The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Martin Pauley (Jeffrey Hunter), Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles), and her mother (Olive Carey). Martin serves as willing agent of the strong women in The Searchers.

  The same masculine-versus-feminine conflicts play out in The Searchers. Ethan and Scar drive the blood feud, seeking retribution, but the women undermine them. The gender divide isn’t neat and clean: Laurie Jorgensen supports Ethan’s bloodstained quest for vengeance, while Martin Pauley is the willing agent of the feminine counternarrative. And Ford exposes the underlying sexual tension of the original tale and makes it the driving force of his story. Feminine values ultimately triumph. The family is restored.

  Love defeats hatred. Martha—from beyond the grave—tames Ethan.

  John Wayne understood this exactly. He told biographer Michael Munn, “When Ethan picks up Debbie at the end, I had to think, what’s going through his mind as he looks into her face? I guess he saw in her eyes the woman he’d loved. And that was enough to overcome his hatred.”

  THE REVIEWS WERE GENERALLY POSITIVE, and a few were glowing. “Undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made for sheer scope, guts, and beauty,” opined the Hollywood Reporter. Jack Moffitt, the reviewer, praised the acting, photography, and script: “Ford and Nugent show fine dramatic craftsmanship.”

  Motion Picture Herald hailed it as “one of the greatest of the great pictures of the American West” and compared it favorably to The Covered Wagon, Stagecoach, and Shane. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it “a rip-snorting Western as brashly entertaining as they come … [It boasts] a wealth of Western action that has the toughness of leather and the sting of a whip … Mr. Ford’s scenic stuff, shot in color and VistaVision, in the expanse of Monument Valley that he loves, has his customary beauty and grandeur.”

  Others were more critical. Film Bulletin called the film “strange but fascinating … The plot is interrupted by sub-plots without any apparent pattern, and the narrative is at times so suggestive and subtle as to be obscure … Yet for all this, the total effect is enormously rich, interesting, and exciting.”

  Variety said the film was “overlong and repetitious,” and complained “there are subtleties in the basically simple story that are not adequately explained.” The Nation called it “long on brutality and short on logic or responsible behavior.” Time magazine lamented “the lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence,” and opined that John Ford’s stock company of actors and crew may have gotten “too practiced and familiar … Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized end-of-film departure into the sunset.”

  What none of the critics, positive or negative, grasped was that The Searchers was a different kind of Western, something much darker and more disturbing than the usual fare. No one seemed to see Ethan Edwards as anything less than a standard-issue John Wayne action hero. Ethan’s racism, his mania, and his bloodlust all passed by without comment. “Racism was so endemic in our culture that people didn’t even notice it,” said Joseph McBride. “They treated Wayne as a conventional Western hero. Not one person got it.”

  Still, Ethan was a memorable character. Buddy Holly and his drummer, Jerry Allison, saw The Searchers when it first opened at the State Theater in Lubbock, Texas—the heart of what had once been Comancheria. They came out and wrote “That’ll Be the Day”—a phrase Ethan Edwards utters four times during the film—which became a number one hit in the fall of 1957. It later became the first demo recorded by a Liverpool group known as the Quarrymen, who later renamed themselves the Beatles. Another first-rate Liverpool band called themselves the Searchers after the film.

  The British film critic Lindsay Anderson, a longtime champion of Ford’s work who was beginning to direct his own movies, disliked the film. Anderson felt Ford had abandoned his trademark optimistic celebration of the American spirit for something darker and more unsavory. Ethan Edwards was “an unmistakable neurotic,” complained Anderson. “Now what is Ford, or all directors, to do with a hero like this?”

  Others felt inspired. Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave critic and director, said he wept at the end of the film, overwhelmed by the “mystery and fascination of this American cinema.” Although a committed leftist, Godard asked of himself almost plaintively, “How can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when, abruptly, he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?”

  When the film failed to get any Academy Award nominations or other honors, Wayne pronounced himself mystified. “You know, I just don’t understand why that film wasn’t better received,” he told one interviewer. Speaking of Ford, he added, “I think it is his best Western.” Wayne was so impressed with the film, and with his character, that he named a son, born in 1962, John Ethan Wayne.

