The Searchers (52 page)

Martin Pauley (Jeffrey Hunter), Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles), and her mother (Olive Carey). Martin serves as willing agent of the strong women in
The Searchers
.

The same masculine-versus-feminine conflicts play out in
The Searchers
. Ethan and Scar drive the blood feud, seeking retribution, but the women undermine them. The gender divide isn't neat and clean: Laurie Jorgensen supports Ethan's bloodstained quest for vengeance, while Martin Pauley is the willing agent of the feminine counternarrative. And Ford exposes the underlying sexual tension of the original tale and makes it the driving force of his story. Feminine values ultimately triumph. The family is restored.

Love defeats hatred. Martha—from beyond the grave—tames Ethan.

John Wayne understood this exactly. He told biographer Michael Munn, “
When Ethan picks up Debbie
at the end, I had to think, what's going through his mind as he looks into her face? I guess he saw in her eyes the woman he'd loved. And that was enough to overcome his hatred.”

THE REVIEWS WERE GENERALLY POSITIVE, and a few were glowing. “
Undoubtedly one of the greatest
Westerns ever made for sheer scope, guts, and beauty,” opined the
Hollywood Reporter
. Jack Moffitt, the reviewer, praised the acting, photography, and script: “Ford and Nugent show fine dramatic craftsmanship.”

Motion Picture Herald
hailed it as “
one of the greatest
of the great pictures of the American West” and compared it favorably to
The Covered Wagon
,
Stagecoach
, and
Shane
. Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
called it “
a rip-snorting Western
as brashly entertaining as they come … [It boasts] a wealth of Western action that has the toughness of leather and the sting of a whip … Mr. Ford's scenic stuff, shot in color and VistaVision, in the expanse of Monument Valley that he loves, has his customary beauty and grandeur.”

Others were more critical.
Film Bulletin
called the film “
strange but fascinating
… The plot is interrupted by sub-plots without any apparent pattern, and the narrative is at times so suggestive and subtle as to be obscure … Yet for all this, the total effect is enormously rich, interesting, and exciting.”

Variety
said the film was “overlong and repetitious,” and complained “there are subtleties in the basically simple story that are not adequately explained.”
The Nation
called it “long on brutality and short on logic or responsible behavior.”
Time
magazine lamented “
the lapses in logic
and the general air of incoherence,” and opined that John Ford's stock company of actors and crew may have gotten “too practiced and familiar …
Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized end-of-film departure into the sunset.”

What none of the critics, positive or negative, grasped was that
The Searchers
was a different kind of Western, something much darker and more disturbing than the usual fare. No one seemed to see
Ethan Edwards
as anything less than a standard-issue John Wayne action hero. Ethan's racism, his mania, and his bloodlust all passed by without comment. “
Racism was so endemic
in our culture that people didn't even notice it,” said Joseph McBride. “They treated Wayne as a conventional Western hero. Not one person got it.”

Still, Ethan was a memorable character. Buddy Holly and his drummer, Jerry Allison, saw
The Searchers
when it first opened at the State Theater in Lubbock, Texas—the heart of what had once been Comancheria. They came out and wrote “That'll Be the Day”—a phrase Ethan Edwards utters four times during the film—which became a number one hit in the fall of 1957. It later became the first demo recorded by a Liverpool group known as the Quarrymen, who later renamed themselves the Beatles. Another first-rate Liverpool band called themselves the Searchers after the film.

The British film critic Lindsay Anderson, a longtime champion of Ford's work who was beginning to direct his own movies, disliked the film. Anderson felt Ford had abandoned his trademark optimistic celebration of the American spirit for something darker and more unsavory. Ethan Edwards was “
an unmistakable neurotic
,” complained Anderson. “Now what is Ford, or all directors, to do with a hero like this?”

Others felt inspired. Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave critic and director, said he wept at the end of the film, overwhelmed by the “mystery and fascination of this American cinema.” Although a committed leftist, Godard asked of himself almost plaintively, “
How can I hate John Wayne
upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when, abruptly, he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of
The Searchers
?”

When the film failed to get any Academy Award nominations or other honors, Wayne pronounced himself mystified. “
You know, I just don't understand
why that film wasn't better received,” he told one interviewer. Speaking of Ford, he added, “I think it is his best Western.” Wayne was so impressed with the film, and with his character, that he named a son, born in 1962, John Ethan Wayne.

“Ethan Edwards,” Wayne declared, “was probably the most fascinating character I ever played in a John Ford Western.”

The Searchers
came and went, embraced lightly—just as Sonny Whitney and Merian C. Cooper had feared—as another John Wayne Western. It garnered positive reviews, made a reasonable profit, and then disappeared, exiled by the early 1960s to the relatively new medium of television, where it received an occasional showing, cut and pasted to coexist with commercials inside a two-hour frame. John Ford pronounced himself puzzled by the film's lack of success, John Wayne said he was surprised and disappointed, but both men quickly moved on. Wayne's career took a slight detour—he starred in several duds, including
Jet Pilot
(1957), Howard Hughes's bizarre Cold War romantic comedy, and John Huston's incoherent
The Barbarian and the Geisha
(1958)—before triumphing in
Rio Bravo
(1959), directed by Howard Hawks, Ford's foremost rival when it came to the proper use of the Wayne persona. Ford's career, meanwhile, resumed its slow arc of decline.

The Searchers
was “a good picture,” Ford told Joe McBride. “
It made a lot of money
, and that's the ultimate end.” Spoken like an obituary.

