Old Yorker

  • The Searchers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Ford (1956)

    Dominic Power from the National Film and Television School, at one point in his introduction, pretended to be lost for words:  ‘What do you say about one of the greatest films ever made?’   It’s not much easier to try to explain why I found The Searchers the third best of the three films I’ve seen so far this month at BFI (not counting Agonia![1]).  Power closed by quoting Jean-Luc Godard:  ‘How can I hate John Wayne [for his political views] and yet love him tenderly in the last reel of The Searchers?’  Godard’s famous remark seems to be widely accepted as proof of the exceptional quality of the film and/or Wayne’s performance but it’s a little puzzling.  Don’t we expect a good actor to be able, in what he does on screen, to transcend what we know of his personal views and behaviour (whether or not we like him as a result of those)?   Barbara Stanwyck, for example, was known to be staunchly Republican – but does anyone express amazement at liking or sympathising with (or even loving tenderly) the characters she creates on film?  No, because she’s a superb actress.  A main reason why Godard marvels at what he feels watching The Searchers is that John Wayne is barely an actor at all:  he always seems to be John Wayne.  You’re much more conscious of the real-life persona of someone who, as a performer, never convinces you they’re a different person.

    Power described Wayne’s portrait of Ethan Edwards as ‘the performance of his life’.   That phrase tends to be used about actors who don’t have a lot to choose from.  When Power added, ‘Greater even than Red River, I think’, I feared the worst but in fact Wayne does do some acting in The Searchers and bits of it are humanly persuasive.  It must be the fact that is so unusual that has caused many distinguished directors and critics lavishly to overrate the performance.  It’s striking that Wayne’s best moments come when he expresses weariness.  Even today, stars who are poor actors can sometimes register when they seemed to have emptied themselves – Leonardo DiCaprio in (just the) one sequence in Revolutionary Road, for example.   And Wayne’s eyes sometimes communicate Ethan Edwards’ isolation – the sense that this rabid Injun-hater also feels out of place in ‘civilised’ white society – convincingly.  On the whole, though, he does his standard thing of growling misanthropically, in the same unvarying rhythm.  His uttering the famous line ‘That’ll be the day’ (supposedly the inspiration for Buddy Holly) pays diminishing returns:  I counted four ‘That’ll be the day’s’ – the first two had some cynical bite, the latter two were well on the way to turning into a Wayne-ism.

    Ethan Edwards, a Civil War veteran, returns to the home of his brother Aaron.  It’s 1868, three years after the end of the War, and that interval is an early indication that Ethan isn’t naturally the settling down kind.  Aaron (Walter Coy) is married to Martha (Dorothy Jordan).  They have three children – Ben (Robert Lyden), Lucy (Pippa Scott) and the youngest, Debbie (Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister) – and an adopted son called Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who’s one-eighth Cherokee.  The day after Ethan’s arrival, he and a group of Texas rangers headed by Captain Clayton (Ward Bond), who also doubles as a man of the cloth when the occasion demands, are tricked into leaving to search for some cattle stolen from the Edwards’ friend and neighbour Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen).  While they’re away, Comanche Indians (the tricksters) burn down the Edwards home, after murdering Aaron, Martha and Ben and abducting Lucy and Debbie.  Ethan, accompanied by Martin, goes looking for the two girls, along with Lucy’s fiancé Brad (Harry Carey Jr) – Brad’s sister Laurie (Vera Miles) and Martin are sweethearts too, although he is, to her mind, infuriatingly tentative.  Brad’s mother (Olive Carey) has begged Ethan unavailingly not to let Brad risk his life by trying to exact revenge.  The men aren’t long into their quest before they discover that Lucy too has been murdered and, when Brad rides into the Indian camp to avenge her death, he’s killed as well.  Ethan and Martin continue in their search for the younger girl Debbie and five years later they find her (she’s Natalie Wood by now).  Debbie has gone native:  she’s one of the wives of the Comanche chief Scar (Henry Brandon) who captured her.  Ethan would rather see his niece dead than living with an Indian but Martin, although Ethan tells him that Debbie ‘ain’t your kin’, defends her.  In the climactic raid on the Comanche camp, Ethan thinks again.  It’s he who brings Debbie safely home.  ‘Home’ means the Jorgensens’ cabin and, in other words, Debbie’s own kind rather than ‘kin’:  Ethan, who after doing the right thing departs the scene, is her only surviving blood relative.  The end of the story also sees Laurie happily reunited with Martin, having narrowly avoided marriage to a dimwit suitor (Ken Curtis).