  “Ethan Edwards,” Wayne declared, “was probably the most fascinating character I ever played in a John Ford Western.”

  21.

  The Legacy (Hollywood, 1956–2010)

  The Searchers came and went, embraced lightly—just as Sonny Whitney and Merian C. Cooper had feared—as another John Wayne Western. It garnered positive reviews, made a reasonable profit, and then disappeared, exiled by the early 1960s to the relatively new medium of television, where it received an occasional showing, cut and pasted to coexist with commercials inside a two-hour frame. John Ford pronounced himself puzzled by the film’s lack of success, John Wayne said he was surprised and disappointed, but both men quickly moved on. Wayne’s career took a slight detour—he starred in several duds, including Jet Pilot (1957), Howard Hughes’s bizarre Cold War romantic comedy, and John Huston’s incoherent The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958)—before triumphing in Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks, Ford’s foremost rival when it came to the proper use of the Wayne persona. Ford’s career, meanwhile, resumed its slow arc of decline.

  The Searchers was “a good picture,” Ford told Joe McBride. “It made a lot of money, and that’s the ultimate end.” Spoken like an obituary.

  Ford returned to the captivity theme in 1961 with the disappointing Two Rode Together, a tepid, uninspired effort. James Stewart and Richard Widmark play a marshal and an army officer dispatched to retrieve white captives from Comanches led by Quanah Parker. But the Quanah portrayed here is a cruel and avaricious warrior, not the conciliatory figure of real life. To add further insult, he is played by Henry Brandon, the same actor who played Scar in The Searchers. Tall and muscular, Brandon has the physicality to play Quanah, but Frank Nugent’s script and Ford’s direction give Brandon none of the depth.

  Two Rode Together is a weird recapitulation of The Searchers—similar to the way Francis Ford Coppola’s unfortunate The Godfather Part III inadvertently mocks the greatness of the first two Godfather films. Members of Ford’s usual stock company of supporting players are on hand: John Qualen, Andy Devine, Anna Lee, Harry Carey Jr., Olive Carey, Mae Marsh, and Ken Curtis. But Nugent’s script is crude and meandering, with none of the narrative tension that makes The Searchers so compelling. The acting is terrible: Stewart and Widmark play their roles for maximum humor and look uncomfortable and ridiculous throughout. Carey and Curtis painfully ham it up. Ford repeats older and better ideas from previous films. Stewart, playing the local marshal, is introduced balancing himself on a chair with his long legs up on a railing—just as Henry Fonda did much more charmingly fifteen years earlier as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine. Carey and Curtis speak in the same inept dryland accents that Curtis used to play Charlie McCorry in The Searchers, and they stage a comic fight with Widmark’s character that echoes the slapstick fistfight of Martin Pauley and Charlie McCorry in The Searchers. A blonde Shirley Jones in blue denims and pigtails generates the same tomboy energy and repressed sexuality of Vera Miles’s Laurie, but it’s all for a lost cause.

  There is a kernel of an idea here—in effect picking up the story of Debbie after she is rescued from the Comanches, echoing the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker’s miserable life wit
h her white relatives after her purported liberation. But the racist sentiments of the main characters are endorsed rather than undermined, as they are in The Searchers.

  “Would you like me to tell you what this little angel looks like now?” demands Jimmy Stewart’s character, explaining to Shirley Jones’s character how her younger brother, captured a decade earlier by Comanches, would have been raised. “That kid has braids down to here now, stiff stinkin’ braids filled with buffalo grease, and he’s got a scar there and scar there … just to prove he’s a man. He forgot his English—he just grunts Comanche now, just grunts … and he’s killed and he’s taken scalps, white man’s scalps, and given a chance, sister, he’d rape you … and when he’s finished he’d trade you off to one of the other bucks for a good knife or bad rifle. Now is that what you want me to bring back to you?”

