The Searchers (53 page)

In
Cheyenne Autumn
, Ford reverses past roles, portraying the Indian leaders as reasonable, moral, and wise, and many of the whites as venal, brutal, and dishonest. Some of the scenes are stunning in their visual composition, but the narrative is flat and plodding and, at 156 minutes, the film is at least a half hour too long. It was a critical and commercial failure, although its reputation has improved over the years. The film's elegiac quality is only enhanced by the retrospective knowledge that it was Ford's final Western. His career was slowly deflating, his reputation for artistry buried under the perception that he was, indeed, what he had long claimed to be: a humble maker of Westerns at a time when the Western was in critical and popular decline. At the turn of the new millennium, noted the film scholar Gerald Peary, himself a rabid Ford fan, John Ford was largely forgotten by the public: “
Young people, including film students
, haven't seen Ford's movies, and seem uninterested in going back and catching up.”

To an extent Peary blamed Ford himself for resolutely refusing to defend himself as an artist. “You say someone's called me the greatest poet of the Western saga,” Ford told the author Walter Wagner in 1973 a few months before his death. “
I am not a poet
, and I don't know what a Western saga is. I would say that it is horseshit. I'm just a hardworking, run-of-the-mill director.”

While much of Ford's work has drifted into obscurity,
The Searchers
is a notable exception. But its resurrection was a slow process. As was often true of mainstream Hollywood directors, the first fans to recognize Ford's artistic greatness were French film critics who were developing the auteur theory that despite the fact that filmmaking is a collective enterprise—and that each studio during Hollywood's golden era has its own distinct filmmaking personality—the director is its heart and soul, the one contributor whose personal sensibility is discernible and critical to the artistic process. While this might not be true for many directors, it surely is the case with Ford. Like Hitchcock, Hawks, William Wyler, Preston Sturges, and a handful of others, Ford's values, visual sense, and passions are readily apparent in all his films, even the bad ones. The French critic Jean-Luc Godard, soon to launch his own filmmaking career with
Breathless
(1960), compared the ending of
The Searchers
to “Ulysses being reunited with Telemachus.” In the United States, the
Village Voice
critic Andrew Sarris, Eugene Archer of the
New York Times
, and Peter Bogdanovich, another critic with filmmaking aspirations, championed Ford and Hawks. I recall Sarris showing
The Searchers
in the inaugural year of his introductory film course on Thursday evenings in the basement of Butler Library at Columbia University in 1970. He presented it as the apogee of great Hollywood filmmaking.

Like Sarris, film professors at scattered campuses revived and celebrated
The Searchers
in their classes and film festivals, spreading word of its greatness to a new generation of film buffs.
A pivotal article
was “Prisoner of the Desert,” a 1971 essay by Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington in
Sight and Sound
magazine. It praised in ringing terms Ford's artistry and power: “
The Searchers
has that clear yet intangible quality which characterizes an artist's masterpiece—the sense that he has gone beyond his customary limits, submitted his deepest tenets to the test, and dared to exceed even what we might have expected of him.”

The essay explored the film's important themes, most especially Ethan's pathology and Ford's obsession with rape and miscegenation between whites and Indians. It traced the connection between Ethan and Scar as two warriors driven to madness and revenge by the murder of their families. Scar, it argued, “is not so much a character as a crazy mirror of Ethan's desires.” The two men, “blood brothers in their commitment to primitive justice, have sacrificed themselves to make civilization possible. This is the meaning of the door opening and closing on the wilderness. It is the story of America.” The article's conclusion eerily echoes the outsized original ambitions of C. V. Whitney, the man who bankrolled it.

The other cohort who loved and championed
The Searchers
was a younger generation of aspiring American filmmakers and screenwriters, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Curtis Hanson, and Paul Schrader, all of whom grew up watching the film and were captured by its beauty, violence, and powerful storytelling. Each of them has testified to its abiding influence over their own filmmaking.

