Once Ethan crosses the threshold to his brother’s homestead, he has entered a domestic haven. The whitewashed adobe brick of the interior glows in the light of the blazing hearth fire; the family gathers along a plank table, joined by their adoptive son, Martin. It’s a scene reminiscent of How Green Was My Valley, in which family share food with warmth, affection, and some good-natured bickering. But Ethan’s racism darkens this version of the domestic scene when he accuses Martin of looking like a half-breed, only to be reminded that he’s just part Cherokee, the rest English and Welsh.
Strong emotions pass between Martha and Ethan: he greets her with a kiss on the forehead, a kiss of palpable tenderness. Later she strokes his jacket when she thinks no one can see her. Aaron, Ethan’s brother, appears oblivious to these moments, but all kinds of questions are raised by their undeclared love. Talk among the characters reveals that Ethan left to fight for the Confederacy but stayed away three additional years after the surrender, which he still refuses to acknowledge. Did he stay away because he loves his brother’s wife? Ethan’s unspoken love for Martha, who seems to return it, isn’t lost on at least one member of the family. Martha’s young son says on the eve of the Comanche attack, “I wish Uncle Ethan was here, don’t you, Ma?” And Reverend Clayton notices what passes between them, but pretends not to.
THE URGE TO PROTECT
Many men seem hardwired to protect, and John Wayne often portrayed exactly that type of man. War films are replete with men who risk their lives to save others, and contemporary films such as Liam Neeson’s Taken franchise rely on just such an imperative—even in an era that offers a wider array of male role models and women who do not want or need male protection, who frankly chafe at the idea.
Ethan Edwards, like Dunson and most heroes of American action movies of the last century, is motivated by an almost blind need to protect something—a woman, a family, children, a place—even if he has no apparent claim to it. When Ethan realizes that the party he joined to track down a rancher’s stolen bull was intentionally lured away by the Comanches, he quickly heads back to Aaron and Martha’s homestead, dreading what he’ll find there. He knows he’s been tricked, and when he arrives, he finds the cabin burned to the ground. He calls out, “Martha, Martha!” desperate to find her alive, but finds her defiled body in a shed behind the smoldering ruins. Martha’s slaughtered body is never actually shown on film. Instead, we see Ethan stumble out of the dark depths of the shed, furious and heartbroken. When Martin comes looking for his aunt Martha, Ethan strikes him, barring his entrance into the killing ground. Later, when he finds Lucy’s defiled body, Ethan also refuses to describe what he’s seen to her young suitor, Brad Jorgensen, played by Harry Carey Jr. “Don’t ever ask me as long as you live,” he snarls. Ford knew that his audience could imagine the death and destruction far more graphically than he could ever depict it on-screen. Because it was 1956, depictions of graphic sex and violence were restrained by the Motion Picture Code, but Ford wouldn’t have used them even if he could; they weren’t part of his aesthetic.
Ethan’s love for Martha is part of what motivates his seven-year search, and finding her defiled body after the Comanche raid propels him to action. He wants to avenge her horrific death as much as he wants to find Martha’s younger daughter. When that urge to protect—to “safeguard the perimeter”—is thwarted, or refused, or proves unattainable, the hero lashes out in other directions. In The Searchers, Ethan’s outward anger is directed toward “the Comanche”—spoken derisively in two instead of three syllables, harsh emphasis on the second—but there must also be unspoken anger toward himself for failing to protect the woman he loved and her children, including one who might possibly have been his own. Given his affection toward Debbie at the beginning of the film—he gives her his Civil War medal of honor—it’s fair to wonder if Debbie was actually fathered by Ethan, which would partly explain his single-minded quest to find her. And while on the search, he angrily disputes that Debbie is Martin’s sister but doesn’t elaborate further.
