The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  By the late 1970s, when Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, and their fellow filmmakers were ascendant, they spoke fondly of the impact The Searchers had had on their work. Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), contains a six-minute sequence in which Harvey Keitel’s character attempts to seduce Zina Bethune’s while waiting for the Staten Island Ferry by telling her all about the film. There are unmistakable echoes of The Searchers in Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Hardcore (1979).

  “He was a great artist,” said John Milius of Ford. “He could speak to your heart and it meant something … He could do it in two or three strokes where it would take other good directors seven or eight and they wouldn’t get it as well. He’s a storyteller like Homer. When Homer got through with a story, you had something you could read forever.”

  Spielberg still worships at Ford’s altar. As executive producer of Cowboys & Aliens (2011), a mash-up of the Western and sci-fi genres, he screened a new print of The Searchers for director Jon Favreau and the screenplay writers to show them what a classic Western looks like. And War Horse (2011), Spielberg’s World War One epic, echoes with Fordian themes and visual references. “Ford’s in my mind when I make a lot of my pictures,” Spielberg told the author Mark Harris. “I grew up with John Ford movies and I know a lot about his work and have studied him. I think the thing that might resemble a John Ford movie more than anything else is that Ford celebrated rituals and traditions and he celebrated the land. In War Horse, the land is a character.”

  Still, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) probably comes the closest to reimagining The Searchers for the modern age. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the crazed New York cabbie who decides to stage his own one-man guerrilla raid on the pimps who have turned a young girl into a prostitute, is Ethan Edwards transplanted a century later from the Texas frontier to the urban jungle. Travis’s obsessions, his twisted personal code, his use of gun violence as a tool of purification—all of these mirror Ethan. So does the refusal of the object of the search—in this case Jodie Foster’s child hooker—to acquiesce in her own rescue. Crashing through the boundaries of time and space, Jodie Foster played Cynthia Ann Parker.

  In declaring the influence of The Searchers to be the cinematic equivalent of Huckleberry Finn, the film critic Stuart Byron attributed the film’s cult status to “an unholy alliance of critics, buffs, and filmmakers.” But The Searchers had not reached the same pinnacle of artistic acceptance as Casablanca, Citizen Kane, the films of Charlie Chaplin, or the Marx Brothers comedies, nor would it ever, Byron argued, because of John Wayne. The Duke’s macho, right-wing politics prevented many cinephiles from embracing the film. It would take another generation to accept the artistry of his performance.

  Still, the film gradually worked its way up the roster of great cinema. After failing to make the top 100 list in a 1962 poll of Sight and Sound, the magazine of the highly respected British Film Institute, ten years later it was ranked eighteenth best among American films. In 2008 it finished at the top of an American Film Institute poll as the greatest Western in film history. And in August 2012 the Sight and Sound poll ranked it the seventh-greatest film of all time.

  Not every modern critic has embraced The Searchers. Richard Schickel blasted Ford as a drunk, tyrant, and bully. The Searchers, he wrote, was “a spoiled masterpiece,” marred by Ford’s “tasteless ridicule” of Look, the acquired Indian bride of Martin, and “a stupefying subplot” of the thwarted romance of Martin and Laurie. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael called it “a peculiarly formal and stilted movie … You can read a lot into it, but it isn’t very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.”

  The aesthetic debate has been rekindled by a new generation of cultural critics. The novelist Jonathan Lethem, in his essay “Defending The Searchers,” describes his lifelong love affair with the film, and his intense anger and humiliation when fellow students at Bennington College mocked it as stilted and old-fashioned. “The pressure of the film, its brazen ambiguity, was too much,” writes Lethem. “It was easier to view it as a racist antique, a naïve and turgid artifact dredged out of our parents’ bankrupt fifties culture.”

  The scene of Martin Pauley physically abusing Look, his Indian pseudo-bride, was “of such giddy misogyny, such willful racism, it seemed indefensible by design,” writes Lethem.

