Jonathan Lethem wrote a funny essay, “Defending The Searchers,” (for his latest book, the essay compilation The Disappointment Artist), in which he confesses his history as an outspoken movie snob who organized a film festival in college in which he spotlighted that movie, despite having never seen it himself – only to find that not only did he not like it, everyone else found it politically incorrect and risibly bad, and thought he was nuts for having touted it.
Like Lethem at that age, I haven’t seen it either. Yet.
One of the great things about the movie is Ethan’s moral ambiguity. He’s not going to rescue Debbie–he’s going to kill her because she is presumably fucking an indian. And he takes YEARS out of his life to do this. It leaves the audience simultaneously rooting for him to complete his mission (after all, he’s John Wayne! He’s the hero!) and horrified at what will happen when he finally does complete his mission (He’s going to shoot Natalie Wood!).
Interesting thing abou the PBS Wayne/Ford documentary was critic Richard Schickel, stating why he doesn’t like The Quiet Man. (kinda ballsy to include a dissenting opinion in an homage to John Ford.)
The moral of the story: just because a movie is a Widely Acknowledged Classic doesn’t mean that *everybody * is gonna like it.
Add that the film is about settling the West. (Please put your political correctness aside; this is John Ford’s vision.) The John Wayne character is a throwback, the last of a generation of the first explorers, who were ruthless – had to be to survive. The Jeffry Hunter character is the next generation, the settlers, the farmers, the builders. Thus, Wayne is an outsider, who is sacrificing himself (or at least, his ideals and his way of life) for the future. (Hijack: Think of Frodo from LORD OF THE RINGS.)
Ford carried this theme with much more irony and a bitter edge in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE.
Did you run into him with your car? Did you meet him on the street and shook his hand? Did you discover the babe you were in bed with was his sweetie when he came in gunz a’blazing???
I liked it. It sort of looked at racism from both sides, Scar and Ethan, and yes, they are both the same man - remember when Wayne asks Scar where he learned to speak such good English (implying from his niece or other captives); and Scar asks where Ethan learned such good Comanche. Ethan at some level appreciated that the Indians and settlers were both human and had human feelings, but it took the search, seeing that the world was changing both for the Indians and settlers, his experience with Look (the Indian wife to Jeffrey Hunter) and his nephew’s stubborness to finally come to terms with it. Unthinking hatred led to Scar’s and his bands destruction, the exact same kind of hatred had Ethan and his nephew almost shooting each other or killing Debbie. Ethan finally realizes it and turns away from it. For the time, that was a powerful message.
I completely agree with you about both scenes. I’ve seen The Searchers several times, but I never like it as much as I hope I’m going to. I’m “Fonda” Fort Apache and Yellow Ribbon. No one asked me, but my two favorite straight-up Hollywood westerns are Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953).
Consider this: if you play Word Association and say “John Ford,” invariably the answer will be “westerns,” and yet none of his four Best Director Oscars were for westerns!
(1936) The Informer
(1940) The Grapes of Wrath
(1941) How Green Was My Valley
(1952) The Quiet Man
John Ford is America’s greatest director. And The Searchers is perhaps his greatest film.
It’s goals and accomplishments are so outsize, in comparison to most other movies, that it really can’t be judged by the same standards. The comparison to Kabuki is apt; few genres of American movies are as stylized as the John Ford Western. To John Ford, the story was far more important than the “truth.” He was, intentionally or not (most likely not) creating a mythology–and American mythology–that rivals the great mythologies of world literature.
The story of American western expansion is a story of irreconcilable contradictions: the “wild” man, the loner, laying down the trail by which civilization would follow him. The very civilization he was attempting to escape in the first place. The Western Hero is, essentially, necessarily, unwelcome in the civilization that could not exist without him. More than any other of Ford’s movies, The Searchers is about this irreconcilable contradiction. It’s also about the irreconcilable contradiction of the genocide on which the settling of the West was built, and the inevitable but somehow still impossible necessity of the two civilizations–white and Indian–coexisting.
