The Searchers (1956)

Texas 1868. After a long, unexplained absence, Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards arrives at the home of his estranged brother, Aaron, and his wife, Martha, for whom he harbors a secret love. Soon after Ethan's return, a posse of lawmen headed by Captain Reverend Samuel Clayton invite Ethan and his adopted nephew, Martin Pawley, to join them in a hunt for some cattle that were run off by marauding Indians. Leaving Aaron and his family at the homestead, Ethan and the posse soon realize the missing cattle were only a ruse to lure them away from their homes. Ethan races back to his brother's home, only to discover it in flames with everyone butchered by Indians, except for Aaron's youngest daughter Debbie and her teenage sister Lucy who are missing. What follows is a long and torturous search for Ethan's kidnapped kin and the bloodthirsty Indian chief Scar who initiated the massacre. Film critic and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of The Searchers: "How can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" This sentiment was also voiced by film students in the late sixties and seventies who began to revise their opinions of John Wayne after seeing him in John Ford's most mythic film, one that was largely misunderstood when it was first released in 1956 and features what is possibly Wayne's finest performance. In a 1979 New Yorker magazine article, Stuart Byron called The Searchers the "Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood." This amply encapsulates just one reason why the film is essential; it had a tremendous influence on filmmakers during the 1970s, arguably one of the most creative periods in Hollywood history. Directors and screenwriters as varied in background and style as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Goddard, and George Lucas have all been influenced and paid some form of homage to The Searchers in their work. Scorsese, perhaps the greatest filmmaker of his generation, exclaimed, "The dialogue is like poetry! And the changes of expression are so subtle, so magnificent! I see it once or twice a year." Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) obviously shares some narrative similarities with the Ford film as does Paul Schrader's Hardcore (1979). Spielberg, one of the most profitable film producer/directors in movie history, told Stuart Byron he had watched The Searchers a dozen times, including twice while on location for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And it was in the late fifties when seventh grader Spielberg shot a two-reel Western in a friend's backyard imitating The Searchers, using a backdrop of Ford's beloved Monument Valley painted on a bedsheet. You can even see references to Ford's masterpiece in the work of Italian director Sergio Leone who stages a massacre scene in his epic, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), that is remarkably similar to the one that destroys Ethan's kin in The Searchers. The Searchers represents the apex of the Western genre and stands as John Ford's most emotionally complex and sophisticated film (It was also his 115th feature film!). But it is not simply a summation of the Western themes that Ford had previously explored in his films. The Searchers is one of the first Westerns to deal in a serious and unpretentious way with racism and sexuality. As Joseph McBride wrote in his monumental Ford biography, Searching For John Ford, the director's decision to tackle such a complicated and ambiguous film dealing with race and sex during the 1950s "was a shrewd career move, showing a willingness to make a more 'modern'seeming Western for an audience that wanted greater psychological realism from the genre..." But more than just making a social statement like other Westerns of the period were apt to do, Ford instills in The Searchers a visual poetry and a sense of melancholy that is rare in American films and rarer still to Westerns. For an essay in The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, film scholar Ed Lowry wrote: "Never

before in a Ford western has the wilderness seemed so brutal or settlements so tenuous and threatened. There are no towns only outposts and isolated homesteads, remote and exposed between the awesome buttes of Ford's mythic Monument Valley. And while the Comanches are depicted as utterly ruthless, Ford ascribes motivations for their actions, and lends them a dignity befitting a proud civilization. Never do we see the Indians commit atrocities more appalling than those perpetrated by the white man. Not only does [Ethan] Edwards perform the only scalping shown in the film, but Ford presents the bloody aftermath of a massacre of Indian women and children carried out by the same clean-cut cavalrymen he depicted so lovingly in films like Fort Apache." For most viewers, however, it is John Wayne's performance in The Searchers that is a revelation. "I've always thought [Wayne is] underrated as an actor," James Stewart once said. "I think The Searchers is one of the most marvelous performances of all time."