  Lethem’s essay succumbs to his own obsessive ambivalence about America itself: “The Searchers strives on, maddened, obsessed, through ruined landscapes incapable of containing it … everywhere shrugging off categories, refusing the petitions of embarrassment and taste, defying explanation or defense as only great art or great abomination ever could.”

  Similarly, Lethem is obsessed by John Wayne. “His persona gathers in one place the allure of violence, the call away from the frontier, the tortured ambivalence toward women and the home, the dark pleasure of soured romanticism—all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means to be a man in America.”

  Others are less impressed. The Searchers “is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring,” writes Stephen Metcalf, in a piece titled “The Worst Best Movie” in the online magazine Slate. He attributes the film’s enduring critical reputation to “two influential and mutually reinforcing constituencies: critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of ‘film studies’ as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline; and the first generation of filmmakers—Scorcese and Schrader, but also Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius and George Lucas—whose careers began in film school.

  “In Ford’s Ethan the avatars of the New Hollywood found a very romantic allegory for the director as monomaniacal obsessive on a quest that others along the way may only find perverse,” writes Metcalf. The film’s ambiguity and intense focus on race and gender make it a feast for deconstructionists, he adds, with an audible sneer.

  The one auteur who has almost always been missing from the discussion is the man who invented The Searchers, Alan LeMay. He went on to write two more Western novels, one of which, The Unforgiven, picked up the racial themes of The Searchers and took them another step. This time it was a white pioneer family that adopted a Kiowa baby who survived the massacre of her village. The members of the Zachary family never tell the girl her true origins until her Kiowa brother and his warriors return to claim her and lay siege to the family’s sod dwelling. The prejudiced white community refuses to intervene, leaving the Zacharys to fend off the Kiowa attack alone. In the ensuing battle, Rachel must choose between her adopted white family and her Kiowa heritage. The Unforgiven was made into a movie in 1960 directed by John Huston and starring Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn. If nothing else the film, which is awkward, stiff, and unconvincing, demonstrates that the kind of mastery of the Western that John Ford seemed to wield effortlessly is far from automatic; even a gifted filmmaker like Huston couldn’t begin to get it right.

  Alan LeMay died of a brain tumor in 1964 in relative obscurity; the few obituaries were brief. “Writers are forgotten people out here,” Alan’s widow, Arlene, told Washington Post film critic Gary Arnold in 1979.

  Arnold was one of the few critics to have championed the novel version of The Searchers after the film’s critical emergence; in fact, he regards the book as the indispensable element in the greatness of the movie. Arnold regrets that Ford sacrificed LeMay’s original concluding scene for his own, more visual closure. “LeMay devised stunning climactic and concluding episodes,” writes Arnold. “They leave emotional reverberations that the movie never quite equals.”

  Arnold admires Ford’s ending, which left Wayne’s character beyond the family threshold, proud and alone. “But there’s also an unseen, forgotten man lingering out there in the cinematic ether,” concludes Arnold, “the storyt
eller who imagined The Searchers in the first place.”

  Another debate has focused on gender issues. In 2007 the feminist social critic Susan Faludi invoked the film’s purportedly macho themes as a prime example of how American society, whenever under sustained attack, falls back on familiar myths of male virtue and domination. This intuitive response holds true, argues Faludi, whether the enemy is Comanche warriors in nineteenth-century Texas or Islamic terrorists in twenty-first-century New York. Faludi reinterpreted the abduction tales of Cynthia Ann and Rachel Plummer from a feminist perspective, and she named her book The Terror Dream after a passage in LeMay’s novel. But while she made a compelling point about the American response to the September 11 attacks, Faludi badly misread the meaning and message of The Searchers. Whatever stereotypes they may evoke, Ford’s women are strong, fearless, determined, and in the end triumphant. Martha, Mrs. Jorgensen, Debbie, and their male surrogate, Martin Pauley, are the winners. The macho men—Ethan and Scar—are either killed or excluded.

  And so The Searchers continues to ride the distant ridge in American cultural discourse, fated to be talked about and admired—and misunderstood—more than viewed.

