from the demolished Indian village by their white captors, then waited to be claimed by Cynthia Ann’s uncle and returned to a home she had long forgotten. They could have easily been among the desperate, unhinged captives whom Ford depicts.
FOUR DAYS LATER, Ford took John Wayne, Natalie Wood, and a camera crew to Bronson Canyon to shoot the film’s climactic scene in which Ethan finally hunts down Debbie. The canyon was one of Hollywood’s classic outdoor locations, a former quarry carved into the southwest corner of Griffith Park just a few miles east of the Culver City studio. Brown and barren, it readily stood in for the rocky terrain of the West. From Riders of the Purple Sage (1925) to I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Zorro Rides Again (1937), anyone who needed a cheap natural location within a bus ride from a studio had resorted to Bronson Canyon over the years. Ford didn’t go there to save money, however, but to solve a problem. As usual, he left no notes to exp
lain. But it’s likely Ford and his crew had filmed the climactic scene in Monument Valley in July according to the Nugent screenplay and that Ford had decided at the last minute to change it.
Nugent’s original script spells out exactly what is supposed to happen and why:
Ethan dismounts with his gun drawn, pointing it at Debbie. “I’m sorry, girl,” he tells her. “Shut your eyes.”
The camera holds on Debbie’s face—the eyes gaze fearlessly, innocently into Ethan’s. After a moment, he lowers his gun and puts it away. “You sure do favor your mother,” he tells her. Then he extends his hand, puts his arm protectively around her and a reconciled uncle and niece head for home.
Somewhere between the original filming of the scene and August 12, Ford decided to reach for a different ending. He clearly wanted something more visual and ambiguous—something the audience could see and feel and not have explained to them. “I wonder, did they box themselves into a corner and find themselves having to shoot this at the very end?” asked the Ford scholar James D’Arc. “Bronson Canyon’s the obvious quickie solution.”
As he did so many times, Ford threw away Nugent’s dialogue and improvised. The fact that he would be jump-cutting from the flat parched floor of Monument Valley to the hilly rock-strewn path leading to Bronson Canyon did not seem to trouble him. In the filmed version, Ethan chases Debbie down, calling out her name—similar to the way he had called out Martha’s name earlier in the film when he searched for her body among the flaming ruins of the ranch house. Desperate to escape him, Debbie reaches the mouth of a cave and then collapses. Ethan dismounts, stands over her, then lifts her over his head in one sweeping motion and takes her in his arms. “Let’s go home, Debbie” is all he says.
For Ford and his crew, it was a quick visit. They started shooting at Bronson Canyon at 11:00 that morning and finished up at 12:45. They broke a half hour for lunch and then headed back to the studio, where Wayne and Hunter performed for a number of process shots with snow-covered fields in the background—looking about as realistic as the plastic flakes inside a glass snow globe. Then Wayne gave Ethan’s “Turning of the Earth” speech, promising Martin that they would eventually find Debbie, taken word for word from LeMay’s novel. The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that Wayne’s reading is so powerful, it feels as if he’s making the earth turn.
Ford wrapped up at 5:10 that afternoon after shooting a total of twelve setups for nine scenes. The next day at noon he completed principal photography.
The Searchers had taken fifty-six days to shoot, a week more than originally scheduled. Ford had shot 187,402 feet of film, only 80,540 of which was listed as wasted or discarded. His film editor, Jack Murray, who had done a dozen pictures for Ford, went to work, but as usual there was little for him to do. As with all his pictures, Ford had essentially edited The Searchers in the camera. Within weeks it was cut, recorded, and made ready for audiences. John Ford was done.
By early October they had a rough cut without music. Then Max Steiner took over. A Vienna-born Jew whose father and grandfather were theatrical producers, Maximilian Raoul Steiner had taken piano lessons from Brahms and had studied at a music conservatory under Mahler before emigrating at age seventeen, first to London and later to New York. To many he was the father of American film music, setting the standard with powerful, classical scores for Cooper’s King Kong, Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, and John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He had done three scores for Ford films in the 1930s, including The Informer, for which he won an Academy Award. But by the 1950s, Steiner’s lush melodramas were out of fashion. Cooper signed him for The Searchers, writes James D’Arc, “as a kind gesture from [an] old friend.”
From preproduction days, Ford had insisted that Pat Ford and his staff come up with a search theme song “that is completely haunting … This should not be done lightly but research should be done exhaustively throughout the classics of the world, from which, after all, we derive our American folk music.”
In the end Ford turned to Stan Jones, a former navy man, firefighter, and park ranger who sang in the Sons of the Pioneers and wrote the haunting Western classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Ford had first met Jones when the ranger had served as an informal adviser on the set of 3 Godfathers in Death Valley in 1948, and Jones wrote songs for Wagon Master and Rio Grande, performed by the Sons of the Pioneers, one of whose members was the handsome baritone singer Ken Curtis. For The Searchers, Jones came up with an eight-verse search theme, which Ford cut down to two—one to launch the film and one to end it. But just as Ford had envisaged, Steiner wove the melody into the score throughout the film, most affectingly during the scenes of Ethan and Martin riding through the high, vast expanse of Monument Valley.
