The Searchers (50 page)

Nugent's original script spells out exactly what is supposed to happen and why:

Ethan dismounts with his gun drawn, pointing it at Debbie. “
I'm sorry, girl,” he tells her
. “Shut your eyes.”

The camera holds on Debbie's face—the eyes gaze fearlessly, innocently into Ethan's. After a moment, he lowers his gun and puts it away. “You sure do favor your mother,” he tells her. Then he extends his hand, puts his arm protectively around her and a reconciled uncle and niece head for home.

Somewhere between the original filming of the scene and August 12, Ford decided to reach for a different ending. He clearly wanted something more visual and ambiguous—something the audience could see and feel and not have explained to them. “
I wonder, did they box themselves into a corner
and find themselves having to shoot this at the very end?” asked the Ford scholar James D'Arc. “Bronson Canyon's the obvious quickie solution.”

As he did so many times, Ford threw away Nugent's dialogue and improvised. The fact that he would be jump-cutting from the flat parched floor of Monument Valley to the hilly rock-strewn path leading to Bronson Canyon did not seem to trouble him. In the filmed version, Ethan
chases Debbie down, calling out her name—similar to the way he had called out Martha's name earlier in the film when he searched for her body among the flaming ruins of the ranch house. Desperate to escape him, Debbie reaches the mouth of a cave and then collapses. Ethan dismounts, stands over her, then lifts her over his head in one sweeping motion and takes her in his arms. “Let's go home, Debbie” is all he says.

For Ford and his crew, it was a quick visit. They started shooting at Bronson Canyon at 11:00 that morning and finished up at 12:45. They broke a half hour for lunch and then headed back to the studio, where Wayne and Hunter performed for a number of process shots with snow-covered fields in the background—looking about as realistic as the plastic flakes inside a glass snow globe. Then Wayne gave Ethan's “Turning of the Earth” speech, promising Martin that they would eventually find Debbie, taken word for word from LeMay's novel. The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that Wayne's reading is so powerful, it feels as if
he's
making the earth turn.

Ford wrapped up at 5:10 that afternoon after shooting a total of twelve setups for nine scenes. The next day at noon he completed principal photography.

The Searchers
had taken fifty-six days to shoot, a week more than originally scheduled.
Ford had shot 187,402 feet of film
, only 80,540 of which was listed as wasted or discarded. His film editor, Jack Murray, who had done a dozen pictures for Ford, went to work, but as usual there was little for him to do. As with all his pictures, Ford had essentially edited
The Searchers
in the camera. Within weeks it was cut, recorded, and made ready for audiences. John Ford was done.

By early October they had a rough cut without music. Then
Max Steiner took over
. A Vienna-born Jew whose father and grandfather were theatrical producers, Maximilian Raoul Steiner had taken piano lessons from Brahms and had studied at a music conservatory under Mahler before emigrating at age seventeen, first to London and later to New York. To many he was the father of American film music, setting the standard with powerful, classical scores for Cooper's
King Kong
, Selznick's
Gone With the Wind
, and John Huston's
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. He had done three scores for Ford films in the 1930s, including
The Informer
, for which he won an Academy Award. But by the 1950s, Steiner's lush melodramas were out of fashion. Cooper signed him for
The Searchers
, writes James D'Arc, “
as a kind gesture
from [an] old friend.”

From preproduction days, Ford had insisted that Pat Ford and his
staff come up with a search theme song “
that is completely haunting
… This should not be done lightly but research should be done exhaustively throughout the classics of the world, from which, after all, we derive our American folk music.”

In the end
Ford turned to Stan Jones
, a former navy man, firefighter, and park ranger who sang in the Sons of the Pioneers and wrote the haunting Western classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Ford had first met Jones when the ranger had served as an informal adviser on the set of
3 Godfathers
in Death Valley in 1948, and Jones wrote songs for
Wagon Master
and
Rio Grande
, performed by the Sons of the Pioneers, one of whose members was the handsome baritone singer Ken Curtis. For
The Searchers
, Jones came up with an eight-verse search theme, which Ford cut down to two—one to launch the film and one to end it. But just as Ford had envisaged, Steiner wove the melody into the score throughout the film, most affectingly during the scenes of Ethan and Martin riding through the high, vast expanse of Monument Valley.

