McBride is a solid fan of this Ford film about an embittered man’s hunt for his niece who’s been kidnapped by Comanches in 1868. He unhesitatingly calls the movie “a masterpiece,” and to bolster his case, he invokes the testimony of critics like Andrew Sarris and filmmakers like John Milius and Martin Scorsese.
On the other side of the argument stand dissidents like Scott Eyman, another Ford biographer, and the critic, filmmaker and Ford buff Lindsey Anderson, perhaps the most eloquent naysayer, who called the movie “an impressive work, the work of a great director; but it is not among John Ford’s masterpieces.” I vote with Anderson.
There is no doubt that “The Searchers,” with John Wayne at its center and Monument Valley as its setting, is, as McBride says, “one of Ford’s most spectacularly beautiful pictures.” The work of a genius who had been making movies since the second decade of the 20th century, it is crafted with the sort of compression and attention to detail that repay repeated viewing.
In the first few minutes of the movie, Wayne’s character, Confederate Army veteran Ethan Edwards, appears at his brother’s farm in Texas. Immediately there are tensions. Some are spoken (Ethan and his brother don’t get along; Ethan reveals his racism when he scorns his nephew Martin because he is part Indian). Some we are shown, and the showing is quick and subtle. A group of Texas Rangers, led by Ward Bond’s Captain Clayton, shows up to recruit help in chasing a band of Comanches rustling cattle. In one scene, while Bond stands in the dining room drinking coffee, he looks into the bedroom and observes Ethan’s sister-in-law Martha lovingly stroking his Confederate Army coat. Moments later Bond looks away when Ethan kisses Martha goodbye-she raises her face to his in anticipation of the kiss, which he pointedly places on her forehead. McBride quotes Sarris’s reaction to this scene: “The delicacy of emotion expressed here in three quick shots, perfectly cut, framed and distanced, would completely escape the dulled perception of our more literary-minded film critics even if they deigned to consider a despised genre like the Western.” Sarris wrote that in 1968, back when Hollywood still made Westerns, and back when mainstream American movies still had subtleties worth talking about.
The Rangers, accompanied by Ethan and Martin, ride off in fruitless search of the Comanches. The Indians, meanwhile, return to the farm and slaughter all of Ethan’s kin except his two nieces, whom they kidnap. Before long, one of these girls turns up raped and murdered, and Ethan and Martin set out in pursuit of the surviving Debbie. The chase takes years, time enough for Debbie to grow up, and time for Ethan’s thoughts of rescue and revenge to curdle into a racist desire not to rescue his niece but to kill her because she’s been despoiled and tainted by her captors.
The movie was a hit when it came out in 1956, but no one, certainly not the critics, seemed to know what to make of John Wayne as a murderous, bigoted neurotic. They were so nonplussed that they simply avoided all mention of this fascinating performance. It’s taken the intervening decades-and their changing mores-for the movie to assume its current status as one of cinema’s hallmarks and as Ford’s “masterpiece.” Today, of course, we’ve seen enough antiheroes in the films of Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino that Ethan Edwards looks completely familiar. Modern directors and modern audiences embrace this movie because, unlike almost every other Ford film, it has a modern hero. What they refuse to acknowledge is how flawed the rest of the movie is.
We are used to lots of hambone comedy in Ford’s movies, and we are willing to excuse some broad, often downright bad acting because the stories cohere. Ford could weld humor and pathos, subtleties and broad strokes into a seamless whole. His best movies always make sense emotionally. That’s what’s wrong with “The Searchers.” So much of it, as Lindsey Anderson points out, seems not inevitable but willed.
Take the last shot, one of the most famous closings in movie history. Ethan has rescued Debbie and brings her home. Staring through an open door into the desert, we see everyone come into the house, while Ethan alone remains outside. Framed by the door, which accentuates his aloneness, he turns and walks off, the door closes, and the movie is over. However, as Anderson points out, this makes no sense. “It is a memorable end, yet not a poetically satisfactory one: the metaphor is forced. The door swings to, and rounds the story off with perfect symmetry [the film begins with a door opening, through which we see Ethan approaching across the desert]. But of course no one in the drama closes it-why should anyone want to exclude Ethan?-it has to be the hand of an unseen assistant, standing in for the author, that motivates the symbol. The idea is seductive, but it lacks that sense of the organic, the ’natural,’ which characterizes Ford at his best.”
