Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank S. Nugent, Alan Le May
Photography: Winton C. Hoch
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Jack Murray
Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Olive Carey, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Hank Worden, Walter Coy, Dorothy Jordan
I have to admit this has always been fairly an acquired taste for me, as John Ford has tended to be generally, and westerns too for that matter. And while I'm at it I better note also that I have little appreciation for John Wayne either—entirely overrated, I think, by a generation who saw some ideal of manliness in his grouchy, laconic contempt for everyone and everything that falls within the orbit of his characters. I'll grant that he's an icon, for what that's worth—because how could I not?—but for me he is an annoying, one-note figure whose various achievements, such as they are, are mostly a matter of someone else knowing how to erect a setting for him.
Certainly that's what we have here, a crafty piece of work that is always beautiful to look at, often astonishingly so, with a strange, darkly stirring, and disturbing story. Yet it's almost fatally out of balance with itself, frequently harsh or lumbering in its details and with broad swaths of cringe-inducing humor—routinely belittling ethnic minorities, abusing "squaws," offering up grotesquely cornpone accents, and when all else fails going to the yuk of last resort, butt hurts—which unfortunately swamp the many admirable subtleties of Ford's obvious gifts for economical and visual storytelling.
It is all too easy to see this as a product of its times, the mid-'50s. The Edwards family isolated in the rugged desert comes off more like a "Father Knows Best" unit, which gives their massacre, as horrific and adeptly staged and shot as it is, the emotional depth of a television show cancellation. The subtle dynamic of sexual tension between lost soul Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) and his brother's wife Martha (played by Dorothy Jordan) practically vanishes into the whoopin' and stompin', and what survives plays rather more like something from a Douglas Sirk film. And the catch phrase given to John Wayne to punctuate his everlasting superiority, "That'll be the day," subsequently became a #1 hit by Buddy Holly & the Crickets.
Even the praise heaped on it has mostly been the work of a generation that came of age in the '50s. In its time, The Searchers won only tepidly warm reviews as another proficient Ford/Wayne genre exercise shot in Monument Valley—a view that Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939), for one, typically excoriates in a DVD commentary, arguing that an appropriate level of appreciation for the movie didn't happen for 10 or 15 years or more after its release.
To be sure, I'm not saying the picture doesn't deserve accolades. The VistaVision is stunning, and the story told is sturdy and uniquely American: a pioneer family viciously massacred by Comanches, their 9-year-old daughter taken captive, and the subsequent mission of the two surviving males, Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley (played by Jeffrey Hunter), who had been lured from the homestead in the first place to enable the crime, to recover the girl and/or exact revenge. It's a consuming, obsessive, episodic mission that goes on for years—seven, by my calculations from the hints strewn through, though possibly more.
Ford makes Ethan Edwards more or less an overt racist. Ethan is carefully identified as a former Confederate soldier who hasn't necessarily given up the fight even though the action of this movie starts in 1868, and his eyes narrow and lip all but curls any time he realizes he is in the company of an ethnic minority, even someone "one-eighth" Cherokee. Ford has thus signaled a willingness to confront or at least to include and use ugly and powerful strains of American life. Compressing them into the action of the story works to make them even more powerful—one of the fears others have about Ethan's motives is that he intends to kill the girl because "she's been living with a buck."
But I'm not at all sure that Ford has anything like control over this material. My persistent sense is that it proved altogether too much for him to handle, that too often the film attempts to have its cake and eat it too, particularly when the humor (which about ruins it for me, I must say again) is itself rooted in racism. I suppose you could argue that Ford is about avoiding preachy messages (or, as Bogdanovich does, that much of it is simply of its time). But was it really necessary, for example, to make the hapless travails of an overweight Native American woman such a self-evidently obvious point of continual merriment?
Probably the best thing for me in this picture is the technical sense that one is in the hands of an experienced and gifted filmmaker. The restraint in resorting to close-ups, the ingenious setups that enable long takes among numerous interacting characters, and the many strategies for telling the story, such as the lengthy letter-reading sequence, get this story told admirably even as they enable Ford to vary the tones and textures and keep it constantly fresh.
There is no end of nice little touches too, such as Charlie MacCorry (played by Ken Curtis, one of the singers in the Sons of the Pioneers) picking up his guitar after the long letter-reading sequence and following to the doorway the distraught Laurie (played with wonderful freshness by Vera Miles), who is Pawley's love interest but in whom Charlie is interested too. While she gazes out in the foreground he stands behind her at the back of the frame, softly strumming and singing "Skip to My Lou"—a very effective moment.
Another telling detail I noticed for the first time in a recent viewing: when Debbie (played by Natalie Wood) comes from over a ridge and running down a hill to rendezvous with Marty and Ethan and try to warn them off, at the very moment she first appears, when she's just a tiny moving figure in the far background, the orchestra begins to warn us something is amiss, alerting us to her presence before we even know it consciously.
And, of course, there are the rightly celebrated opening and closing shots, from inside the dark homestead looking out on the bright world, a world that contains Ethan Edwards but by implication does not allow him entry into the warmth and community of home. Or perhaps Ethan denies himself the comfort; that fits his character as well. There's a lot to admire in this film—unfortunately, there's a lot to wince at as well. And a lot more that seems to me mostly incoherent and deeply flawed. It's still ranked high by critical consensus, apparently considered not just the greatest John Wayne movie, not just the greatest John Ford movie, but the greatest western. I can't help thinking it's an overestimation that will eventually correct.
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