Scorsese was thirteen when he journeyed uptown from Little Italy in Manhattan with two friends to the landmark Criterion Theatre in Times Square to see
The Searchers
. They entered in the middle of the picture and were mesmerized by its stunning visuals and emotional resonance. Scorsese recalled the clarity of the VistaVision high resolution. Over the years, as he watched the film on television, the subtext of
Ethan Edwards's inner turmoil and slow psychological disintegration became more and more apparent to him. Curtis Hanson recalled being frightened by the violence and the emotions when he first saw it at the Sherman Theatre, a second-run movie house in the San Fernando Valley. John Milius first saw it four times in a row at a theater in Westwood Village in Los Angeles. “
I wanted to be Scar
,” he recalled.

When he was about fifteen years old in the early 1960s, Spielberg met Ford at the director's office. Spielberg recalled being ushered into the empty office and stared at a series of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell paintings on the wall. Then Ford swept in, “dressed like a big game hunter” with his trademark floppy hat, eye patch, and half-chewed handkerchief. Spielberg recalled that Ford had smeared lipstick on his face.

“
So you wanna be a picture maker
,” Ford declared. “What do you know about? You see these paintings around the office? Tell me what you see in that first painting.”

Spielberg sputtered for a minute. “No, no, no, no,” Ford broke in. “Where's the horizon? Can't you find the horizon? Don't point where it is. Look at the whole picture.” When Spielberg pointed out that the horizon was at the very bottom, Ford replied, “Fine.”

“When you can come to the conclusion that putting the horizon at the top of the frame or the bottom of the frame is a lot better than putting it in the middle of the frame, then you may someday make a good picture maker. Now get out of here.”

By the late 1970s, when Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, and their fellow filmmakers were ascendant, they spoke fondly of the impact
The Searchers
had had on their work. Scorsese's first feature film,
Who's That Knocking at My Door
(1967), contains a six-minute sequence in which Harvey Keitel's character attempts to seduce Zina Bethune's while waiting for the Staten Island Ferry by telling her all about the film. There are unmistakable echoes of
The Searchers
in
Star Wars
(1977),
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), and
Hardcore
(1979).

“
He was a great artist
,” said John Milius of Ford. “He could speak to your heart and it meant something … He could do it in two or three strokes where it would take other good directors seven or eight and they wouldn't get it as well. He's a storyteller like Homer. When Homer got through with a story, you had something you could read forever.”

Spielberg still worships at Ford's altar.
As executive producer of
Cowboys & Aliens
(2011), a mash-up of the Western and sci-fi genres, he screened a new print of
The Searchers
for director Jon Favreau and the
screenplay writers to show them what a classic Western looks like. And
War Horse
(2011), Spielberg's World War One epic, echoes with Fordian themes and visual references. “
Ford's in my mind
when I make a lot of my pictures,” Spielberg told the author Mark Harris. “I grew up with John Ford movies and I know a lot about his work and have studied him. I think the thing that might resemble a John Ford movie more than anything else is that Ford celebrated rituals and traditions and he celebrated the land. In
War Horse
, the land is a character.”

Still, Scorsese's
Taxi Driver
(1976) probably comes the closest to reimagining
The Searchers
for the modern age. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the crazed New York cabbie who decides to stage his own one-man guerrilla raid on the pimps who have turned a young girl into a prostitute, is Ethan Edwards transplanted a century later from the Texas frontier to the urban jungle. Travis's obsessions, his twisted personal code, his use of gun violence as a tool of purification—all of these mirror Ethan. So does the refusal of the object of the search—in this case Jodie Foster's child hooker—to acquiesce in her own rescue. Crashing through the boundaries of time and space, Jodie Foster played Cynthia Ann Parker.

In declaring the influence of
The Searchers
to be the cinematic equivalent of
Huckleberry Finn
, the film critic Stuart Byron attributed the film's cult status to “
an unholy alliance of critics
, buffs, and filmmakers.” But
The Searchers
had not reached the same pinnacle of artistic acceptance as
Casablanca
,
Citizen Kane
, the films of Charlie Chaplin, or the Marx Brothers comedies, nor would it ever, Byron argued, because of John Wayne. The Duke's macho, right-wing politics prevented many cinephiles from embracing the film. It would take another generation to accept the artistry of his performance.