Still, neither Ford nor Steiner was happy with the results. Ford thought the musical score was too lush and classical. “
You've got a guy alone
in the desert and the London Philharmonic's playing,” he complained to Peter Bogdanovich.

Steiner clearly did not care for the way Ford mutilated his score. There is no record that he ever put his complaints in writing, but there exists a letter from Whitney to Steiner praising the composer for his work on the film and noting, “
I am sorry you are not altogether satisfied
with the musical score as cut.” It was clear that in musical choices, as in everything else about
The Searchers
, John Ford exercised ultimate control.

Sonny Whitney ran a pair of sneak previews in Los Angeles and San Francisco in early December, after which he told Ford that
The Searchers
“goes down as my favorite
picture.” Jack Warner sent Walter MacEwen, a studio lieutenant, who reported back that the picture was a success. “Wayne has never been better, in a rugged, sometimes cruel role—and the audience is with him all the way from his opening shots where he gets a good laugh from his weather-beaten appearance.”

It's not hard to detect a few doubts creeping into MacEwen's glowing assessment. “
The picture is brutal in spots
to the point of being daring,” he told Warner. He singled out as particularly gruesome the scene of the white captives at the fort and a scene near the end where Ethan scalps Scar's corpse, and he also called the pace “rather deliberate in spots, [although] it never seemed to lag.”

Still, MacEwen added, “the whole picture has a real feeling of bigness
and honesty, as if you were actually witnessing how the pioneers lived on the frontier.”

Jack Warner's own doubts were apparent in the delays that followed. The studio had originally planned to release
The Searchers
in January 1956, but rescheduled for April 7. Then the film ran up against another John Wayne picture,
The Conqueror
, which RKO slated for general release on April 1. The
Searchers
contract specified that Warner's did not have to pay C. V. Whitney Productions its share of the production costs until the film was released.
Whitney was eager to get paid
: he told Jack Warner he needed the money to finance his next project. No matter. Warner's delayed its check until the release date, now reset for early June.

Whitney was unhappy with Warner's for other reasons as well. He feared his big investment was being bounced around the Warner's studio machine. He had Cooper write Warner a passionate five-page letter that was part plea, part threat, and part paean that clearly had been dictated by Whitney himself.

“
Frankly, I have been very disappointed
in the advertising copy and television advertising preparation that Warner Brothers has been doing, and when I explained exactly what it was to C.V., he was equally disgusted,” Cooper begins. “We wanted to make a BIG picture which would show off the Whole West.”

Cooper says he had sent over to the studio three scripts for movie trailers that captured “the scope and magnitude of the picture—the BIGGEST, ROUGHEST, TOUGHEST, and MOST BEAUTIFUL PICTURE ever made.” But Warner's discarded all three and produced a trailer that “simply plays this as another John Wayne picture …” This was unacceptable to Whitney. “C.V. and I think
The Searchers
is bigger than any single star, no matter how big the star.”

Cooper's discomfort in writing this letter is palpable. He swears his allegiance to Wayne (“I admire him tremendously”) and pointedly notes to Warner that he's “writing at the request of C.V.” Still, he closes with an ode to his boss: “When everyone else thought that over-ocean flying was folly, it was C.V. Whitney's brilliant idea that put over Pan American Airways. He understood how to advertise and exploit a new industry—flying—no one in America understood it as well … Indeed, I don't think anyone understands advertising and exploitation better than does our President—your friend and mine—C.V. Whitney. I hope you will consider well his suggestions—as expressed in this letter.”

Jack Warner, like John Ford before him, ignored Sonny Whitney's
unhelpful suggestions. The movie trailer focused on John Wayne from start to finish.
“From the thrilling pages of life rides a man you must fear and respect,”
proclaims the God-like narrator. “
It's John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, who has a rare kind of courage … Here is the story of a man hard and relentless, tender and passionate.”

The Searchers
, according to Warner Brothers, was a John Wayne movie after all.