Tom Dunson in Red River also failed to protect the “one woman he loved.” When the film opens, he’s leaving behind his sweetheart, Fen, played by Colleen Gray, so he can strike out on his own in search of land to start his cattle ranch. She sweetly insists on accompanying him, but believing she will be safer with the wagon train, Dunson refuses to allow it. In parting, he gives her a prized bracelet that had belonged to his mother, a token of his love and emblem of his promise to send for her when he secures land. In a cruel irony, she is slaughtered when the wagon train is attacked by Indians, and Dunson and his sidekick, Groot Nadine, played by Walter Brennan, are spared—they’re already far away. Heartbroken and guilty, Dunson takes in the only survivor of the massacre, young Matthew, who becomes not only a surrogate son but a kind of surrogate wife. He gives the boy the bracelet that he’d first given to Fen, found on the body of one of the marauding Indian braves. And he mates his bull with the boy’s rescued cow, which will be the start of his cattle herd.
Matthew’s romantic attraction to Tess, however, softens any hint of mutual attraction between the two men. Even Dunson gets into the act when he meets Tess and guesses her attachment to Matthew. He offers her half of his ranch if she’ll bear him a son, in a vengeful attempt to disinherit Matthew and steal his girl. She briefly considers it, if only to save Matt from Dunson’s murderous intent.
But Dunson is haunted by his memory of his abandonment of Fen and his failure to protect her. That abandonment is replayed, in a fashion, when Matt appears to abandon Tess to drive the cattle herd to Abilene, ordering her to stay with the wagon train, just as Dunson had done years earlier. When the conflict is finally resolved, Dunson echoes Captain York in Fort Apache when he tells Matt to “marry that girl,” to keep Matt from repeating his own irrevocable mistake.
Halfway through The Searchers, when years have gone by in the fruitless pursuit of Debbie, Ethan reveals he is increasingly driven by the desire not just to find the girl but to kill her. He believes that she’s been contaminated by life with the Comanches and presumes that she has been taken as the wife of his nemesis, the Comanche warrior known as Scar, played by the German actor Henry Brandon, or by one of his braves. The fact that she’s “been living with a buck,” in Ethan’s words, condemns her to death in his mind, and in the prevailing ethos of the day.
When Martin realizes Ethan’s new intention, he devotes his efforts to stopping him. Throughout, Ethan heaps scorn on Martin, calling him “blanket head” and sneering at his mixed-blood heritage. In Ethan’s mind, this racial legacy prevents Martin from being a true man, despite partnering up with Ethan, who would otherwise have much to teach him. Ethan repeatedly reminds him that Martin is no blood kin to Debbie or to himself, even as Martin carries on, firm in his conviction to see the quest completed.
Ford, whether intentionally or not, tapped into one of the great conundrums of a traditional masculine impulse: when men fail to protect those they love, or they discover or decide that the ones they’re protecting are not worthy of their efforts, those men turn deadly. And often they set out to destroy the very loved ones they had failed to protect in the first place. So Ethan, a hard man who failed to protect the woman he loved and her family, seeks to find and murder the last of her children. It’s possible that he not only is carrying out what would now be called an “honor killing” but is perhaps seeking to expunge the last reminder of his failure to protect her and her mother. There are true tales of this behavior: men who murder their families when they can no longer support—and thus protect—them.
On another level, the impulse to murder Debbie is Ethan’s way of saving her from what he considers a hellish life, an opinion strengthened by a visit to a U.S. Cavalry fort to find out if one of three white girls rescued from Indian captivity might be Debbie. The encounter makes for a chilling sight; the three former captives are clearly insane. The oldest one, a young woman, maniacally clutches Debbie’s doll when Ethan shows it to her. One of
the younger girls giggles and stares eerily into space, while the third clings to her as if to life itself. It’s an unsettling portrait of the aftermath of captivity—quite different from the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker upon which the novel was based—and it deepens Ethan’s lust for revenge. “It’s hard to believe they’re white,” says the cavalry commander who has rescued them, and Ethan answers, “They ain’t white, they’re Comanche,” spitting out the final word. Ford closes in on Ethan’s face as he leaves the scene, registering a look of so much hatred, disgust, and resolve that Scorsese has described it as one of the most powerful close-ups in film history.
Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers is a fictionalized retelling of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker’s 1836 abduction by the Comanches in West Texas, and the efforts of the Texas Rangers to find and rescue her. It’s a classic captivity narrative, part of a popular genre in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction centered on white women and children captured by Indians and raised in their culture. Many women and children were indeed captured during the long, bloody skirmishes between Plains Indians and settlers pushing westward, and these novels underlined the pervasive fear of tribal Indians on the frontier. Their depictions of Native savagery helped to justify, in white settlers’ minds, the forceful annexation of Indian lands.
But captives often assimilated into Native American cultures, adopting their ways, as Cynthia Ann Parker did. Renamed “Nadua” or “Nauta” by the Comanches, which means “found one” or even more tellingly “one who keeps warm with us,” Cynthia lived with a tribe for twenty-four years, marrying the chieftain, Peta Nocona, and bearing him a daughter and two sons. So complete was her assimilation that when she was finally recaptured by the Texas Rangers, she could not integrate back into white society. She died of influenza shortly thereafter, mourning the loss of her Comanche sons. A chronicler of her tale wrote in 1909, “I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians did by taking her away in the first place.”
While the scene in The Searchers showing three recaptured white girls driven mad by their ordeal might not have been true to the norm, it emphasizes the prevailing belief that girls and women were always defiled by Indian capture. It’s reminiscent of the scene in Stagecoach in which the gambler Hatfield holds a pistol to Lucy Mallory’s head, ready to kill her if they are defeated by attacking Apaches, to save her from the proverbial fate worse than death. And that moment is identical to a scene in The Big Trail, evidence both of the pervasiveness of this line of thinking and of Ford’s penchant for creative borrowing.
But in Cynthia Ann Parker’s case, her marriage to Peta Nocona was a good one, testified to by the fact that he did not take any other wives after her, contrary to expectations for a tribal chieftain. One of their sons, Quanah, became the last great Comanche chief. Peta Nocona was killed in a raid in 1864 on the Pease River, in a virtual slaughter: most of the Comanche warriors were away at the time, so the Texas Rangers wantonly killed women and children, only sparing Cynthia when they saw that she had blue eyes. That raid is suggested in The Searchers by the slaughter of a small Comanche encampment by the U.S. Cavalry, including the murder of the Native American maiden named Look who is comically traded to Martin as a wife; she is the object of much misogynistic humor as Martin physically throws her out of his bedroll and sends her home. That this character is played for laughs and then slaughtered is unsettling, but it was Ford’s attempt to show that there was savagery on both sides.
The Peta Nocona of Le May’s novel is twisted into Scar, the hardened, vengeful Comanche warrior. Scar is also out for vengeance—his sons have been slaughtered by white men—making him Ethan’s double. At the dramatic climax of the film, Ethan and Martin take part in a cavalry raid on a village where Scar is known to be hiding. Martin sneaks in, finds Debbie, and rescues her. When Scar suddenly enters the teepee, Martin shoots him, escaping with Debbie just as Ethan arrives on the scene. In a final act of brutal vengeance, Ethan removes his knife and bends down to scalp his dead rival—and his counterpart—becoming the savage he has vilified throughout the film.
He then goes after Debbie. In a terrifying finale, he mounts his rearing steed and chases her down, an armed man on horseback pursuing a defenseless young woman on foot. At the last minute, when he captures her, we see in her close-up that she is not like the crazed and craven young captives at the fort. In a sudden and dramatic reversal, Ethan takes her in his arms and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” It’s a shocking ending. His abrupt turn to tenderness and sanity completely redeems his character. As Scorsese noted, “Ethan Edwards is not a villain. He is despicable and yet you love him when he says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ ” Strangely, the picture provides not the slightest hint of his monumental about-face before this moment.
In the screenplay, Ford originally had Ethan prepare to shoot Debbie, telling her, “I’m sorry, girl….Shut your eyes,” before looking into her face and saying, “You sure favor your mother.” That moment of recognition would certainly explain his change of heart. But Ford removed that sequence from the script, so the film provides no clear explanation for Ethan’s actions. Did scalping Scar satisfy his bloodlust? Or did his family loyalty—and love for Martha—finally trump his blinding anger and racism? Or perhaps he could see, as the viewer does, that she is not a demented, ruined girl like the ones recently rescued by the cavalry. It’s an unforgettable finale partly because it’s unexpected and ambiguous, and it succeeds beautifully in part because of John Wayne, the man of rough justice who will ultimately find a way to do the right thing. His aura and his status lend credibility to this final catharsis. His sudden mercy also transforms Ethan into a father figure, albeit a harsh one. This sudden, silent forgiveness is a paternal prerogative, an act of love.
