The Searchers (46 page)

“I find it troubling that he makes
Fort Apache
which I just love and is, among other things, pro-Indian, and then he turns around two years later and makes
Rio Grande
, which is a racist hate movie about Indians,” said Ford biographer Joseph McBride.

The Navajos, who played Indians from all tribes in Ford's films, did not mind being depicted as villains. In fact, they grew angry when Ford brought in actual Apaches to play some of the Indian roles in
Stagecoach
. “
It was a job
and we just didn't concern ourselves about that,” Navajo medicine man Billy Yellow told McBride about playing villains. “Ford was a very generous man. He fed all the Navajos there. The pay was good.”

The Navajos liked Ford's generosity, his sense of humor, his patience, and the way he talked and consulted with them at the end of the day's shooting. And they liked the fact that he didn't do too many takes and wear out their horses. All of his favorite Navajo horsemen—the three Stanley brothers, Bob Many Mules, Harry Black Horse, Pete Grey Eyes, and Billy Yellow—were there to serve him for
The Searchers
. Stuntman Chuck Roberson recalled how Ford would chase ten-year-old Dolly Stanley around the wooden dining tables, growling and grimacing. “
The Indian children looked on him
with awe,” wrote Roberson.

The Navajos liked John Wayne as well. Although few of them ever got to see a Western movie, they knew Wayne was a big star and they felt flattered that he spoke to them regularly and treated them with respect. Early on in the filming of
The Searchers
, he volunteered his private Cessna to fly
a two-year-old Navajo girl
with measles and double pneumonia to the hospital in Tuba City, one hundred miles away. Wayne personally carried the little girl to his plane and placed her inside. “So overnight, Wayne, the actor with the Big Eagle, has become a heap big hero to the local Navajos,” read the film company's breathlessly condescending press release.

ONCE THE ACTORS AND FILM CREW ARRIVED in the valley, Ford wasted no time. On Thursday, June 16, the first day of shooting,
he filmed eleven setups
from eight different scenes in less than four hours on a blistering hot afternoon, finishing up at 5:59 p.m. The first ones were the opening shots of the film, with Wayne as Ethan Edwards riding along a ridge and slowly making his way through an arid sea of sagebrush to his brother Aaron's farmhouse for a bittersweet homecoming.
Ford also shot scenes
of Ethan and Mose, a fellow settler, galloping past a horseless Martin on their way back to the burning ranch house, and shots of Ethan and Martin escaping the Comanches after first seeing Debbie many years later.

From the beginning Ford was forced to improvise. The original
shooting scheme was laid out before he and Pat knew that Jeff Hunter would be delayed a week to finish a previous film. Instead, Ford shot around him, using the stuntman Chuck Hayward dressed in Martin Pauley's outfit.

The following day Ford shot sequences of the Indians chasing Ethan and Martin to a cave, a scene from much later in the story. Wayne and Hunter were doubled by Hayward and Chuck Roberson, who also did a series of spectacular falls dressed as Indians. Ford's stuntmen were always the most professional and among the highest paid, and both Hayward and Roberson had worked for Ford since the Cavalry Trilogy. “
They had bodies like iron
, their wrists and hands and forearms were like few other men,” recalled Harry Carey Jr., himself an excellent rider. “When you shook hands with them, all you could feel was callous.”

The stuntmen were Ford's personal favorites. He himself had started out doing stunts for his brother Francis's silent films, and he appreciated rugged men who followed orders and always got the job done. “
I like the cowboys
, I like the stuntmen,” said Ford. “… They're a wonderful, kindly, gentle group of people. They're charitable, they're patriotic, and they're easy to work with.”

The cowboys, in turn, took pride in being Ford's shock troops.
Lee Bradley
, a Navajo wrangler, had worked on fifty-seven films since 1925, eleven of them with Ford. Frank McGrath signed on to perform his patented fall and drag stunts off racing horses even though he was still recovering from breaking three vertebrae in a stunt eight months earlier. Jack Pennick, Pappy's personal aide-de-camp and a mournful-faced actor who seemed to have played bit parts in every Ford film since the early 1930s, came along to drill the men for the horse-riding scenes. “
We were his personal soldiers
, as dirty and stinking as any army that ever chased an Indian across the desert in the middle of July; probably dirtier,” recalled Chuck Roberson. Ford liked to dress them up and use them in his trademark folk dance scenes, and they called themselves “Ford's chorus girls.”

The fact that he had to tear up his original shooting plan for
The Searchers
didn't seem to bother Ford. He simply did what he had always done when commanding a film set: he plowed ahead. “
He never shot in continuity
, it didn't mean a damn thing to him,” recalled Bill Clothier, a longtime colleague who served as director of photography on several of Ford's later films. “He could shoot a close-up here and put it in a scene that was shot three weeks later.”

The Searchers
was Ford's 115th film, and his daily routine was almost
as immutable as the mesas themselves. It began each morning with Danny Borzage, his personal accordion player for more than thirty years, warming up the set with a selection of tunes. During the silent era, Borzage would play during the shooting itself, varying his tunes to the mood of each scene. Now Ford used him to establish an emotional climate on the set that might be called Early Americana: old folk tunes, dirges, and ditties. At around nine, Harry Goulding would pull up in his station wagon with Ford in the front passenger's seat. When Borzage spotted the car, he would break into “Bringing in the Sheaves” to announce Pappy's arrival.