    Dominic Power suggested that the juxtaposition of tragedy and low humour in The Searchers demonstrates Ford’s complexity, the breadth of his artistic vision.  Of course the combination of seemingly disparate elements might do this but I don’t think it does here.  The humour in The Searchers is the same tedious stuff you usually get in Westerns and Power was pushing it in describing the character of the eccentric Mose Harper as a ‘Shakespearean fool’, even if Hank Worden does play the part in a way that seems meant to keep you guessing whether Mose is a half-wit or a seer.  (His lines don’t really have that complexity, though.)  Most of the acting too is Western standard issue, broad and wooden.  Honourable exceptions are, in addition to Worden, Henry Brandon, Olive Carey and, surprisingly, John Wayne’s son Patrick, as a greenhorn US army soldier (called Greenhill).   Admirers of the genre will describe the acting we see from the rest of the cast as ‘stylised’.  That’s at best a euphemism:  why should this kind of stylisation be peculiar to Westerns?  In a mid-nineteenth century drama with an urban or metropolitan setting, the actors may be just as likely to be playing types but they’re expected to give individuality to their roles.  Isn’t it a fact too that many actors best known for their appearances in Westerns are in fact known only for those appearances?  That obviously doesn’t apply to Natalie Wood but she’s glazed and superficial as Debbie:  I don’t understand how those who find the film’s climax deeply moving don’t find Natalie Wood getting in the way of that.  Thanks to Psycho, Vera Miles isn’t just a Western girl either but she’s a dull, limited actress.  As Laurie, perhaps Miles too gives the performance of her life; as with John Wayne, that doesn’t add up to much.

    A group of ‘very bright, very motivated American students’, to whom Dominic Power showed The Searchers years ago (although he didn’t say when exactly), pronounced it the ‘most sexist and racist’ movie they’d seen in a long time.  Power described how he kept asking the students after they’d delivered this verdict whether they’d noticed this or that subtlety or contradiction and the answer was always no.  It seemed they couldn’t see past John Wayne.  It wasn’t clear from the reactions last night that the NFT2 audience could either – but there are different kinds of blindness:  lots of people were clearly enjoying Wayne being Wayne.  Except for the treatment meted out to the Native American woman (Beulah Archuletta) whom Martin inadvertently marries (until she’s conveniently killed off), I doubt many people today are offended by the racial and sexual attitudes of the film.  There’s a confusion of reasons for that:  on the one hand, we accept that these attitudes are historically realistic; on the other hand, the Western is a largely obsolete film form (as I was leaving, I heard a youngish male voice in the row behind me say this was the first Western he’d seen).  So the presentation of these attitudes, which might have caused offence fifty years ago in that it was seen to be promoting racism and sexism, now seems as far distant in time past as the years in which The Searchers is actually set.