After four months of delays,
The Searchers
finally opened on May 26, 1956. To the audience it looked like something very familiar: a John Wayne movie set in Monument Valley with cowboys, Indians, horses, and gunplay. It begins with a panel announcing the scene as “Texas 1868,” then a door opens onto a Monument Valley vista—a subtle announcement that what follows is a fable. Ethan Edwards rides up slowly, tired, expressionless, but erect in the saddle. His sister-in-law, Martha, welcomes him with a shy, awkward gesture, stepping backward toward the house, drawing him in as if she were welcoming royalty—or the man she loves but cannot embrace. It is as beautiful, stylized, and ambiguous as the film that follows.

From its austere opening moment until its emotional climax,
The Searchers
is a mythic tale, only loosely connected to historical reality—“
a myth based on other myths
based themselves on still other myths,” wrote the critic Tag Gallagher.

Its pioneers are eking out a hardscrabble existence in a setting as unyielding as the Sahara; its Comanches are mythic apparitions that Gallagher called “
icons of savage violent beauty
and dread … projections of white fantasy.” It is a psychological drama, obsessed with race and sexual violation and fear of the other. The audience sees very little violence in
The Searchers
; what we witness instead are the devastating effects of violence on those who survive.

Ethan Edwards is the Man Who Knows Indians, a worthy successor to Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo and to the image that Cynthia Ann Parker's uncle James had sought to project in his own troubled narrative more than a century earlier. Ethan is the person you'd most want
by your side in a dangerous situation. “
I wish Uncle Ethan was here
, don't you?” Ben Edwards says to his mother, Martha, as Comanche raiders close in on the Edwards homestead. On this we all can agree. He is, after all, John Wayne—reliable, undefeatable, strangely menacing, as powerful and invulnerable as Monument Valley itself.

Wayne dominates. Ford usually films him from middle distance, so we can see his body as well as his face. He is controlled and heavy, yet somehow loose. When he twirls his pistol, it is with a knowing and flexible motion. When he swings his rifle into action, flinging its buckskin sheath to the ground, he is ready to kill. The only time he tenses up is in the winter scene when he goes crazy with bloodlust and kills as many bison as he can, and it's the one moment in the film when he's less than totally convincing. More often he's cold and deliberate—taking aim with his rifle at Scar from a distance, or smiling with icy pleasure as he shoots the eyes out of the Comanche corpse. It is a monumental performance, one that has slowly come to be recognized as one of the greatest in film history.

Then there is the psychological drama of Ethan and Scar, two blood enemies who are wounded warriors and effectively two sides of the same mirror. When they finally meet, they trade knowing insults. “
You speak good American
for a Comanch—someone teach you?” declares Ethan as he goes to enter Scar's teepee. Scar retorts with equal contempt: “You speak pretty good Comanch—someone teach you?” Ethan wants to do to Scar what Scar has done to him: destroy his family and steal and kill his women. Yet, just like Ethan, Scar has reasons for his brutality: he reveals that his own two sons were killed by whites. “For each son I take many scalps.” Ethan can at least understand the grim equation.

Behind these rich, complicated men is John Ford, mythmaker and storyteller. With every choice Ford makes, he reduces the exposition of Nugent's final script, hacks away at dialogue and explanation, replaces literal certainty with subtle ambiguity. There is much about
The Searchers
that seems makeshift and haphazard. In the opening scene, a Navajo blanket sits atop a fence at one moment, then vanishes the next. There's no continuity in the chase scene: Comanche warriors are within a few feet of the Rangers one moment; then in the next the Rangers are halfway across the San Juan River with the pursuing Indians far behind. Later on in the winter Cavalry scene, a discerning eye can catch a station wagon in the distance lumbering incongruously down a road at the top edge of the shot. At the end of the film, Ethan races after Debbie on the
flat plain outside the Indian village, then Ford cuts to a cave on a hillside. There's an almost willful sloppiness at work that in later pictures—
Two Rode Together
and
Cheyenne Autumn
—becomes fatal to the films' meaning and ambitions. But in
The Searchers
none of it matters. If Ford is sloppy around the edges, sacrificing continuity and visual coherence, he is precise at the core.