The man who emerged
from Harry's station wagon had aged considerably since his last journey to the valley. He was six feet tall, but he seemed shrunken, and his movements were hesitant and careworn. On the set he usually wore a flowing blue shirt and pleated khaki pants. Sometimes he held up his trousers with a leather belt with a silver buckle; other times he slipped a necktie through his belt loops and knotted it, recalled Harry Carey Jr. His socks often didn't match and his scuffed brown-and-white saddle shoes were usually unlaced. The black eye patch stuffed behind his black horn-rimmed glasses hid the left side of his face, and his battered canvas slouch hat cast a shadow over most of the rest. In the back he wore a lone Indian feather secured by his hat-band. No matter what the temperature, he usually wore a battered sport jacket or a windbreaker. On the set he would take out a huge white handkerchief and shove the corner in his mouth, chewing away when he was worried about a scene or an actor. The rest would hang in front of his chest, said Carey, “like a big windless sail.”

He kept a soggy cigar clamped in a corner of his mouth as he went from actor to actor, lingering over their costumes and sprinkling a few last-minute words of encouragement. Even Wayne got the treatment: Ford carefully knotted and straightened Wayne's bandanna before he began shooting.

Everyone stood silently, awaiting his or her turn. “
It was a feeling of reverence
on every set,” recalled Harry Carey Jr. “… You felt almost like you were in a church. It was something sacred, something beautiful going on.”

AFTER ARRIVING ON THE SET, Ford usually headed straight to Winton Hoch, his Oscar-winning director of photography, to discuss where best to place the camera for the morning shot.
The two men had been partners
and antagonists for nearly a decade. Hoch was a bushy-browed man with a patrician nose and the bearing of a field general. Ford respected Hoch's impeccable skills but felt that Hoch was overly fussy and temperamental. He laid out his ground rules for Hoch in 1948 on their first day on location for
3 Godfathers
, after Hoch had had the temerity to suggest a camera angle to Ford. “Do you want to go home right now?” Ford demanded. “Who in the name of Christ do you think you are talking to? I mean, Jesus, you're going to lecture me about your pretty goddamned picture postcard shots? Well, we're not having those kinds of shots in this picture! And I tell you where the camera goes.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Hoch replied evenly. And according to Carey, who witnessed this scene, “they never crossed words again.”

The most controversial moment of their tangled partnership was also one of their finest. It came on a late-afternoon during the shooting of a scene in
Yellow Ribbon
in which Captain Brittles leads a troop of cavalrymen through Indian Territory. Purple-black clouds were holding the sky hostage and a smattering of rain and lightning had begun. Ford ordered everyone back to Goulding's, then suddenly changed his mind. The darkening landscape was rich and disturbing, and Ford wanted to capture it on film.

John Ford surrounded by cast and crew—including John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and Danny Borzage, who played accordion on Ford's film sets for four decades—on the set of
The Searchers
. A never-before-published photo by Allen Reed.

“
Winnie, what do you think
?” he asked Hoch.

“It's awfully dark, Jack. But I'll shoot it. I just can't promise anything.”

Ford decided to try. “Winnie, open her [the lens] up and let's go for it. If it doesn't come out, I'll take the rap.”

The result was a brilliant Technicolor moment: blue-clad troopers leading their anxious mounts through a gathering storm under a black roof of sky as lightning flashed and snarled. Hoch went on to win an Academy Award for cinematography, but he and Ford squabbled for years over who deserved the credit.

By the time he worked on
The Searchers
, Hoch had won three Oscars, two of them with Ford. Still,
The Searchers
was a particularly trying project for Hoch, who was using for the first time a complex new technique known as VistaVision. It produced a film image of extra depth and clarity, and enabled Ford to capture Monument Valley's stunning beauty in long and medium shots while allowing for action to unfold within the frame. The result, wrote one observer, was “
images that are so detailed
that they seem to be painted on screen.” But the technique required more cameras and a larger crew, and while Hoch was intrigued with its possibilities, he was also distracted and chagrined by the intricate and costly details.

For all their quarreling, Hoch and Ford shared a visual sensibility about Monument Valley. Hoch appreciated Ford's restraint. “In Monument Valley
he avoided the temptation
to shoot nothing but breathtakers,” Hoch recalled. “He had only an occasional beauty shot. It's like diamonds. They are very valuable because they are rare. If the street was paved with then, then they would be worthless.”

AFTER HE CHATTED WITH HOCH, Ford would prepare the actors. This was the moment when he would tear up parts of the script and present the fresh ideas he had worked through the night before. “
Too many directors
are too concerned with camera angles, and don't worry about anything else,” recalled Ken Curtis. “Ford worried about his actors. He would get them together in the morning … [and] we'd run through the scene while they were lighting. He'd get it exactly the way it seemed to work best. He always knew what he wanted and when he got it he would print the take. He never shot more than he needed, he never shot less.”

Ford believed that actors needed to be spontaneous. He didn't give the actors line readings, and he seldom verbalized what he wanted. He just gave clues, opening bits, a word or two, relying upon chemistry and intuition.

“
He didn't want any rehearsing
” until the morning that a scene was ready to be shot, Pippa Scott recalled. “I was new but it was fine for me. I just blithely stepped off the plank and went with whatever he wanted.”

The last thing Ford wanted was for the actors to act like actors. He didn't mind mistakes, but he despised dramatic gestures and studied line readings.

“
The actors get tired
, they get jaded and lose their spontaneity—so that they're just mouthing words,” he told Bogdanovich. “But if you get the first or second take, there's a sparkle, an uncertainty about it; they're not sure of their lines, and it gives you a sense of nervousness and suspense.”

When Ford shot the emotionally powerful climactic scene of
The Grapes of Wrath
when Tom Joad, preparing to flee the police coming to arrest him for murder, says good-bye to his mother, Ford refused to allow Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell to rehearse. “
He never let us get into the scene
,” Fonda recalled. “He knew, as well he should, that Jane and I knew our dialogue. He also somehow instinctively knew that he should get the first take, the first emotion.”