    The Searchers, although it was overlooked by critics (and the Academy), was a commercial success on its original release and you can see why.  John Ford makes the movement of the action sequences very exciting – the shoot-outs, men and horses sliding down steep slopes or through lakes, and so on.  Silence or near silence is used to varying effect – so is Max Steiner’s score.  There are fine images, like the tiny, lone figure watching from a mountain top the Comanche camp below, or Debbie on foot being pursued by Ethan on horseback.  The contrast between the small indoors and the great outdoors, between the interiors of the scattered homesteads and the vast Texas wilderness (dusty orange terrain and hard blue sky) that they look out on, is at the heart of The Searchers’ most famous image – with which it begins and ends (and which features at other points too).  The door of one of these cabins is opened at the start and gradually closes on Ethan Edwards as he walks back out into the desert at the end.  (The image also suggests the opening and closing of a book – the screenplay by Frank S Nugent is based on a 1954 novel by Alan LeMay – or the opening and closing of a camera shutter or even the rise and fall of a stage curtain.)   The landscape looks to have epic possibilities and that no doubt increases the emotional power of the piece for those who find it psychologically complex too.  I imagine it’s because The Searchers combines John Ford’s trademarks with an uncharacteristic ambiguity that many of his admirers rate the film uniquely highly in his work – but this doesn’t seem to me essentially different from the reasons for enthusing about John Wayne’s acting here.  John Ford being ambivalent may well be preferable to his being unequivocal but I prefer directors who are in two or more minds as a matter of course.

    18 April 2011

     

    [1] See note on The Grim Reaper.

  • Tess

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roman Polanski (1979)

    The mise en scène of Polanski’s adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is accomplished and often imaginative.   The light and the colour tones of the Wessex landscape (actually Brittany) are subtly varied; the sounds – of milking and its aftermath, of farm machinery – express the pulse and the relentless routine of agricultural life.  There are fine set pieces, like the opening May Dance, where Tess Durbeyfield first meets Angel Clare;  and lovely visual details, such as a cow’s tail brushing Tess’s face as she milks it.   The sequence in which the four milkmaids’ path to church on a sunny Sunday morning is deep in water, and Angel carries them to dry land one by one, is perfect.   (Each of the four girls dreams of being held in his arms, and their dreams momentarily come true:  the only one who resists is Tess, at least until Angel explains to her that he carried the other three across only in order to be able to get to her eventually.)   The cinematography (by Geoffrey Unsworth and then, after his sudden death, Ghislain Cloquet), the costumes (Anthony Powell) and the art direction (Pierre Guffroy, Jack Stephens) deservedly won Oscars.  According to co-producer Timothy Burrill, who was interviewed with Leigh Lawson before the BFI screening, the first cut of the film ran four hours:  even with more than an hour trimmed, though, Tess feels excessively long.  Polanski dwells not only on his descriptions of rustic ritual and labour, which are worth the attention, but, less justifiably, on the bridges between key parts of the story – especially Angel’s search for Tess after his return to England.  The film’s landscape isn’t expressionistic in the way you might expect from reading Hardy – except in darkness and cruel weather, it looks benign.  This might be a subtlety rather than a shortcoming if the central drama were dynamic.  As it’s not, the predominantly placid appearance of Tess does become a weakness and expressive of a larger one.  Philippe Sarde’s skilful score sometimes seems melodramatic because it has greater force than what’s happening on screen.

    Tess in Hardy is not only a victim but also, in the novel’s ironic subtitle, ‘a pure woman’.  In Tess, she’s a pure victim.  (It’s hard to ignore the dedication of the film to Sharon Tate.)   On their last night together, at Stonehenge, Angel tells Tess that the place was once the site of pagan sacrifices to the sun.  At daybreak, as the police arrive to arrest her for the murder of Alec d’Urberville, Tess is sleeping on one of the great stones – the image, suggesting that she is about to be sacrificed, sums up Polanski’s view of his heroine.  As Tess, the seventeen-year-old Nastassja Kinski, who has a look of the young Ingrid Bergman, is a magnetic image and shows a lot of skill but she lacks emotional friction.  You watch her suffering and feel for her when the worst things happen – but because those things are awful for anyone to suffer rather than because of anything coming from the actress.  Kinski is somewhat remote: perhaps her conscientious attempts at a Dorset accent, which she holds onto except in moments of high emotion, reinforce that effect.  She also has a radiant sullenness:  when Alec accuses Tess of wearing her ‘ridiculous pride like a hair shirt’ and, in their final moments together, of ‘moping, as usual’, you rather sympathise.  In the BBC television adaptation of the novel in 2008, Jodie Whittaker’s Izz was so naturally spirited that I wished that she, rather than Gemma Arterton, had had the lead.  Although the role of Izz is smaller here, Suzanna Hamilton has the same effect:  there’s more turbulence in Hamilton, in the conversation between Izz and Angel when he asks if she loves him more than Tess did, than in most of the scenes between Tess and Angel put together.

