This'll be the day
Finally saw John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in a 70 mm print and the experience is as sprawling and expansive as the landscape depicted in widescreen VistaVision.
(WARNING: Plot of this 69-year-old film discussed in explicit detail!)
As in poetry much of the film's power comes from repetition and rhyme. The film's opening shot follows a woman emerging from a dark cabin into the open desert; in the finale Ford repeats that movement in reverse, with the camera retreating from the wide world back into the womb of another cabin's darkness.
In between the two shots we have a massacre, a five-year hunt, a marriage, an attempted wedding, a second even bloodier massacre. Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) visits the home of his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), lifts young Debbie (Lana Wood) up high in his arms, enjoys the loving attentions of Aaron's wife Martha (the quietly luminous Dorothy Jordan) before joining a posse out to recover stolen cattle. Turns out the stolen cattle were a ploy; turns out the rustlers were really Comanches luring the men away from their families; turns out Ethan is too late to save little Debbie from being kidnapped, too late to keep Aaron, Martha, and their family from being slaughtered (and worse).
You might say Ethan's search for Debbie is really his way of dealing with his failure to protect the only family he had. You might say Ethan's quest makes perfect pairing with (maybe inspiring) one Scottie Ferguson's, who can't get past his failure to prevent Madeleine Elster's death. You might further say some of the most highly regarded films of the past few decades involve aging white men unable to let go of unfinished business.
You might also say calling the film The Searchers is actually a misnomer; there's only one searcher and his name is Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Debbie's part-white part-Cherokee adopted brother. Once Martin realizes that Ethan isn't so much looking for Debbie as seeking revenge-- perhaps seeking to kill Debbie (now grown into the beautiful Natalie Wood) for becoming the wife of Comanche chief Scar (Henry Brandon)-- he insists on accompanying Ethan on his years-long quest, hoping to rescue his sister and maybe protect her from Ethan's wrath. He in truth is the film's moral center, insisting on rescue over vengeance, insisting on his love for Debbie despite Ethan repeatedly pointing out that they have no common blood ties holding them together beyond the fact that the Edwards took Martin in and raised him as their own. In many ways Martin is a better man than Ethan, only early in the film when he joins that first posse Martin hasn't the sense to properly water and feed his horse before galloping to the rescue.
But Martin learns and grows in skill and experience. On occasion he fumbles; he mistreats Look (Beulah Archuletta), and his uncharacteristically callous cruelty-- treated as low comedy-- is near unwatchable (that said Archuletta's performance feels honest, and Max Steiner's music, not always subtle when it comes to comic cues, evokes a tender regard for her that suggests the film does see her, and does see her plight). Martin's face on learning of Look's ultimate fate doesn't show much empathy-- but that's a failure of his character's imagination, not (I submit) of the film's.
The film seems to have influenced another classic, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), where the moral lesson is handed to us by the high-minded, self-righteous prig Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston)--
("The law protects the guilty as well as the innocent."
"Our job is tough enough."
"It has to be tough. A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. That's the whole point.")
--when all everyone wants to look at and listen to is the charismatically corrupt cop Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles): "An old lady on Main Street picked up a shoe; the shoe had a foot in it. We're gonna make you pay for that mess."
In this film greenhorn Martin has all the right ideas while deadly-quiet Ethan has all the right skills; by film's end Martin has grown enough in ability and experience where he's the one able to infiltrate a Comanche camp on his own to locate Debbie and kill Scar. All Ethan has done riding with this second larger posse* is to take Scar's scalp, chase Debbie down, then fail to do what he had aimed to do all along, commit an honor killing.
*(Interesting to note that this 'raid' on an Indian camp has a few Comanche warriors taking a few token shots at the raiders-- all on horseback-- while women and children run for cover. Suggested if not explicitly stated: this was yet another massacre, this time inflicted by mounted vigilantes on a camp mostly made up of civilians)
I'm being unfair. Ethan took Martin in, fed him, guided him, trained him enough to become the man he ended up becoming; Ethan in effect was the mentor Martin needed to learn the skills to enforce his morals, though even he isn't able to stop Ethan from running Debbie down.
And why doesn't Ethan go through with the honor killing? One clue is Ethan's expression when he picks up his gun prior to joining the second posse-- shades of "This feels familiar" or "Why the fuck am I doing this again?" As Scottie Ferguson says: "This is my second chance" and Ethan is both startled to be offered and determined to take advantage.
Ethan isn't the hero, Martin is; so Ethan ends up trying to do that other thing, only it's all mixed up in his head what he's supposed to do: kill Debbie or rescue Martha? In a moment of ambiguity worthy of few other films (the finale of Journey to Italy comes to mind) where you-- and I suspect Ethan himself-- isn't sure what's next, it's the muscle memory of lifting Debbie up high that ultimately wins out, that gesture celebrating a family life he never really knew (but always treasured), the inexpressible power of repetition and rhyme. Ethan, overcome but hardly one to admit it, can only say: "Let's go home."
Ethan's finest moment in effect was that he wasn't man enough to do what he said he would. His constant refrain (and the audience's constant delight) are the words 'that'll be the day!'-- well today was the day and he failed at his word. A man can be guilty of worse crimes.
And that lovely final shot that rhymes so perfectly with the first-- Debbie has been restored to her community,* Martin enjoys a hero's welcome, all is this much right with the world. And Ethan? What did he do, ultimately, beyond shepherd matters to this point, and fail to fuck things up further? That final shot feels sad the way it closes a door on the man, but also in a sense feels deserved: Ethan has served his purpose, has in fact survived past his purpose; he's free to go do whatever while the real people come inside to live out the rest of their lives. And I'll cite yet another film that might have found (unlikely but possible) inspiration from this film: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, where Kambei tells Gorobei 'Again we've lost. Victory belongs to the farmers-- not us.' In Kurosawa's case as in Ford's, the camera just happens to be pointed at the wrong direction, at the losers in the margins of life. A momentary tribute for what they did do right, before they fade away.
**(And I know I know, Debbie's real-life fate was more complex-- she was rescued against her will, and struggled to re-adjust to settler life. Ford cheats by suggesting Debbie was half-willing to come with Martin-- her attitude can be described as ambivalent at best-- and never really alludes to the rest of the story. Which may be one of the film's bigger failings)
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