  Its fiftieth anniversary came and went in 2006 with little fanfare. James D’Arc of Brigham Young University worked with Brian Jamieson of Warner Brothers to put out a special DVD edition. “We worked together on a project that would include material from the collection, the original soundtrack and all of that, a booklet and everything,” D’Arc recalled. But the executives at Warner Brothers killed the most ambitious parts of the project. The two-DVD set that was released was a shadow of what D’Arc and Jamieson had in mind. “It’s a real shame,” said D’Arc. “That struggle carried on for a good three years.”

  Several mysteries remain about the film. In a 1956 Warner Brothers Presents TV show promoting the movie, Jeffrey Hunter tells host Gig Young that John Ford shot seven reels of film about the making of the movie—“an unprecedented film about a film,” says Hunter. The Warner Brothers program shows some scenes of bulldozers, crew workers, John Ford, and John Wayne. All of that footage seems to have disappeared.

  Leith Adams, a Warner Brothers studio archivist, tried unsuccessfully to track it down. He spoke to the widow of Brick Marquard, one of Ford’s favorite cameramen, who recalled that when her husband visited the set at Monument Valley during the filming, Ford handed him a camera and asked him to shoot the making of the movie. Mrs. Marquard said she and Brick later attended a private screening of an hour or two of the footage with Ford, his wife, and Merian Cooper. Then it vanished. “I’ve had people searching high and low for original color footage in the vaults and I’m pretty sure it isn’t there,” said Adams.

  Adams also failed to locate most of Ford’s outtakes from the film that might help explain the choices the director made and, most especially, the variations of the climactic scene when Ethan decides to spare Debbie’s life. One likely explanation: Ford shot so economically that outtakes were rare, and he surely didn’t want those that may have existed to fall into the hands of the studio executives he so richly despised. Perhaps he made them disappear.

  Similarly, the notes and files that Alan LeMay compiled during of the writing of the novel have largely vanished. After her husband’s death, Arlene LeMay donated twenty-three boxes of Alan’s papers to the Charles E. Young Library at UCLA. The archives reveal Alan to have been a meticulous researcher of his historical novels and Westerns, but they contain virtually no Searchers material. Arlene died in 1993, and Alan’s children have no idea where the Searchers files have gone.

  By now The Searchers itself has become a legend and the mythmakers themselves have become mythic. Ford is an historic figure, revered by many. Wayne these days is more iconic than real. The purported macho meaning of his persona—captured in the still potent but sad and readily parodied figure of his later life and work—has outstripped his actual performances in his best films. And The Searchers is perhaps the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen. It is hiding in plain sight, gaining in stature even as it lingers in a space between legend and obscurity. Like the generation that first dismissed it as just another Hollywood Western, we think we know what it is about, but its relentless ambiguity defeats us. We honor its ambition and its artistry. But we have no firm sense of what it means nor how truly great and disturbing it is.

  Epilogue (Quanah, Texas, June 2011)

  The fierce Texas sun was incinerating its way toward another 101-degree day on a Saturday morning in early June as the procession began its solemn trek through the half-abandoned downtown of Quanah, Texas, population 2,437. A muscular young man named Ronnie McSwain led the way, dressed in a bright yellow vest and pants with white fringe and moccasins and a bristling array of eagle feathers, jingle-jangling up the broad, empty main street past a silent audience of boarded-up storefronts, artists’ galleries, and preservation projects. He was followed by Don Parker, one of Quanah’s great-grandsons, a dignified man of sixty-five riding erect on a handsome brown steed and gripping the red, blue, and yellow Comanche Nation flag in his left hand. Then came Don’s older brother Ron, in a white-feathered ceremonial war bonnet similar to the one his great-grandfather wore more than a century ago. Then a handful of others, friends and relatives, including Sarah McReynolds, director of the Parker’s Fort State Park, dressed in buckskins as a tribute to Quanah’s long-lost mother, the tragic, iconic Cynthia Ann.

