The Searchers (C. V. Whitney Pictures, Warner Bros., 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, December 30) Turner Classic Movies showed a tribute to the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Awards that included a screening of The Searchers, a 1956 Western directed by John Ford, written by Frank S. Nugent, and based on a novel by one Alan Le May (a writer otherwise unknown to me). The Searchers is a film I really wanted to watch because, though it got “meh” reviews at the time – Variety praised Ford’s direction but said it was “not sufficient, however, to overcome many of the weaknesses of the story” – in later years it’s been re-evaluated big-time. It’s been called both John Ford’s and John Wayne’s best film; it regularly makes the decennial Sight and Sound poll of the 10 best movies ever made; and it’s become a key work to the Ford cult. Well, guess what: the original reviewers were right, for a change, and the later critics were wrong! I have rarely been as disappointed by a movie I’d had high hopes for than I was by The Searchers (I think the last time I had this reaction was at the review screening of Brokeback Mountain in 2005). Basically, The Searchers is a revenge tale in which Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) comes back to his Texas home in 1868 after having served in the Civil War (on the Southern side, of course!) and then apparently spent three more years on the battlefields of Mexico fighting as a mercenary in the war with France (though it’s not all that clear that that’s what happened to him – it’s mentioned on the film’s Wikipedia page but not in the movie itself – let alone what side he fought on, and the only hint of his post-Civil War activity is a bag full of Union $20 gold pieces he carries and is evasive about just how and where he got them). He’s there to visit his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), Aaron’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan, whose husband Merian C. Cooper produced the film), and their daughters Debbie (Lana Wood) and Lucy (Pippa Scott). Only just as soon as he arrives and then briefly rides off on an errand, the Edwardses are attacked by a party of Comanche Indians led by “Scar” (Henry Brandon), also known as “Cicatriz” because that’s the Spanish word for “scar.” Aaron is killed, Martha survives and her daughters are kidnapped and enslaved by the Comanches. The rest of the movie is a tale of revenge in which Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a young man whose parents died and abandoned him in the desert until Aaron Edwards took him in and raised him as his son, set out after the Comanches who took Debbie and Lucy. (Ethan and Martin find a scrap of cloth from an apron Lucy was wearing when she was abducted, and deduce from this that she is dead.)

The film begins to go wrong from the very start; though the story is supposed to take place at various locations throughout Texas and the Southwest, Ford chose to film it at his favorite stamping ground, Monument Valley, Utah. The reason was to take advantage of its spectacular scenery, including the famous elevated mesa that figures so prominently in Ford’s films. Only the photography by Winton C. Hoch and Alfred Gilks is just too beautiful, too picture-postcardy (the film was shot in Technicolor, which may have been one of Ford’s biggest mistakes; this doom-ridden tale really needed red-filtered black-and-white to work on screen in 1956), and the skies too blue and cloudless. One aches for a sense of drama in the landscape to match the darkness of the story, and instead one gets ravishingly beautiful and totally wrong-headed desert vistas. Another big problem with The Searchers is the horrible comic-relief subplot dealing with Swedish immigrant Lars Jorgenson (John Qualen), his wife (Olive Carey, widow of Harry Carey, one of Ford’s favorites; their son Harry Carey, Jr. is also in this movie) and their daughter Laurie (Vera Miles), who’s engaged to Martin Pawley until Martin leaves her literally for years on end to follow Ethan on his single-minded revenge quest through the Southwest. The third problem with this film is John Wayne: in Howard Hawks’s Red River (also a film that pairs him with a younger, studlier actor, but a far better one than Jeffrey Hunter: Montgomery Clift) eight years earlier he’d shown unexpected depths in his acting. In fact, John Ford himself had complimented Hawks on the performance he got out of Waye and told him; “Who would have thought that the big guy had that much in him?” I suspect part of John Ford’s motive in making The Searchers was to showcase John Wayne’s acting skill in a film with his name on the director’s credit, but the part of Ethan Edwards is just too far beyond Wayne’s reach as an actor. I can think of other actors at the time who could have played it far better – Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, even Arthur Kennedy – who had played similar characters in revenge-themed Westerns (Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Blood on the Moon, 1948; Stewart in Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73, 1950; Kennedy in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, 1952).

There are also real political problems with this movie, not only in its romanticization of the Confederate cause (in one scene a part-time minister and part-time Texas Rangers captain attempts to draft Ethan into his company, and Ethan says the only oath he ever swore was to the Confederacy) but especially in the treatment of Native Americans. Though sometimes surprisingly progressive in other ways (notably his skepticism about capitalism), Ford was a thoroughgoing racist in his depiction of Native people. He tried to correct that in his next-to-last film, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) – also a film with a potentially great concept that got horribly botched in the execution – and in The Searchers Ford and Nugent insert a line for “Scar” that says he’s targeting and scalping white people as revenge for all the Native lives white settlers have taken. But that’s just a blip in the overall message that “Indians” are mindlessly evil (when I saw the films of The Lord of the Rings I compared Peter Jackson’s treatment of the Orcs to John Ford’s Indians), to the point where once they find Debbie – who’s now a grown woman and played by Natalie Wood (quite well, too) – Ethan is ready to shoot and kill her on the ground that having lived with (and been a sex slave to – they couldn’t come right out and say that under the Production Code but Ethan strongly hints it) the Comanches, she’s no longer a white woman and therefore she doesn’t deserve to live. If The Searchers has any real merit, it’s as a powerful drama of post-traumatic stress disorder; the term “PTSD” didn’t exist yet but it’s clear from the story that both Ethan Edwards and his niece Debbie have it and are among the “walking wounded” from its traumas. But that was an aspect of the story John Ford, Frank S. Nugent and the other people involved in the making of this film did not seem all that interested in, and the film has a disappointing and inconclusive ending in which Martin Pawley marries Laurie after all (I was hoping he’d marry Debbie, who even though they grew up together is not his biological kin, and help heal her from her PTSD) and Ethan walks off into the proverbial Western sunset, turning his back on the rest of humanity, or at least that part of the rest of humanity that actually has any reason to give a damn about him.