  The speech is similar to the harsh outburst that Laurie Jorgensen makes to Martin Pauley, her fiancé, in The Searchers. The difference is that Ford, identifying with Martin, clearly repudiates these sentiments in The Searchers, whereas in Two Rode Together they are treated as unpleasant but undeniable truths.

  As in The Searchers, there is a dance that serves as a pivotal moment in the life of the community, only in this case Ford uses the event—a military officers’ ball—to illustrate the raging hypocrisy of white society toward former captives. Stewart gives yet another speech—for a director who hates exposition, Ford allows it to run amok in Two Rode Together—this time berating the white hypocrites who are polite to a newly freed captive to her face yet disdainful of her behind her back: “This afternoon she asked me to take her back because she was treated better by the Comanches than she was treated by some of you.”

  Ford took on Two Rode Together for the money and soon lost interest, according to his grandson Dan Ford. “The worst piece of crap I’ve directed in twenty years” was Ford’s own definitive verdict.

  He made one more great Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), starring Stewart and Wayne. Stewart plays a lawyer-politician who is credited with confronting and shooting dead a murderous thug who is terrorizing a small town, thus bringing civilization and eventual statehood to the community, while Wayne is a rough-hewn rancher and man of action who actually did the killing. The Stewart character achieves fame and fortune and the hand in marriage of Vera Miles, while the Wayne character dies a lonely and forgotten alcoholic. Ford filmed it in black-and-white and shot most of it on a soundstage at Paramount, and it was a dark, somber, pessimistic picture. There was no Monument Valley, no Technicolor flourishes, and no Indians. Yet the film was Ford’s final statement about the gap between fact and myth, and the role that legend played in the civilizing of the American West. It was also his final film with Wayne, whose character more than ever seemed to reflect Ford’s own. It concludes with the famous moment when a newspaper editor rejects publishing Stewart’s account of what really happened: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a serious assault on everything,” said Peter Bogdanovich. “It tells us our legends are false, that our history is wrong and that everything we believe in is a lie.”

  Ford made one more attempt to come to grips with the Native American experience. Cheyenne Autumn (1964) was his epic retelling of the attempt of a band of Cheyenne to escape captivity in Oklahoma and return to their native homeland in Wyoming and Colorado—the same story Alan LeMay had fictionalized in Painted Ponies in 1926. Ford, assisted once again by his son Pat, sought to tell the tale with great empathy and compassion, and he again employed Widmark and Stewart, along with stock company regulars like Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Patrick Wayne, George O’Brien, and John Carradine. He filmed for the seventh and final time in Monument Valley, using a large cast of Navajos to play the Cheyenne.

  In Cheyenne Autumn, Ford reverses past roles, portraying the Indian leaders as reasonable, moral, and wise, and many of the whites as venal, brutal, and dishonest. Some of the scenes are stunning in their visual composition, but the narrative is flat and plodding and, at 156 minutes, the film is at least a half hour too long. It was a critical and commercial failure, although its reputation has improved over the years. The film’s elegiac quality is only enhanced by the retrospective knowledge that it was Ford’s final Western. His career was slowly deflating, his reputation for artistry buried under the perception that he was, indeed, what he had long claimed to be: a humble maker of Westerns at a time when the Western was in critical and popular decline. At the turn of the new millennium, noted the film scholar Gerald Peary, himself a rabid Ford fan, John Ford was largely forgotten by the public: “Young people, including film students, haven’t seen Ford’s movies, and seem uninterested in going back and catching up.”

  To an extent Peary blamed Ford himself for resolutely refusing to defend himself as an artist. “You say someone’s called me the greatest poet of the Western saga,” Ford told the author Walter Wagner in 1973 a few months before his death. “I am not a poet, and I don’t know what a Western saga is. I would say that it is horseshit. I’m just a hardworking, run-of-the-mill director.”