    Although Polanski presents Tess as a passive figure, on the receiving end of the cruelty of social and economic structures and of men, neither Alec d’Urberville nor Angel Clare is an out-and-out scoundrel.  Leigh Lawson’s line readings are occasionally a bit wooden but his playing of Alec is mostly successful.  He’s easily able to incarnate a sneering villain in Victorian melodrama:  he and Polanski use this as a counterpoint to the character that Lawson creates – a man who’s thwarted and weak, in spite of the powerful position that he abuses, in what he does Tess.   Peter Firth’s Angel is increasingly disappointing.  He’s charming in the earlier part of the film, when Angel is viewed admiringly in more ways than one; at this stage, he also suggests a latent priggishness.  It’s all the more frustrating, then, that this quality doesn’t connect with Firth’s playing of Angel when Tess reveals to him her past with Alec and as the mother of a short-lived illegitimate child.   You don’t get any sense of Angel’s having divided feelings, of being compelled by selfish and socially conscious imperatives which overwhelm his better judgment.  (Eddie Redmayne, in the BBC version, did get something of that across.)  Firth’s Angel simply turns into a nasty person and back again.

    Most of the supporting parts are played by British actors whom I remember from television roles in the seventies and eighties.   Some of these characterisations – John Collin as Durbeyfield, Rosemary Martin as Mrs Durbeyfield, Richard Pearson as a shrewd but worldly clergyman, Lesley Dunlop in a brief appearance as a girl who works on the D’Urberville estate – are vivid without being overdone.   In cameos where the performances are busier, it may be just a matter of personal taste as to what you think works and doesn’t work:   I enjoyed Patsy Smart as the housekeeper at the place where Tess and Angel spend their cut-short honeymoon; I didn’t like Tony Church’s Parson Tringham.  The other milkmaids at the dairy farm are all good – as well as Suzanna Hamilton, there’s Carolyn Pickles as Miriam (excellent as she falls asleep talking, and when she has resounding hiccups at the farm workers’ breakfast next morning) and Caroline Embling as Retty.  There’s an extraordinary collection of faces and physical types in evidence.  As a farm hand, John Barrett is effortlessly eccentric; Fred Bryant as the dairyman has to work much harder to seem so.   He has only two lines to speak but Jimmy Gardner creates a powerful image as a dwarfish pedlar.  Patsy Rowlands is the landlady of the upmarket boarding house where Tess and Alec live together.  Rowlands plays things straight – and the landlady’s transition from nosiness to horror, to great effect.

    The scenes in the boarding house are among the film’s best and Polanski’s restraint here is impressive.  It’s no surprise how expertly he handles the blood seeping into a corner of the downstairs ceiling but the sequence is remarkable too for perhaps the finest sound effect in Tess:  the noise of a hedge being cut in the front garden of the boarding house.  The shears are going when Angel Clare arrives asking for Tess; they’re still at work after she has stabbed Alec and as she leaves the place swiftly, in order both to escape and to find Angel again.   The sound of those shears suggests a clock ticking and the remorselessness of fate.   The film could do with more touches like this – you can’t easily take unfortunate predestination out of Hardy without weakening the story.  Although I think of cinema adaptations of his novels as products of the 1960s and later, watching Tess made me wonder if the typical 1940s Hollywood style of literary classic adaptations – more crudely melodramatic in some ways but also often more emotionally direct – might have been better suited to realising Hardy on the big screen.

    1 February 2013

     

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