Ford at his best, as McBride ruefully notes in the introduction to “Searching for John Ford,” is rarely seen, much less celebrated these days. He is out of date, out of fashion and largely out of mind. Film buffs routinely roll their eyes when they learn that Orson Welles lost the best-picture Oscar for “Citizen Kane” to Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley,” but, without taking a thing away from “Kane,” I wonder if this is because they’ve never seen “How Green Was My Valley.” If they had, they might at least admit that it was a contest in many ways too close to call. But Ford’s movie celebrates family, community, duty and honor and does so with cinematic craft that never calls attention to itself-old-fashioned virtues rarely respected today. The irony here is that Ford’s storytelling skills-his way with a camera, his skill with actors-is so strong that we are beguiled into thinking that we’re watching a conventionally uplifting movie, even though the Welsh coal-mining family at the center of this story is destroyed over the course of the picture, honor and duty are defeated, and all we are left with at the end is our allegiance to these ideals. In this respect, “How Green Was My Valley” ranks among Ford’s best films, because it so effortlessly embodies the paradoxes of a divided heart.
In “Fort Apache,” Ford both condemns and extols a Custer-like commander who leads his men into annihilation at the hands of Cochise. In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” he looks at the life of a man who helped civilize a town and a region, although that man’s entire career was built on a lie. In “My Darling Clementine,” Wyatt Earp becomes sheriff of Tombstone solely in order to avenge his brother’s murder, and yet we root for him at every step. It was Ford’s genius to send us out of the theater artistically satisfied but troubled in almost every other way.
Ford did not make realistic pictures. The notion, for example, that anyone is raising cattle in the middle of Monument Valley, where “The Searchers” is set, is but the first of several incongruities in the movie that we are expected to swallow without question. But his protagonists are always recognizably human, and memorably so. The title character in “Judge Priest,” Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Capt. Nathan Brittles in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and everyone in “Stagecoach”-these are people plucked from the streets of life, neither all good nor bad. It is the circumstances in which they find themselves that are often extraordinary, be it the Dust Bowl migration or the Indian wars. It is how they respond to these conditions that makes these people extraordinary. And that is what makes “The Searchers” such an anomaly among Ford’s films. Ethan Edwards is extraordinary, and he throws everything else off balance, including Ford’s artistry. All the usual tropes in a Ford movie-from the clownish humor to the broad-stroke acting of the secondary players-here seem out of key. Unlike the best Ford movies, where everything is part of a whole, “The Searchers” is never more than many brilliant but disparate pieces struggling to cohere.
I suppose it doesn’t matter if Ford’s admirers want to overpraise this movie. In the end, something moves you or it doesn’t, and plainly “The Searchers” does it for some people. I don’t get it, and nothing they say has made me change my mind. I guess if I weren’t so passionate about the rest of what this irascible, cranky director turned out, I wouldn’t care at all. But I do care, because I want to know what it is about Ford’s movies that moves people, because that might get me a little closer to knowing what it is that moves me so much, that makes me watch them repeatedly, that makes me pick up every new biography and pore over the same anecdotes. (As far as this goes, McBride’s book is excellent, full of new stories and testimony, since it seems he’s talked to nearly everyone who worked on a Ford picture going back at least as far as “Stagecoach” in 1939. He can say what he likes about “The Searchers,” because all is forgiven. This book is a Ford junkie’s dream.) All I’ve come up with to explain my passion for Ford is that while his films may seem conventional, they aren’t like anyone else’s movies I’ve ever seen.
In the first place, they look better. Even people who don’t like Ford’s movies admit he had a great eye. Ford knew how to work with actors, too. Actors never look better than they do in Ford pictures, and they came back again and again to work with him, even as they told astonishing stories of his hectoring and cruelty on the set. But mostly, I think he simply knew better than almost anyone how to tell a story with the camera. Maybe it was because he began in the silent era and had to work pretty much without dialogue. Maybe it was something he was born knowing. But knowing where to put the camera, and knowing how to move actors around in the frame-Ford rarely used a tracking shot; it’s the people who supply the movement in his movies-and knowing how to sublimate all of this in the service of whatever story he sought to tell, he got the job done. Will we ever see that combination of talent in another director? That’ll be the day.