Ford returned to the captivity theme in 1961 with the disappointing
Two Rode Together
, a tepid, uninspired effort. James Stewart and Richard Widmark play a marshal and an army officer dispatched to retrieve white captives from Comanches led by Quanah Parker. But the Quanah portrayed here is a cruel and avaricious warrior, not the conciliatory figure of real life. To add further insult, he is played by Henry Brandon, the same actor who played Scar in
The Searchers
. Tall and muscular, Brandon has the physicality to play Quanah, but Frank Nugent's script and Ford's direction give Brandon none of the depth.

Two Rode Together
is a weird recapitulation of
The Searchers
—similar
to the way Francis Ford Coppola's unfortunate
The Godfather Part III
inadvertently mocks the greatness of the first two
Godfather
films. Members of Ford's usual stock company of supporting players are on hand: John Qualen, Andy Devine, Anna Lee, Harry Carey Jr., Olive Carey, Mae Marsh, and Ken Curtis. But Nugent's script is crude and meandering, with none of the narrative tension that makes
The Searchers
so compelling. The acting is terrible: Stewart and Widmark play their roles for maximum humor and look uncomfortable and ridiculous throughout. Carey and Curtis painfully ham it up. Ford repeats older and better ideas from previous films. Stewart, playing the local marshal, is introduced balancing himself on a chair with his long legs up on a railing—just as Henry Fonda did much more charmingly fifteen years earlier as Wyatt Earp in
My Darling Clementine
. Carey and Curtis speak in the same inept dryland accents that Curtis used to play Charlie McCorry in
The Searchers
, and they stage a comic fight with Widmark's character that echoes the slapstick fistfight of Martin Pauley and Charlie McCorry in
The Searchers
. A blonde Shirley Jones in blue denims and pigtails generates the same tomboy energy and repressed sexuality of Vera Miles's Laurie, but it's all for a lost cause.

There is a kernel of an idea here—in effect picking up the story of Debbie after she is rescued from the Comanches, echoing the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker's miserable life with her white relatives after her purported liberation. But the racist sentiments of the main characters are endorsed rather than undermined, as they are in
The Searchers
.

“Would you like me to tell you what this little angel looks like now?” demands Jimmy Stewart's character, explaining to Shirley Jones's character how her younger brother, captured a decade earlier by Comanches, would have been raised. “That kid has braids down to here now, stiff stinkin' braids filled with buffalo grease, and he's got a scar there and scar there … just to prove he's a man. He forgot his English—he just grunts Comanche now, just grunts … and he's killed and he's taken scalps, white man's scalps, and given a chance, sister, he'd rape you … and when he's finished he'd trade you off to one of the other bucks for a good knife or bad rifle. Now is that what you want me to bring back to you?”

The speech is similar to the harsh outburst that Laurie Jorgensen makes to Martin Pauley, her fiancé, in
The Searchers
. The difference is that Ford, identifying with Martin, clearly repudiates these sentiments in
The Searchers
, whereas in
Two Rode Together
they are treated as unpleasant but undeniable truths.

As in
The Searchers
, there is a dance that serves as a pivotal moment in the life of the community, only in this case Ford uses the event—a military officers' ball—to illustrate the raging hypocrisy of white society toward former captives. Stewart gives yet another speech—for a director who hates exposition, Ford allows it to run amok in
Two Rode Together
—this time berating the white hypocrites who are polite to a newly freed captive to her face yet disdainful of her behind her back: “This afternoon she asked me to take her back because she was treated better by the Comanches than she was treated by some of you.”

Ford took on
Two Rode Together
for the money and soon lost interest, according to his grandson Dan Ford. “
The worst piece of crap
I've directed in twenty years” was Ford's own definitive verdict.

He made one more great Western,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), starring Stewart and Wayne. Stewart plays a lawyer-politician who is credited with confronting and shooting dead a murderous thug who is terrorizing a small town, thus bringing civilization and eventual statehood to the community, while Wayne is a rough-hewn rancher and man of action who actually did the killing. The Stewart character achieves fame and fortune and the hand in marriage of Vera Miles, while the Wayne character dies a lonely and forgotten alcoholic. Ford filmed it in black-and-white and shot most of it on a soundstage at Paramount, and it was a dark, somber, pessimistic picture. There was no Monument Valley, no Technicolor flourishes, and no Indians. Yet the film was Ford's final statement about the gap between fact and myth, and the role that legend played in the civilizing of the American West. It was also his final film with Wayne, whose character more than ever seemed to reflect Ford's own. It concludes with the famous moment when a newspaper editor rejects publishing Stewart's account of what really happened: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

“
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
is a serious assault on everything,” said Peter Bogdanovich. “It tells us our legends are false, that our history is wrong and that everything we believe in is a lie.”

Ford made one more attempt to come to grips with the Native American experience.
Cheyenne Autumn
(1964) was his epic retelling of the attempt of a band of Cheyenne to escape captivity in Oklahoma and return to their native homeland in Wyoming and Colorado—the same story Alan LeMay had fictionalized in
Painted Ponies
in 1926. Ford, assisted once again by his son Pat, sought to tell the tale with great empathy and compassion, and he again employed Widmark and Stewart,
along with stock company regulars like Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Patrick Wayne, George O'Brien, and John Carradine. He filmed for the seventh and final time in Monument Valley, using a large cast of Navajos to play the Cheyenne.