American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (35 page)

After he delivers Debbie back to the Jorgensens, we glimpse Ethan one last time, through the same open door from the film’s first shot, as he puts his left arm over his stomach and grabs his right elbow, before turning away and walking in that familiar John Wayne way. As the door closes,
The Searchers
ends as it began, in blackness, with Ethan still the outsider, unwilling or unable to rejoin society. With that arm-grabbing gesture (a move he suggested to Ford), Wayne became the Harry Carey of his generation.

Ethan Edwards is the most complex character Wayne had ever played, and it is without question the most internal performance of his career. His Ethan is at once manly and frightening, manly
because
he is frightening, one of the many uneasy truths of this performance and Ford’s film, an ultimately uplifting story filled with murder, hatred, racism, vengeance, rape, and rage. While Wayne claimed never to be much of an actor, and certainly not a Method-style one, his performance has all the earmarks of an actor “living” his character. Here is Harry Carey Jr. recalling his reaction to watching Wayne play Ethan during filming: “The first scene I was in with Duke was the one where I discover that my family’s prize bull has been slaughtered. When I looked up at him in rehearsal, it was into the meanest, coldest eyes I had ever seen. I don’t know how he molded that character . . . He was even Ethan at dinnertime. He didn’t kid around on
The Searchers
like he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes.”

Wayne had visited a simpler version of Ethan Edwards before, in Hawks’s
Red River.
Both Ethan Edwards and Thomas Dunson are older, embittered men (Wayne had to play older for both roles). Each is a loner who reluctantly takes on younger partners. In
Red River
it is Montgomery Clift’s Matt Garth; in
The Searchers
it is Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin Pawley. Both films are centered around an obsessive journey. The main difference between the films is once again stylistic. Hawks’s is externally motored; it races through its multigenerational story, pulsating toward its happy reconciliatory conclusion. Ford’s is internal; it moves slowly, with a meditative drive that focuses on the interior journeys of its characters. In
Red River,
Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) is the key female love interest. She is loose, spirited, sexual, and aggressive. In
The Searchers,
the key love interest (besides Debbie) is Martin’s Laurie, tight, spiritual, and aggressive. Both films share Wayne’s brilliant, multidimensional performance of essentially the same character, differentiated and deepened by the stylistics of these two very distinct directorial masters.

When he first saw
The Searchers,
Hawks, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, flatly declared it “[t]he best color film I’ve ever seen!”

THE SEARCHERS
WAS FILMED IN
two stretches, one in June 1955, the second that August, to capture the winters and the summers that pass during the telling of the story. One part was shot in Monument Valley, the fifth John Ford production to be set there, and one part in Gunnison, Colorado, with nine days of interior work at RKO-Pathé Studios, with a total budget of $2.5 million that Ford was able to meet almost to the dollar, the actual negative cost coming in at $2.502 million.

The scene where Ethan sweeps Debbie up in his arms was shot near Griffith Park in Los Angeles at midday on August 12, the next-to-last day of filming. That same afternoon everyone returned to the studio to shoot the winter scene, against artificial snow, during which Ethan promises Martin, “Injuns’ll chase a thing till he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ’em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ’em—just as sure as the turnin’ o’ the earth.” It is to Wayne’s everlasting credit that he could make this emotional shift from one scene to another in a single day, on cue at Ford’s direction.

During the shoot, Ford’s health was still frail, which may partly explain why he was less vitriolic than usual with Wayne. He was awed by the level of Wayne’s performance and prudently decided it was best to leave him alone lest he upset his delicate balance of emotions Wayne was drawing up from inside himself to inhabit the character of Ethan Edwards. Ford wasn’t going to go near that. Wayne was no Fonda; Duke might kill Ford if he tried anything funny with him.

Like
The Big Trail
a quarter of a century earlier,
The Searchers
was filmed in a new process intended to emphasize the expansive reach of the story and the glorious Monument Valley. Cinematographer Winton C. Hoch shot it in VistaVison, which yielded an exceptionally sharp image and allowed for greater depth of field, one of Ford’s favored techniques. As with
The Big Trail,
there were only a few theaters equipped to show it in this format, one in New York and one in Hollywood. Most people saw
The Searchers
in standard 35 mm. The reduction of the print reduced the glory of Ford’s vision, even as it sharpened and brightened the film’s visuals.
¹¹⁹

The Searchers
opened March 28, 1956, after four months of delays due mainly to the difficulty of editing the VistaVision negative, to decidedly mixed reviews.
Variety
called it “overlong and repetitious.” Bosley Crowther, writing in the
New York Times,
called it “a rip-snorting Western as brashly entertaining as they come . . . [it boasts] a wealth of Western action that has the toughness and leather and sting of a whip.” In the June 6, 1956, issue of
The New Yorker,
John McCarten wrote, in part, that “
The Searchers,
John Ford and his celebrated road company, headed by fearless John Wayne, are back, chasing around Texas, fighting Indians, fighting each other and fighting time . . . the thing has to do with the search for a couple of maidens some nasty Comanches have abducted shortly after the Civil War, and it certainly has plenty of action.” Robert Ardrey, in
The Hollywood Reporter,
was even less impressed than McCarten: “The same John Ford who once gave adults
The Informer
must now give children
The Searchers
.”