The surprising conclusion of The Searchers: Natalie Wood as Debbie, the kidnapped girl, Wayne as her pursuer, and Jeffrey Hunter as her adopted brother and rescuer.
In the rescue scene, while Ethan redeems himself by sparing Debbie, Martin assumes the mantle of the heroic archetype. He is the one who kills the formidable warrior Scar and rescues his sister. Martin’s growth from youthful Indian sympathizer to victor over a Comanche chief marks his becoming a man. In a brief few moments of screen time, Martin and Ethan change places: Martin finds the necessary hardness to rescue his sister, and Ethan has found the love in his heart to reject killing her.
Only John Wayne—and all his preexisting associations with justice and bravery—could command sympathy and respect while portraying Ethan Edwards. Repellent as his racism, and his intention to kill his niece, might be, Bogdanovich notes that “the audience doesn’t hate him.” In fact, to viewers he’s still the hero of the picture: “The reason they like him is because he’s John Wayne! You can’t make John Wayne unlikable. That’s what Hawks discovered.”
John Ford knew that casting Wayne would add to the moral ambiguity of the story. Again, as in so many Ford Westerns, heroes are outsized. Ethan Edwards commands our attention by towering over everyone else, except for the burly Reverend Clayton. Ward Bond and John Wayne—the two former USC football players—are well matched in size and presence. If anything, Bond is even more commanding, bigger and louder than Wayne in his role as reverend and Ranger. Like Ethan, Clayton has an easy authority, but as a reverend he also wields explicit moral influence. In an early scene in which the rescue party escapes an attack by the Comanches, he cautions Ethan to allow the Indian warriors to retrieve their dead and wounded before firing on them. He also objects when Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian warrior, condemning his spirit to wander the afterlife forever, according to Comanche tradition. It’s a chilling moment, showing the blackness of Ethan’s rage, and it reveals his knowledge of Indian ways, as does a scene where he wantonly shoots bison to deprive the Indians of food.
Ethan exists on the edge of two civilizations—white homesteaders and Native Americans. A whiff of the outlaw clings to him: he flashes
newly minted Yankee dollars to his brother at the beginning of the movie, and Clayton suggests that Ethan fits the description of several outstanding warrants. At the end of the picture, Ethan is wanted for murder of the treacherous Futterman, a trading post owner who sells knowledge of Debbie’s whereabouts to Ethan and then, after being paid, tries to rob Ethan of the gold coins he’s carrying. It’s interesting to note that though Ford will increasingly question the devaluation of the Native American, one of the minor but important villains in The Searchers is Futterman, with the suggestion that he is a Jewish merchant.
Ford took additional steps to muddy the waters, such as making Martin Pawley part Indian—not so in Le May’s novel. As such he comes across, at least to mid-century American audiences, as the only fully moral character who can see both sides of the West’s defining conflict. His unusual beauty and his dark skin distinguish him as a racial other, and he enters the movie riding bareback, leaping off his horse like a Plains Indian. Ethan’s racism—or “tribalism,” as Curtis Hanson calls it—sets him against the youth from the start, even as Martin becomes a kind of surrogate son during their journey.
Wayne being sworn in by Ward Bond in The Searchers. The two were close friends since playing football together for USC.
Is Ford a racist, or—as Bogdanovich says about the movie—is he “picturing the complicated face of racism”? Bogdanovich points out that aside from the reverend, only the “quarter breed” Martin Pawley consistently shows compassion and humanity toward the Indians. Even Martin’s girl, Laurie, angrily says that Debbie should be killed after living with the Comanches; she suggests a bullet through her head, as “Martha would want it.” Out of the mouth of this young woman we see the virulent racism and fear of the other that pervades her community; Martin’s perspective, and ours, and Ford’s, are enlightened—and out of time.
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