  While much of Ford’s work has drifted into obscurity, The Searchers is a notable exception. But its resurrection was a slow process. As was often true of mainstream Hollywood directors, the first fans to recognize Ford’s artistic greatness were French film critics who were developing the auteur theory that despite the fact that filmmaking is a collective enterprise—and that each studio during Hollywood’s golden era has its own distinct filmmaking personality—the director is its heart and soul, the one contributor whose personal sensibility is discernible and critical to the artistic process. While this might not be true for many directors, it surely is the case with Ford. Like Hitchcock, Hawks, William Wyler, Preston Sturges, and a handful of others, Ford’s values, visual sense, and passions are readily apparent in all his films, even the bad ones. The French critic Jean-Luc Godard, soon to launch his own filmmaking career with Breathless (1960), compared the ending of The Searchers to “Ulysses being reunited with Telemachus.” In the United States, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris, Eugene Archer of the New York Times, and Peter Bogdanovich, another critic with filmmaking aspirations, championed Ford and Hawks. I recall Sarris showing The Searchers in the inaugural year of his introductory film course on Thursday evenings in the basement of Butler Library at Columbia University in 1970. He presented it as the apogee of great Hollywood filmmaking.

  Like Sarris, film professors at scattered campuses revived and celebrated The Searchers in their classes and film festivals, spreading word of its greatness to a new generation of film buffs. A pivotal article was “Prisoner of the Desert,” a 1971 essay by Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington in Sight and Sound magazine. It praised in ringing terms Ford’s artistry and power: “The Searchers has that clear yet intangible quality which characterizes an artist’s masterpiece—the sense that he has gone beyond his customary limits, submitted his deepest tenets to the test, and dared to exceed even what we might have expected of him.”

  The essay explored the film’s important themes, most especially Ethan’s pathology and Ford’s obsession with rape and miscegenation between whites and Indians. It traced the connection between Ethan and Scar as two warriors driven to madness and revenge by the murder of their families. Scar, it argued, “is not so much a character as a crazy mirror of Ethan’s desires.” The two men, “blood brothers in their commitment to primitive justice, have sacrificed themselves to make civilization possible. This is the meaning of the door opening and closing on the wilderness. It is the story of America.” The article’s conclusion eerily echoes the outsized original ambitions of C. V. Whitney, the man who bankrolled it.

  The other cohort who loved and championed The Searchers was a younger generation of aspiring American filmmakers and screenwriters, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Curtis Hanson, and Paul Schrader, all of whom
grew up watching the film and were captured by its beauty, violence, and powerful storytelling. Each of them has testified to its abiding influence over their own filmmaking.

  Scorsese was thirteen when he journeyed uptown from Little Italy in Manhattan with two friends to the landmark Criterion Theatre in Times Square to see The Searchers. They entered in the middle of the picture and were mesmerized by its stunning visuals and emotional resonance. Scorsese recalled the clarity of the VistaVision high resolution. Over the years, as he watched the film on television, the subtext of Ethan Edwards’s inner turmoil and slow psychological disintegration became more and more apparent to him. Curtis Hanson recalled being frightened by the violence and the emotions when he first saw it at the Sherman Theatre, a second-run movie house in the San Fernando Valley. John Milius first saw it four times in a row at a theater in Westwood Village in Los Angeles. “I wanted to be Scar,” he recalled.

  When he was about fifteen years old in the early 1960s, Spielberg met Ford at the director’s office. Spielberg recalled being ushered into the empty office and stared at a series of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell paintings on the wall. Then Ford swept in, “dressed like a big game hunter” with his trademark floppy hat, eye patch, and half-chewed handkerchief. Spielberg recalled that Ford had smeared lipstick on his face.

  “So you wanna be a picture maker,” Ford declared. “What do you know about? You see these paintings around the office? Tell me what you see in that first painting.”

  Spielberg sputtered for a minute. “No, no, no, no,” Ford broke in. “Where’s the horizon? Can’t you find the horizon? Don’t point where it is. Look at the whole picture.” When Spielberg pointed out that the horizon was at the very bottom, Ford replied, “Fine.”

  “When you can come to the conclusion that putting the horizon at the top of the frame or the bottom of the frame is a lot better than putting it in the middle of the frame, then you may someday make a good picture maker. Now get out of here.”