Still, the film gradually worked its way up the roster of great cinema. After failing to make the top 100 list in a 1962 poll of
Sight and Sound
, the magazine of the highly respected British Film Institute, ten years later it was ranked eighteenth best among American films. In 2008 it finished at the top of an American Film Institute poll as the greatest Western in film history. And in August 2012 the
Sight and Sound
poll ranked it the seventh-greatest film of all time.

Not every modern critic has embraced
The Searchers
. Richard Schickel blasted Ford as a drunk, tyrant, and bully.
The Searchers
, he wrote, was “
a spoiled masterpiece
,” marred by Ford's “tasteless ridicule” of Look, the acquired Indian bride of Martin, and “a stupefying subplot” of the thwarted romance of Martin and Laurie. The
New Yorker
film critic
Pauline Kael called it “
a peculiarly formal and stilted movie
… You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.”

The aesthetic debate has been rekindled by a new generation of cultural critics. The novelist Jonathan Lethem, in his essay “Defending
The Searchers
,” describes his lifelong love affair with the film, and his intense anger and humiliation when fellow students at Bennington College mocked it as stilted and old-fashioned. “
The pressure of the film
, its brazen ambiguity, was too much,” writes Lethem. “It was easier to view it as a racist antique, a naïve and turgid artifact dredged out of our parents' bankrupt fifties culture.”

The scene of Martin Pauley physically abusing Look, his Indian pseudo-bride, was “of such giddy misogyny, such willful racism, it seemed indefensible by design,” writes Lethem.

Lethem's essay succumbs to his own obsessive ambivalence about America itself: “
The Searchers
strives on, maddened, obsessed, through ruined landscapes incapable of containing it … everywhere shrugging off categories, refusing the petitions of embarrassment and taste, defying explanation or defense as only great art or great abomination ever could.”

Similarly, Lethem is obsessed by John Wayne. “
His persona gathers in one place
the allure of violence, the call away from the frontier, the tortured ambivalence toward women and the home, the dark pleasure of soured romanticism—all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means to be a man in America.”

Others are less impressed.
The Searchers
“is
preposterous in its plotting
, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention
boring
,” writes Stephen Metcalf, in a piece titled “The Worst Best Movie” in the online magazine
Slate
. He attributes the film's enduring critical reputation to “two influential and mutually reinforcing constituencies: critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of ‘film studies' as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline; and the first generation of filmmakers—Scorcese and Schrader, but also Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius and George Lucas—whose careers began in film school.

“In Ford's Ethan the avatars of the New Hollywood found a very romantic allegory for the director as monomaniacal obsessive on a quest that others along the way may only find perverse,” writes Metcalf. The
film's ambiguity and intense focus on race and gender make it a feast for deconstructionists, he adds, with an audible sneer.

The one auteur who has almost always been missing from the discussion is the man who invented
The Searchers
, Alan LeMay. He went on to write two more Western novels, one of which,
The Unforgiven
, picked up the racial themes of
The Searchers
and took them another step. This time it was a white pioneer family that adopted a Kiowa baby who survived the massacre of her village. The members of the Zachary family never tell the girl her true origins until her Kiowa brother and his warriors return to claim her and lay siege to the family's sod dwelling. The prejudiced white community refuses to intervene, leaving the Zacharys to fend off the Kiowa attack alone. In the ensuing battle, Rachel must choose between her adopted white family and her Kiowa heritage.
The Unforgiven
was made into a movie in 1960 directed by John Huston and starring Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn. If nothing else the film, which is awkward, stiff, and unconvincing, demonstrates that the kind of mastery of the Western that John Ford seemed to wield effortlessly is far from automatic; even a gifted filmmaker like Huston couldn't begin to get it right.