Notes From The Archives

Alan Le May's best-selling novel, on which the film was based, was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post under the title The Avenging Texans from 6 November to December 3, 1954. The Hollywood Reporter review gives the film's running time as 110 min. According to a April 1, 1955 Hollywood Reporter news item, some scenes were shot on location in Canada and Colorado. Hollywood Reporter production charts noted that the majority of location shooting was done in Monument Valley, UT, while studio sequences were shot at RKO-Path. Several modern sources add Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles' Griffith Park as a shooting site. The Searchers was the first film produced by C. V. Whitney Pictures. Whitney, a well-known sportsman and millionaire, had previously been a partner with David O. Selznick in Pioneer Pictures and other ventures, including the production of Gone With the Wind (1939) and the formation of the Technicolor company. Whitney also had a long association with producer Merian C. Cooper, one of director John Ford's partners in Argosy Pictures. Ford's son Patrick acted as the associate producer and his

son-in-law, Ken Curtis, played "Charlie McCorry"; John Wayne's son Pat played "Lt. Greenhill"; and Lana Wood, who played "Debbie" as a young girl, was actress Natalie Wood's sister. Olive Carey and Harry Carey, Jr. were the widow and son of the late western actor Harry Carey, who was a longtime friend of and major influence on both Ford and Wayne. Many modern film critics have pointed out that in the final shots of The Searchers, when Wayne is seen in the doorway, he paid tribute to Carey by grasping his right elbow with his left hand, a gesture that Carey often made in his pictures. Although their appearance in the film has not been confirmed, Hollywood Reporter news items add the following actors to the cast: Mae Marsh, Gertrude Astor, Peter Ortiz and Maj. Philip Kieffer. In his autobiography, Iron Eyes Cody states that he also was in the film, but he was not identifiable in the print viewed. The Mexican man who takes the searchers to meet Chief Scar is called Emilio Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa. The name of this character played by Antonio Moreno is a combination of the names of Mexican actor and director Emilio Fernandez and his cinematographer 'Gabriel Figueroa' . This is one of the first movies to market itself with a making-of documentary aired on TV. Gig Young hosted the program, which introduced new hearthrob Jeffrey Hunter. In the climactic scene, John Wayne and Natalie Wood run up the side of a hill in Monument Valley, Utah... and come down the other side of the hill in Bronson Park, Los Angeles (1,200 miles away!). Western star Harry Carey died in 1947. Director Ford cast Carey's wife (Olive) as Mrs. Jorgensen (the mother) and also Carey's son (Harry Carey Jr.) as one of the sons (Brad) as a tribute to Carey. In the closing scene with John Wayne framed in the doorway, Wayne holds his right elbow with his left hand in a pose that Harry Carey fans would recognize as one that Carey often used. Wayne later stated he did it as a tribute to Harry Carey. Off-camera, Olive Carey watched. Lana Wood played young Debbie Edwards and

Natalie Wood, who was Lana's older sister of 8 years, played teenaged Debbie Edwards. The film received mostly positive reviews, although some reviewers commented negatively on the complexity of the "Ethan Edwards" character and the lack of explanation of his actions. According to an early plot synopsis contained in the film's file in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library, Ethan's rescue of "Debbie" at the film's end was to be explained by his statement that she resembled her late mother, with whom Ethan was in love. Although many modern critics have noted an implied romantic relationship between Ethan and "Martha," it is only vaguely hinted at in the film. The Searchers was a financial success, but it did not receive any Academy Award nominations. However, in 1971 Peter Bogdanovich produced and directed a documentary on Ford, Directed by John Ford, that utilized the opening and closing of The Searchers, and in 1972, a Sight and Sound poll of international film critics included it on a list of the twenty best films of all time, and a number of modern directors have cited the picture as an influence on their work. In 1991, Warner Bros. released a thirty-fifth anniversary video edition of the film, which included documentary footage of the making of The Searchers. The footage was broadcast on several segments of the 1956 Warner Brothers Presents television program. In 1998, The Searchers was rated number 96 in the AFI's list of the 100 greatest movies of the century. ~

Credits
The Searchers - 1956 - Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. Producer: Director: Writer: Cast: John Wayne Jeffrey Hunter Vera Miles Ward Bond Natalie Wood John Qualen Olive Carey Henry Brandon Ken Curtis Harry Carey Jr. Antonio Moreno Hank Worden Beulah Archuletta Walter Coy Dorothy Jordan Cinematography: Visual Effects: Editing: Music: Art Direction: Sound: ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Ethan Edwards Martin Pawley Laurie Jorgensen Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnston Clayton Debbie Edwards (older) Lars Jorgensen Mrs. Jorgensen Chief Cicatrice (Scar) Charlie McCorry Brad Jorgensen Emilio Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa Mose Harper Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky (Look) Aaron Edwards Martha Edwards Merian C. Cooper John Ford Frank S. Nugent

Winton C. Hoch, Alfred Gilks George Brown Jack Murray Max Steiner, Murray Cutter, Stan Jones Frank Hotaling, James Basevi Hugh McDowell, Howard Wilson