The Searchers (1956)Director: John Ford
Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Henry Brandon, Ward Bond, Hank Warden, Natalie Wood
In the readings relating to Mean Streets for Screens, Images, Ideas this week, there was a really interesting article by Stuart Byron about John Ford's western The Searchers and how it became the cult film of the New Hollywood. I'd seen it a couple of years ago, but reading the article peaked my interest so I decided to watch it again.
Ethan Edwards (Wayne), who has been off fighting in the Confederate Army, returns to his brothers ranch three years after the Civil War ended. One day Ethan joins a posse to go out and investigate the theft of the cattle from the neighbouring ranch. When they find the cattle slaughtered Ethan recognises it as a decoy. He returns to his brothers ranch to find the farmhouse torched by Comanche. His brother and nephew have been murdered, his sister-in-law raped and murdered, and his two nieces missing. Ethan vows to retrieve the girls and is joined by the families surrogate son, a one eighth Indian, Martin (Hunter) on his quest.
Westerns were traditionally built around reasonably uncomplicated binaries. You had good and bad, civilised and savage, and very little in the way of grey area. By the time Ford made The Searchers, the black and white nature of the Western was starting to be questioned. Ethan is a very openly racist character. He has a deep seeded hatred of the Comanche. This deep hatred leads to a pivotal transition in the story. Having been searching for a number of years, Ethan's intentions change. He knows that Debbie would now be of an age that she would have become a sexual partner to one of the Indian men, or in Ethan's words, she has become "the leavin's of a Comanche buck." His hatred of the Comanche leads to a change in his intention from trying to rescue her to trying to kill her. Marty's mission then becomes to protect Debbie from Ethan as much as it is to rescue her from the Comanche. Ethan's racism is no different to the basic racism which underpinned the vast majority of earlier Westerns, but in this case it is highlighted in such a way that it becomes a character flaw. Ethan becomes a tainted hero. Whereas a traditional Western would have had the good Ethan chasing the bad Indians, in the case of The Searchers we are encouraged to question our hero. This was a real eye opening performance from John Wayne, who up until this point, while being one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, was not taken overly seriously. Here Ford and Wayne played with the expectations that audiences had developed about the roles he played. He would do so again with great success in True Grit, which would win him his only Academy Award.
John Ford is an absolute institution of the American cinema, having directed over 140 feature films. Today, The Searchers is probably his most highly regarded film, but that was not always the case. Films like My Darling Clementine, How Green was my Valley and especially The Grapes of Wrath were seen as the high points in Ford's illustrious career, but the profile of The Searchers rose considerably in the 1970s. It actually broke into Sight and Sound's highly regarded, once every ten years, top ten films of all time list in 1982 at equal tenth and then moved up to fifth in 1992. More than just being highly regarded, The Searchers has probably become the most influential American film. An article in New York magazine in 1979 claimed "you could construct half the syllabus for a course on contemporary American cinema just from films that, consciously or not, have been influenced by The Searchers." In large part this revision of The Searchers is due to the regard that it was held in by the filmmakers of the New Hollywood. As Byron's article suggested, The Searchers really became the cult film of the New Hollywood with references and citations appearing in many prominent New Hollywood films. Some are only subtle nods to the film, others borrowed key plot structures. To note a few:
- In George Lucas's Star Wars, Luke Skywalker returns to his Uncle Owen's farm to find that it has been torched in a scene which is very similar to Ethan's return to his brother's farm.
- Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is driven to violence by his mission to rescue a girl who has become a sexual possession of those he sees as subhuman.
- In Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Michael searches for his friend Nick, only to find that he does not wish to be rescued.
- In Steven Spielberg's Jaws, after discovering the body of Chrissie, Brody's assistant sits on the beach and digs in the sand with his knife, mimicking the actions of Ethan after he discovers Lucy's body.
- John Milius, who claims to have seen the film over 60 times, openly admitted "I steal from Ford and I don't care!... There has been a reference to The Searchers in all the movies I've directed." He even went so far as to name his son Ethan.
The Searchers is visually spectacular. No one shoots the American west and the iconic Monument Valley the way John Ford does. But what makes it such a brilliant film is the storyline. It really hooks you in, with the exception of the subplot about Marty and his hopeless relationship with Laurie Jorgensen (Miles), which is the reason the plot has been adapted and reused so much since then. Even if westerns are not your thing, this one is worth seeing. If you're a film buff you have to see at least one John Ford/John Wayne western, plus you'll start to make connections with the many, many films which have borrowed from it.
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