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 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.