The Searchers is evidence, to me, that Ford was the greatest artist of storytelling since Shakespeare. It’s absolutely Shakespearean in the scope of its tragedy and the size–and univerality–of its characters.
I had read about The Searchers before I saw it, and I liked it even more than I expected to. Others have done a good job singing its praises, but one more comment. If you remember, at the beginning of the movie Ethan has just returned from the war, where he fought for the Confederacy. He goes from one lost cause to another.
And while I love Butch Cassidy, it’s really a modern film set in the West. They throw in a bit of the West is over, but they could just as well be a buddy team version of Bonnie and Clyde.
Well, for one thing, the tepees, if not the whole Indian settlements, are obviously unfit for habitation and look thrown together. The one house out in the middle of nothing but desert with nothing but Monument Valley landforms as far as one can see. Picturesque but pointless. And where do all the other people who come there for the big dance all live?
I do admit the cabin looks solidly built, if that’s a concern about the “cardboard.” But so many of the other scenes (where it’s not another shot of Monument Valley) are obviously shot on sound stages. That’s the cardboard. The campfire scene, the “swamp” scene where they go stalking through water (!).
The gunfight with the shopowner who comes to steal money from them at the campfire. The scene where Ethan is scouting out the Indians in the valley below by climbing out on a rock. Then a bit later when they drop Jeffrey Hunter off the rock.
Any of the scenes with Pat Wayne.
I could name others, but that should give an idea of the “cardboard” I saw.
Granted. But did you notice how ridiculous both scenes were?
The scene opens with Wayne lying down on the rock, some distance back from the edge. At first we don’t see anything but him and the rock. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that he’s near the edge of a cliff. As it does, he stands up and creeps out to the edge to get a look at the Indians who must be at least half a mile away.
Why was he lying down to begin with and why did he stand up to go to the edge? It would make sense to do it in reverse if there really were any risk of his being seen.
The bit with lowering (actually just dropping) Hunter over the side of the cliff was just comical. We don’t see him actually touch ground, just a big poof of dust. They must have dropped him at least 20 feet after making a big deal of lowering him down some little distance.
The “fight” scene with Hunter and Festus was similarly ridiculous. Just a lot of dust. Reminded me of that Peanuts character Pigpen.
Thanks. I just don’t understand how a movie as flawed and stylized as this can be ranked among “the best and most influential Westerns.” Obviously there are plenty of people who look past all the amateurish effects and settings and still proclaim John Ford as a master moviemaker. People like Scorsese even.
They live miles apart from each other. The families are isolated and vulnerable, and that little cabin in the middle of nowhere illustrates that. Same with the teepees - they need to look bedraggled and ragtag.
I, for one, was also disappointed with The Searchers when I saw it. But I was tainted because I read LeMay’s wonderful novel first. Read the book, it is superior (and not just because of the “books are always better than movies” cliche.
These are all issues you have with Hollywood movies of that era, not with Ford or The Searchers. This was the heydey of the giant MGM musical; people expected their movies to be artificial. Jean Renoir said something like, as technology improves, someday, instead of making a movie set in a forest, you’ll be able to perfectly recreate a forest down to the last detail, and walk through it. This will not be art, he said; the more “perfect” it is, the less art it is: the art lies in what the artist does to change reality, to make it art.
You’re judging from a very modern perspective. Gritty realism didn’t come into the movies until the Italian Neorealists’ movies began to have influence. Before that, Hollywood=artifice, period, pretty much. You don’t complain that an opera’s sets are not realistic; neither did contemporary audiences see anything wrong with Ford’s settings and soundstaginess.
The first director to really bring the neorealists into the western was Peckinpah, I think: look at Ride the High Country, then look at The Wild Bunch. I think it’s pretty likely Peckinpah watched a passle of Rossellini between those two movies.