Still, neither Ford nor Steiner was happy with the results. Ford thought the musical score was too lush and classical. “You’ve got a guy alone in the desert and the London Philharmonic’s playing,” he complained to Peter Bogdanovich.
Steiner clearly did not care for the way Ford mutilated his score. There is no record that he ever put his complaints in writing, but there exists a letter from Whitney to Steiner praising the composer for his work on the film and noting, “I am sorry you are not altogether satisfied with the musical score as cut.” It was clear that in musical choices, as in everything else about The Searchers, John Ford exercised ultimate control.
Sonny Whitney ran a pair of sneak previews in Los Angeles and San Francisco in early December, after which he told Ford that The Searchers “goes down as my favorite picture.” Jack Warner sent Walter MacEwen, a studio lieutenant, who reported back that the picture was a success. “Wayne has never been better, in a rugged, sometimes cruel role—and the audience is with him all the way from his opening shots where he gets a good laugh from his weather-beaten appearance.”
It’s not hard to detect a few doubts creeping into MacEwen’s glowing assessment. “The picture is brutal in spots to the point of being daring,” he told Warner. He singled out as particularly gruesome the scene of the white captives at the fort and a scene near the end where Ethan scalps Scar’s corpse, and he also called the pace “rather deliberate in spots, [although] it never seemed to lag.”
Still, MacEwen added, “the whole picture has a real feeling of bigness and honesty, as if you were actually witnessing how the pioneers lived on the frontier.”
Jack Warner’s own doubts were apparent in the delays that followed. The studio had originally planned to release The Searchers in January 1956, but rescheduled for April 7. Then the film ran up against another John Wayne picture, The Conqueror, which RKO slated for general release on April 1. The Searchers contract specified that Warner’s did not have to pay C. V. Whitney Productions its share of the production costs until the film was released. Whitney was eager to get paid: he told Jack Warner he needed the money to finance his next project. No matter. Warner’s delayed its check until the release date, now reset for early June.
Whitney was unhappy with Warner’s for other reasons as well. He feared his big investment was being bounced around the Warner’s studio machine. He had Cooper write Warner a passionate five-page letter that was part plea, part threat, and part paean that clearly had been dictated by Whitney himself.
“Frankly, I have been very disappointed in the advertising copy and television advertising preparation that Warner Brothers has been doing, and when I explained exactly what it was to C.V., he was equally disgusted,” Cooper begins. “We wanted to make a BIG picture which would show off the Whole West.”
Cooper says he had sent over to the studio three scripts for movie trailers that captured “the scope and magnitude of the picture—the BIGGEST, ROUGHEST, TOUGHEST, and MOST BEAUTIFUL PICTURE ever made.” But Warner’s discarded all three and produced a trailer that “simply plays this as another John Wayne picture …” This was unacceptable to Whitney. “C.V. and I think The Searchers is bigger than any single star, no matter how big the star.”
Cooper’s discomfort in w
riting this letter is palpable. He swears his allegiance to Wayne (“I admire him tremendously”) and pointedly notes to Warner that he’s “writing at the request of C.V.” Still, he closes with an ode to his boss: “When everyone else thought that over-ocean flying was folly, it was C.V. Whitney’s brilliant idea that put over Pan American Airways. He understood how to advertise and exploit a new industry—flying—no one in America understood it as well … Indeed, I don’t think anyone understands advertising and exploitation better than does our President—your friend and mine—C.V. Whitney. I hope you will consider well his suggestions—as expressed in this letter.”
Jack Warner, like John Ford before him, ignored Sonny Whitney’s unhelpful suggestions. The movie trailer focused on John Wayne from start to finish. “From the thrilling pages of life rides a man you must fear and respect,” proclaims the God-like narrator. “It’s John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, who has a rare kind of courage … Here is the story of a man hard and relentless, tender and passionate.”
The Searchers, according to Warner Brothers, was a John Wayne movie after all.
20.
The Movie (Hollywood, 1956)
After four months of delays, The Searchers finally opened on May 26, 1956. To the audience it looked like something very familiar: a John Wayne movie set in Monument Valley with cowboys, Indians, horses, and gunplay. It begins with a panel announcing the scene as “Texas 1868,” then a door opens onto a Monument Valley vista—a subtle announcement that what follows is a fable. Ethan Edwards rides up slowly, tired, expressionless, but erect in the saddle. His sister-in-law, Martha, welcomes him with a shy, awkward gesture, stepping backward toward the house, drawing him in as if she were welcoming royalty—or the man she loves but cannot embrace. It is as beautiful, stylized, and ambiguous as the film that follows.
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