The Searchers radically reinvented every wild west trope, the critics said. Trouble is, no one told John Wayne or John Ford . The Searchers is a landmark Hollywood western from John Ford, probably the best of the bunch. It’s a Technicolor marvel in shades of psychological grey, a revisionist take on the myth of manifest destiny. It’s full of savagery and tragedy, blood and thunder.
I know this because I’ve read all about it and this made me feel I knew the film in advance. But either the critics were wrong or I had bamboozled myself. The Searchers was my all-time favorite western until the moment I saw it.Ford’s 1956 film casts foursquare John Wayne in the role of foursquare Ethan Edwards, a civil war veteran on the trail of murderous Comanche. Edwards is in pursuit of his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was abducted as a child and now lives as a squaw of Scar, the chief.
Except that it turns out that Edwards does not want to rescue Debbie, he wants to murder her, because what she has done so offends his sense of decency. “Living with a Comanche ain’t living,” he says. And just writing this paragraph, I find that I’m excited all over again.Edwards searches for Debbie for years and years; I searched for The Searchers for 12 months or so. The more I read about it, the more I wanted to find it. The plot sounded tremendous and everyone else seemed to love it.
The Searchers is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films. It Derived David Lean and Steven Spielberg (and latterly the final episode of Breaking Bad). Jean-Luc Godard hailed it as “a Homeric odyssey”, while the critic Greil Marcus liked Ethan to Captain Ahab, an American hero gone mad. In pursuing the monster, he became the monster himself.One Sunday afternoon I found a film called The Searchers and it bore a passing resemblance to the film I’d been chasing.
But it was as if The Searchers had died on the trail and then was boiled down and made into a soup. Here was John Wayne just being John Wayne, waddling through the action with none of the nuance or conflict that Ethan is meant to embody. He says he wants to save Debbie. Then he says he wants to kill Debbie. And then he says to Debbie, “Let’s go home.” But he might as well be reading his lines off a cue card. I don’t think he understands the man he is playing or the story he’s telling.
Worse, I’m not entirely convinced that the director does either. Ford, of course, was one of the great myth-makers of the wild west. He “printed the legend” and mapped out the frontier (on screen if not physically). As a young man, he played a KKK horseman in The Birth of a Nation and typically viewed US history as a war against barbarism, the taming of the wilderness. The white men were the good guys; the people of color the beasts.