  Even at a slow pace, it took them only ten minutes to reach the town square. They were met there by Baldwin Parker Jr., who at age ninety-three was Quanah’s oldest surviving grandson, and a crowd of two hundred extended family members, local dignitaries, and onlookers. Baldwin, too, was wearing a bright red feathered chief’s bonnet. His son Ron took his arm and helped him to the microphone, where Baldwin recited the gentle blessing that Quanah himself had once bestowed upon the town that bears his name:

  “May the Great Spirit smile on your little town, may the rain fall in season, and in the warmth of the sunshine after the rain may the earth yield bountifully. May peace and contentment be with you and your children forever.”

  Baldwin was not a solemn man. When the mayor of Quanah handed him a key to the city, he asked if it opened any local bank vaults.

  The story of Cynthia Ann Parker’s abduction by Comanches in 1836, her recapture by U.S. cavalrymen and Texas Rangers in 1860, and the rise to prominence of Quanah Parker, her surviving child, was re-created and reimagined over many generations, each for its own needs and reasons. But the story did not end with The Searchers. Like the legend itself, the two sides of Cynthia Ann’s family—Texan and Comanche—have endured. They hold separate annual family reunions each summer, send emissaries to each other’s events, and get together to honor their ancestors, retell their stories, and bask in their myths.

  There are Texas towns named after Quanah and his father, Peta Nocona, a Cynthia Ann Parker Elementary School in Houston and a Cynthia Ann Parker College of Liberal Arts at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. Lone Star Trilogy, a homespun ballet featuring Cynthia Ann, Charles Goodnight’s wife, Molly, and Frenchy McCormick, a notorious saloon hall dancer, had its world premiere in Amarillo in April 2011. Country music star Larry Gatlin wrote the music, lyrics, and story for a musical called Quanah that had several public readings, including one at Pace University in Manhattan in January 2010. There are Cynthia Ann reenactors who tour Texas public schools, and a bay gelding named Quanah Parker who raced in the United Kingdom.

  The year 2011 was the one hundredth anniversary of Quanah’s death, and the emphasis was on peace and friendship between white people and red. The story had acquired an added layer of significance since the election three years earlier of Barack Obama. Like Quanah, the American president was the talented child of a union between a man and a woman of different races and different worlds. And, like Quanah’s, his ascendancy was historic, holding out the possibility of reconciliation in a country founded on slavery, racial strife, and prot
racted warfare between whites and Indians on its limestone plains.

  Ever since they first invited Quanah to the town’s founding celebration in 1886, the town fathers have periodically welcomed his heirs. Like many North Texas towns, Quanah’s downtown has suffered a steady economic decline, and city officials were hoping the family reunion might give their community a much-needed boost. There were storytelling sessions, a gourd dance, a chuck-wagon banquet in the local meeting hall, book talks, and field trips to places of significance in the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah, including the site of the Pease River massacre where she was recaptured by troopers in December 1860 and forced against her will to return to her white family after twenty-four years with the Comanches.

  But there was one historic site seventy-one miles to the northeast in neighboring Oklahoma that was too far away to make the list. It was, however, the most significant and amazing place of all.

  THERE IS NO ROAD SIGN for the Star House. Visitors knew to pull up at the Trading Post Restaurant and Indian Store on the main Cache road, just off State Highway 62—a four-lane designated as the Quanah Parker Trailway. You entered the coffee shop and asked for Wayne Gipson, a quiet man with curly blond hair, a rumpled T-shirt, and jeans. In the late afternoon, after the regulars had drained their final cups of coffee and cleared out, Wayne took visitors for a drive down a winding dirt road behind the trading post, past a collection of faded amusement rides and attractions. There was a rusted narrow-gauge railroad track, the sullen ruins of a wooden rodeo grandstand, an abandoned Ferris wheel and bumper cars, and a collection of old buildings: a church, a one-room schoolhouse, a newspaper office, a music hall, a drugstore, a livery stable, a ranger station, and a homesteader’s cabin where the outlaw Frank James took up residence after retiring from a career in the family crime business. But the largest and most impressive site presided alone in the back of the property: Quanah Parker’s aging two-story mansion.