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John Ford and John Wayne, the classic director-star duo behind some of the finest Westerns ever made, were both disappointed by the response to arguably the greatest of them all, The Searchers. Released in 1956 – and now marking its 70th anniversary with its first ever UK release on 4K disc – The Searchers got fair reviews and drew a respectable box office. But it failed to get a single Oscar nomination, a significant snub for Ford, by then a four-time winner of Best Director, making him (still) the most decorated director in the history of the Academy.
The Searchers tells the story of Ethan Edwards (Wayne), an ex-Confederate soldier from Texas who embarks on a five-year mission to find his abducted niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), snatched as a child by the Comanche chief Scar (Henry Brandon). The film was marketed and viewed by snootier critics as disposable genre fodder.
But The Searchers, which Ford dubbed a “psychological epic”, is far from a run-of-the-mill John Wayne western. It’s an odyssey across a much darker frontier. Co-star Harry Carey Jr saw it in John Wayne during rehearsals, writing in his memoir that Wayne had “the meanest, coldest eyes I had ever seen... He didn’t kid around on The Searchers like he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes.”
Ethan Edwards isn’t a typical John Wayne hero of the Old West – not a kindly cowboy nor a dignified cavalryman. He’s a vicious, Native American-hating racist – the cold-blooded heart of a story about forbidden desire, rape, revenge and murderous prejudice. Indeed, when he discovers that little Debbie, now grown-up, has married her Comanche captor, Ethan is so disgusted by her having been sexually violated by an Native – her racial purity sullied – that he vows not to rescue his niece but to kill her.
But The Searchers is the true masterpiece of the Ford-Wayne partnership and was later acknowledged as a major influence on the rising stars of New Hollywood – the likes of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, and George Lucas – for its stunning vistas of Monument Valley, the iconic setting of many Ford-directed Westerns and its rich metaphor and psychosexual complexity. It’s also a film that becomes ever-more loaded as the years roll on, playing into and against the reputations of Ford and Wayne. Ford’s depictions of Native Americans have often been controversial while Wayne is remembered as an ardent Right-winger whose comments on race still get a reaction to this day.
The Searchers is based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May, which was itself based on real-life stories of Native American abductions – most notably the abduction of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker in 1836. She spent 24 years with the Comanche and had three children with a chief before being rescued by Texas Rangers. She was effectively captured again – this time by white people. Forcibly separated from her children and tribe, she struggled to re-assimilate into white civilisation and lived a pained, miserable existence.
The rights to Le May’s novel were purchased by Cornelius “Sonny” Vanderbilt Whitney, a socialite mining heir and occasional film financier. Ford, meanwhile, was on the cinematic rebound after the Oscar-nominated Mister Roberts (1955), which Ford saw as a creative failure. The director – known for his tempestuous nature, bullish treatment of actors and rampant alcoholism – had punched out star Henry Fonda and descended into heavy drinking, from which he usually abstained during filming.
Ford was back on familiar territory with The Searchers, returning to Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, recognisable for its towering sandstone buttes – the defining expanse of Hollywood westerns. Ford shot 10 films there beginning with Stagecoach (1939), the film that turned Wayne from a B-feature player to an A-feature attraction and cast Native Americans as a savage threat to white society – a much-repeated portrayal.
Whitney wanted The Searchers to be the first of several movies on American history, the “American Series”. But, as recalled in Glenn Frankel’s book on the making of The Searchers, Ford ignored Whitney’s suggestions to make the film patriotic. The director was more interested in what the historian Arthur Eckstein called a “darkening” of Wayne’s character. Writing in Cinema Journal, Eckstein studied the changes from novel to script (by Ford regular Frank S Nugent) to screen, noting than some of Ethan’s most abhorrent actions, such as scalping his Comanche nemesis – the mark of a Western villain, not a Western hero – were impromptu additions by Ford during the shoot. For Eckstein, it suggests that rather than being complicit in Ethan’s racism, Ford was portraying Ethan as “a psychologically damaged, tragic figure”.
The film also makes Ethan a Mexican war mercenary and outlaw who absconded from the surrender of the South. “Don’t believe in surrenders,” he says.
It begins with him returning to his brother Aaron’s Texas ranch after an eight-year absence. With his bags of freshly-minted gold coins – presumably robbed from some gunned-down bank teller – Ethan spells imminent doom for the Little Prairie-like harmony of Aaron (Walter Coy), Aaron’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) and their children.
