The Searchers (49 page)

Ford and his sunbaked crew returned to Los Angeles during the week of July 11 and reported for work on Stage 15 the following Monday. Here Ford went to work cutting and pasting bits of script, coaxing, cajoling, and bullying performances out of the actors. Ford was always
more relaxed after a sojourn in Monument Valley. He cleaned himself up, put on fresh clothes, ate a few good meals, and got down to business. He summoned Frank Nugent, the screenwriter, for a bit of polish on some of the scenes. But mostly this was Ford himself, pushing his own vision, using the soundstage to fill in the gaps in the story he was telling.
The Searchers
is justly famous for the evocative landscape of Monument Valley, yet many of its most powerful moments were filmed on the RKO soundstage. What's more astonishing, virtually none of them were in the original screenplay.

Perhaps the most memorable is the breakfast scene that Ford shot on Wednesday, July 20. Ranger captain Samuel Clayton's posse of volunteers has ridden up to the Edwards farmhouse early in the morning (their thunderous approach on horseback having been filmed in Monument Valley several weeks earlier). Clayton, who is also a reverend, has come to deputize Aaron Edwards and his adopted son, Martin Pauley, to join the hunt for rustlers who have stolen cattle from the neighboring Jorgensen ranch the night before. The scene is a classic Ford tableau: the camera watches quietly from a stationary spot in the front of the dining room as the women of the Edwards family scurry to and fro, serving coffee and doughnuts to the Rangers, while Clayton swears in Aaron and Martin, and his men chat amiably with one another and the Edwardses. It's a domestic opera—lots of chatter and bustle. People are talking in clusters and moving around the room in a busy but balanced composition. Then from a back door Ethan Edwards enters the room and saunters forward. Ford's camera watches for a moment, then moves slowly toward him. Wayne almost swaggers as he makes his way toward the dining room table. Ethan and Clayton exchange wary greetings. They are both former Confederate soldiers, ex-comrades who haven't seen each other in the three years since the Civil War ended. Nugent's dialogue, spoken by Wayne and Bond, two old pros, is crisp and sardonic.

“
Captain, the Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton
! … Mighty impressive,” declares Ethan mockingly.

“Well, the prodigal brother,” Clayton retorts in Ward Bond's trademark caustic, booming voice. “I haven't seen you since the surrender. Come to think of it, I didn't see you
at
the surrender.”

“Don't believe in surrenderin',” Ethan responds. “I still got my saber, Reverend … didn't beat it into no plowshare either.”

Ethan immediately takes charge, ordering his brother Aaron to remain at the ranch because those alleged cattle rustlers might turn out to be
Comanche raiders with more than thievery on their minds. Ethan says he'll take Aaron's place in the posse, although he refuses to be sworn in. “Wouldn't be legal anyway,” he adds mysteriously.

Clayton wants to know why. “You wanted for a crime, Ethan?”

“You askin' as a Reverend or a Captain, Sam?”

“I'm askin' as a Ranger of the sovereign state of Texas.”

“Got a warrant?” Ethan demands.

“You fit a lot of descriptions,” Clayton replies.

It's one of the film's classic lines, capturing as it does the sense that Ethan is indeed many men—wrangler, scout, uncle, lover, outlaw, killer.

“I figure a man's only good for one oath at a time … I took mine to the Confederate States of America … So did you, Reverend.” Ethan spits out the last line like an accusation.

An anxious Martha, worried that Ethan is pushing things too far, cuts through the escalating tension by offering more coffee and doughnuts, and the posse and family members head out the door, leaving Clayton to drain his cup in the foreground, facing forward toward the camera while behind him we see Martha fetching Ethan's coat. She strokes it gently and hands it silently to Ethan, who kisses her chastely on the forehead and heads outside. The harpsichord music playing softly in the background is Martha's theme, a Civil War–era ballad called “Lorena,” a tale of a thwarted, forbidden love affair. Clayton thoughtfully sips his coffee in the foreground, pretending not to see a thing. Then he slips out the door as well, passing close to Martha without a word. The posse rides off.

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 explain. 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.