The Searchers (1956)

Directed by John Ford

According to Orson Welles, who was himself a phenomenal director and quite an authority about the art, the three greatest American directors were, “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” At our house, we agree with that assessment. Even so, we don’t agree with what many people say, that our Film of the Week is his most magnificent achievement. That honor I give to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also I think the greatest western ever made, or to that film at once intensely lyric, noble, tragic, and yet beautifully triumphant, How Green Was My Valley. But I understand why The Searchers has its partisans.

Ford was no optimist or sentimentalist when it came to human nature. He was, if you’ll forgive me an attempt to describe a sort of person hard to imagine, a devout Catholic but not reliably pious, a deeply religious sinner who disliked displays of religiosity, but not public worship; which is why you’ll hear in his films quite a lot of muscular hymnody, like the Welsh hymns Calon Lan (“The Pure Heart”) and Bryn Calfaria (“Calvary Hill”), the revival song “Shall We Gather at the River” (in Three Godfathers), “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (in The Long Gray Line, when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reaches the cadets at West Point when they are all in chapel), and many more. He was also an ardent believer in the goodness of marriage as uniting those mysterious and formidable creatures called men and women. But he harbored no illusions about the unmixed blessings of civilized life. It is why Stagecoach ends with the young John Wayne and Claire Trevor going away from the spanking new western town and the sourpuss Temperance Society ladies who represent it, which prompts Thomas Mitchell to quip, to the sheriff of all people, “Well, they’re saved from the blessings of civilization.”

In The Searchers, we have the Christian religion — indeed, the film ends with the sound of a gospel song — but the main character, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), has been saved from a bottomless pit of hatred, by the slimmest of threads, and it isn’t clear that he will ever know human joy again. We have marriage — but it is warped by the kidnapping and rape of the young Debbie Edwards (played as an adult by Natalie Wood), who has lived for five years with the Comanche chief Scar as one of his wives. We have civilization, but the white people who bring that civilization often behave in a brutal and treacherous way. Scar himself hates the whites with a searing and relentless passion, because they are responsible for the death of his two sons. The Indians are noble — and savage, by which I mean not just that they are violent; they are half wild. Ethan hates them, and he too has reason; they murdered his brother and sister-in-law and their son, abducting the two daughters. There is a way to look at The Searchers is the first and greatest of the anti-westerns. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a few years away.

The film is called The Searchers because that is what the two central characters are about. They are searching for the two girls, Lucy and Debbie, whom the Comanches have taken away. The searching, with interruptions, takes five years. The two are Ethan, devoured with hatred of all Indians, who would rather see his niece dead then bedding with an Indian, and the girls’ adopted brother Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), who does not share all of Ethan’s hatred. He is afraid, in fact, that if Ethan finds the girl in that condition, he will kill her; and we don’t know, either. So as we watch the film we see that Ethan and Scar are not so far apart in character, and I don’t mean that as a compliment to either one, nor as pure condemnation. If we are hoping that Ethan will give up his hatred and re-enter human society, let’s say that the film gives us little confidence that that will happen, or that it can happen.

The Searchers boasts an enormous cast of Ford’s regulars, such reliably strong character actors as Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., and Ken Curtis; the always intelligent Vera Miles, engaged to Martin, who can go from warm womanhood to ice in the blink of an eye; Jeffrey Hunter in a role that saved his flagging career; Wayne’s son Patrick, and many more. The cinematography is superb, shot in color, in large part in Utah’s Monument Valley; and the music by Max Steiner is worth watching the film for, alone.

But the movie is inconceivable without John Wayne. The Duke was so good at what he did, people tended to take it for granted, as they did with Cary Grant in his very different vein. Pay close attention to John Wayne’s eyes, his face, his hands. A lot of guys did great impersonations of John Wayne — my favorite in that vein is the diminutive comedian John Byner — but as is usual with impersonators, they fix on what is liable to caricature, such as the odd walk (Wayne, for a large man, had rather small feet, which often hurt). But Wayne knew that his job was to reach down into the soul. And he did that job.

We’re sorry we weren’t able to find a free version of the film today. Here’s the original Warner Brothers trailer.

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