Audiences loved it even if the critics didn’t, and it earned $8.5 million U.S. and Canada in its first year of release, making it the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1956. Wayne eventually earned $350,000 from his deal (his estate continues to earn revenue from the film).
¹²⁰

Although popular with audiences, Ford and Wayne’s collaborative masterpiece did not impress the Academy, and it received no Oscar nominations. The favorites for Best Picture that went instead to overlong, huge, and hollow “epics”
Around the World in Eighty Days, The Ten Commandments, War and Peace, Giant,
and the winner,
The King and I.
Best Actor went to Yul Brynner for his signature portrayal of the King of Siam. Rock Hudson, the star of two of the top ten films of the year, was nominated for his role in the best of the nominated films,
Giant
(James Dean’s last movie before he died; his performance was also overlooked by the Academy).
¹²¹
Best Director went to George Stevens for
Giant.
In these last-gasp years of the studios, “big” rather than great was the hoped-for antidote against the disease called television.

It wasn’t until years later that
The Searchers’
greatness began to be recognized. Ironically, it was the French Marxist filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, in the vanguard of the French New Wave, who was among the first to recognize the film’s cinematic power, in the pages of the French bible of auteurism,
Cahiers du Cinéma
: “How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of
The Searchers
?” After seeing the film for the first time in a Paris theater, Godard claimed he was so moved by Wayne’s performance that he openly wept. In August 1999, Peter Bogdanovich in
The
Observer
wrote that
The Searchers
was “a vivid and beautiful piece of Americana; it is certainly among Ford’s greatest achievements—as entertainment, as art, as personal statement . . . an unqualified masterpiece.” In a 1971 essay by Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington in
Sight and Sound
, “Prisoner of the Desert,” they wrote that “
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.” In 1972, the highly respected
Sight and Sound
listed
The Searchers
as one of the “greatest films ever made.” In 1992, it ranked it fifth; in 2002, eleventh; and in 2012, seventh. In 2008, the American Film Institute named
The Searchers
as the greatest western of all time. How much satisfaction it would have given Wayne to know that at long last, his film was considered better than
High Noon
!

The next generation of filmmakers lauded the film as an inspiration for their own filmmaking. Scorsese, discussing
The Searchers
for the American Film Institute, said: “The dialogue is like poetry, and the changes of expression are so subtle, so magnificent. I see it once or twice a year.” In his early masterpiece
Taxi Driver,
Scorsese contemporizes Ford and Wayne’s notion of the antihero as a wanderer, searching for and running from something he, and we, aren’t quite sure of.

Director John Milius (who wrote
Taxi Driver
) called
The Searchers
“[t]he best American movie—and its protagonist Ethan Edwards is one classic character in films . . . I’ve seen it sixty times.”

Steven Spielberg noted: “It has so many superlatives. It’s John Wayne’s best performance . . . it’s a study in dramatic framing and composition. It contains the single most harrowing moment in any film I’ve ever seen.”

George Lucas’s massacre at the beginning of
Star Wars
is a direct homage to
The Searchers
. And 1969’s
Easy Rider,
directed by Dennis Hopper, the journey of the two motorcyclists updates the existential wandering of Ethan’s and Martin’s souls in
The Searchers
.

The film influenced the world of pop music as well. A year after it was released, the late Buddy Holly wrote “That’ll Be the Day,” after hearing Wayne repeat the line several times in the film. And in the ’60s, a British band named itself “The Searchers.”

Finally, years later, here is what Wayne himself said about the film and its lack of immediate recognition as a classic, either by the critics or the Academy: “You know I just don’t understand why that film wasn’t better received. I think it’s Ford’s best western . . . Ethan Edwards was probably the most fascinating character I ever played in a John Ford western.”

In any western, or in any film by any director. Wayne, who always expressed himself best with a script in his hand and a director calling the shots, said little more about the film until twenty-five years later, when he was interviewed by
Playboy
magazine not long after winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in
True Grit.
When asked if he thought
The Searchers
was the best film he’d ever made, he bristled as he told the interviewer, “No, I don’t. Two classic westerns were better—
Stagecoach
and
Red River—
[although I thought]
The Searchers . . .
deserved more praise than it got.”

TWO DAYS AFTER
THE SEARCHERS
opened, Pilar gave birth to a seven-pound, eight-ounce baby girl they named Aissa. Wayne was ecstatic. Pilar describes him as behaving like a “blithering idiot” at the moment of their daughter’s birth. Breathing life into a character on-screen was one thing; bringing life into the world was quite another. He was proud of
The Searchers,
but he loved Aissa. There were tears in his eyes when here affirmed his devotion to Pilar: “This is my second chance in life. This time, Pilar, I swear I’ll do it right.”

Chapter 19

The Academy’s snubbing of
The Searchers
reconfirmed Wayne’s long-standing belief that it would never let him win an Oscar. He never openly complained about it—he didn’t want to give them that satisfaction—but it helped diminish whatever compassion he may have had for both the studios and the victims of the blacklist.

There was another reason he didn’t make any noise about
The Searchers
: despite the public’s acceptance of him in the film, and the solid box office, it was still a critical flop. Whenever a film of his opened that audiences loved and critics dismissed, he would tell friends that he laughed all the way to the bank. That was Wayne the actor talking; Wayne the producer understood that while he was at the moment the most popular star in Hollywood, it didn’t always translate into automatic funding.

Thanks to the large financial successes of
Hondo, The High and the Mighty, Blood Alley,
and
The Sea Chase,
most times a nod from his leathery face was all that was needed to raise the money to make any movie he wanted. He had hoped to cash in on his popularity to produce
The Alamo,
but even he wasn’t able to overcome the culture-defining popularity of Disney’s Davy Crockett series, whose third episode of the original TV three-hour weekly series was called “Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” Fess Parker, as Davy Crockett, was as popular in 1954–55 with preteens in America as Elvis Presley would be for their older brothers and sisters a year later. Even for Wayne it was too difficult a cultural mountain to climb over.