The script is careful not to say it aloud but Ethan – a towering force of frontier machismo – loves Martha, who almost certainly loves him back. He also takes against Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), a young man whom his brother has taken in. “Fella could mistake you for a half-breed,” gripes Ethan, spying Martin’s very-slightly-darker complexion. Martin is in fact an eighth Cherokee, a point of endless irritation for Ethan.
An intense, skin-prickling sequence comes after crafty Natives draw Ethan away from the ranch. It’s a diversionary tactic, and the defenceless family realise the Comanche are about to attack under red dusk skies, the tension erupting with a soul-curdling scream from eldest daughter Lucy (Pippa Scott). Ethan returns to find Martha raped and murdered, the home burned down and his two nieces, Lucy and Debbie, taken. His brother and nephew are also dead, though he doesn’t seem bothered about them. (George Lucas would later borrow this scene in Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker returns to his desert homestead to find his aunt and uncle incinerated – a wholesale homage to The Searchers.) Ethan and Martin then set out to search for Lucy and Debbie, though Ethan later finds Lucy dead. He vows to track down Debbie and villainous Scar “just as sure as the turning of the Earth” – a nugget of grizzled poetry.
Film scholars argue that Ethan’s motive is psychosexual, that Comanche chief Scar carried out Ethan’s darkest desire – to kill Ethan’s brother and possess his wife – and that Ethan and Scar are alter-egos, opposing forces from the same breed of savagery. When they finally come face-to-face, we learn that Scar is driven by vengeance – white men killed two of his sons. “For each son I take many scalps,” he says.
Production notes from Ford and his son Patrick, who served as associate producer, reveal they wanted to portray Native people with “as much barbarism as possible” while the white characters are “only a shade less barbaric than the savages”. In one scene, Ethan and Martin discover the remains of an Native camp – its inhabitants massacred by Custer’s passing Seventh Cavalry – a scene that mirrors the slaughter of Ethan’s brother’s family.
John Wayne – “Duke” to his friends and fans – took the role more seriously than any role before. As his son Patrick told Glenn Frankel about The Searchers: “My father would say that everything he had done on film to this time was building to this role.”
Ethan has the sloping swagger and trademark Wayne drawl. But he is a man who will gladly shoot Native Americans in the back as they collect the bodies of their dead. Later, he shoots buffalo – an in-vain effort to starve out the Comanche – and sneers at white women who have been sent doolally by years held captive. “They ain’t white, not anymore,” he says.
His most appalling act comes when he shoots the eyes out of an already dead Comanche, preventing him from entering the spirit land. “He has to wander forever between winds,” says Ethan. Not content with physical death, Ethan wants to destroy his soul too. Wayne was apparently unbothered by the character’s more problematic aspects. “I loved him,” said the actor, who named his youngest son John Ethan.
It’s Wayne’s greatest performance. See the scene in which he describes finding Lucy’s body then burying her in the dirt with his bare hands. The trademark cadence of his voice becomes broken grief. When Lucy’s soon-to-be-dead fiancé asks – in not so many words – whether she was raped, Ethan snaps, “What do you want me to do, draw you a picture?!”
Watched 70 years on, some of The Searchers is painfully old-fashioned. But it’s certainly no outdated, couldn’t-say-that-now relic. Its racial themes continue to work retroactively, given extra grit by the increasingly under-fire legacy of Wayne, a bastion of American conservatism, a fierce anti-communist, and – according to 1971 Playboy interview – a supporter of white supremacy. “I believe in white supremacy until the black [people] are educated to a point of responsibility,” he told Playboy, adding that white people were right to take Native American land in the name of survival. Native Americans, he said, “were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves”.
As Hollywood legend goes, Wayne had to be restrained from tackling Sacheen Littlefeather when she appeared at the 1973 Oscars to decline Marlon Brando’s award – a protest against treatment of Native people by Hollywood. The story was later debunked as apocryphal, but Duke’s Right-wing legacy is so potent that the story lingers at the point where the real man meets the mythic enforcer of the Old West.
But just as The Searchers is at odds with Wayne’s usual Western hero, it’s also at odds with Wayne’s true-life persona – it bristles against the image of him as a reactionary conservative. The tension of the film is whether Ethan, after they eventually catch up with the Comanche, will in fact kill his niece. He has a change of heart, carrying Debbie to the safety of the family home of Martin’s fiancée Laurie (Vera Miles). He’s still not the hero, though: in one of cinema’s great final shots, Ethan is shut out of the home while Debbie and the part-Cherokee Martin and his white bride start over. The film ultimately condemns his own breed of savagery. He stands alone – there’s no place for him in what’s about to become civilisation.
The 4K Blu-ray of The Searchers is released on July 20
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