Anytime Movies #5: The Searchers

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,**** when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

It’s a film that chills me right down to my bones and makes me cry every single time.* It throws itself into the deepest pits of despair and within moments, prat-falls into low comedy. It’s a western…about race relations, and in the house of mirrors of a “genre” piece deflects the self-righteous tone of a sermon. It stares into the soul of people at their worst, and exults in their best.

It is arguably John Ford’s best film (and he made many great ones). It is inarguably John Wayne's finest performance on-screen, while completely working against the image that Marion Morrison had built as “John Wayne,” American Hero.

Oh no. We’re talking about The Searchers—a “western” made during the somnambulant 50’s …and with John Wayne, ferchrissakes! How corny can you get?

Back up, pilgrim.

The Searchers has just been re-released (to mark its 50th anniversary**) in a gloriously re-mastered DVD, and has come under critical review for being too corny, too obvious, and more than a little dated. 

Worse still, it has been branded a “film-school darling” that has skated too long on an undeserved reputation as a masterpiece.

Bullshit.

Like Pauline Kael’s faulty detective work dissecting Citizen Kane and Elvis Mitchell’s naïve un-analysis of 2001, the work in Slate smacks of a critic either looking for something to write about or make a name for themselves bucking “conventional wisdom.” Having to spend a summer reviewing the third X-Men movie, the fifth “Superman” opus AND an entirely superfluous “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel is bound to make anyone crabby.

But it shouldn’t lower one’s standards, and there’s enough slip-shod work in the article to indicate that’s the case. At the very least, it’s a terrible gloss-over.

At the worst, it displays a film reviewer who hasn't even seen the film he was supposedly watching for the prejudices and pre-conceived notions that he would rather cling to rather than objectivity.

The Searchers is a masterpiece—the culmination of decades of film-making experience that John Ford had accumulated since the silent era—while crystallizing Ford’s growing disenchantment with the Myth of the West. In a time when westerns were still basically built around the simplistic formula of “Cowboys vs. Indians,” Ford was starting to speak out more explicitly for the latter sixteen years before such accepted “consciousness-raising” films as Little Big Man or Soldier Blue. Like any masterpiece, it displays the sum of a body of work and breaks new ground, paving the way for the future.

The Searchers tells the story of an obsessive 10 year hunt for a lone family member taken in a violent Comanche raid. It’s led by the worst person possible: the child’s uncle--a hate-obsessed confederate soldier, self-exiled from his family, who still carries his saber on his hip, bitterness in his soul and his heart on his sleeve. Mix in a venomous race-hatred for all non-whites and you have the most flawed anti-hero to appear in movies. Ethan Edwards starts his search to bring his niece back alive, but as the years pass and she matures into womanhood, he gives her up as one of the Enemy, and sets out to kill her. At the center of the film’s black heart is that most archaic and useless word: miscegenation.

It’s rough stuff. Rougher still are the attitudes of the settlers towards the Indians that border on hysteria. There’s a haunting scene late in the film where Edwards and his fellow traveler (played by future "Star Trek" Captain Pike and “Teenage Jesus,” Jeffrey Hunter) ride into a fort on the Trail of Tears to inspect some kidnapped white women who have been re-captured—"rescued" they would say—by the Cavalry. 

“It’s hard to believe they’re white” a sergeant says. 

“They ain’t white,” spits Edwards, and at the sound of a shriek from one of the women, he turns to look at her. Ford trucks in the camera fast onto Wayne’s face (mirroring the shot he used to introduce Wayne in their first film together, Stagecoach) and it’s amazing. Wayne was always blessed with a mug that the camera loved***—it could read every emotion that played across it—and in a performance minus the “hero façade” and that turns on the full after-burners that usually blew his co-stars off the screen, this one quiet moment radiates a combination of hate, disgust…and abject fear. No words need to be said to make the point. No words could.

It's what made Ford a great director and Wayne a great actor.

"No, Ethan!  No, you don't!"

And yet, for all its depths of despair amid bloodshed and the race-hysteria, Ford tries to balance it with entertainment. That’s quite the tight-rope walk. But then, it’s not a sermon. It’s a Western. Ford was never so pretentious to be caught lecturing. He’d say if you want to send a message, use the Pony Express. Better to sneak the lessons into the fabric of the story, and distract with shenanigans about wayward lovers, goony old men, and green cavalrymen with pointy swords. One of the incidents involves the unintended marriage of Hunter’s character to a portly Indian maid. It’s the source of raunchy comedy in the vein of Ford’s The Quiet Man—all roughhouse and bad taste. But when Ford’s good guys “The Cavalry” decimate a Native village and the luckless character along with it, Hunter is left to ask “What’d they have to kill her for? She never hurt anybody!” The question hangs in the air with indictments all around.
The Searchers begins and ends with a black screen. In the beginning, the blackness gives way to the vast magical vista of Monument Valley (which figures in two of my anytime movies. If God lives anywhere on Earth, I think it’s on that vast acreage of land overseen by the Navajo) that to Garry Wills suggests an irising lens, but to these eyes seems more of a proscenium arch. At the end it shuts out Ethan Edwards who is left out of the warmth of a family embrace to wander the desert (Of course, Wayne’s character is going to come in eventually and eat…but Ford chooses to leave Edwards outside). His prejudice does not belong with home and hearth...and society…and Civilization. Yet it is also Ford’s choice to leave the character alive, the wolf always at the door.

It’s as if having made his plea for tolerance, Ford cautions us that it will always exist, somewhere.

Will we ever...finally...lose the hate?

“That’ll be the day.”

Robert McGinnis' portrait of Wayne in The Searchers.

Anytime Movies:
The Searchers

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* A comment on this post and movie—when it was stationed at another blog—asked: "The Searchers makes you cry?!?!? Is it because of all the dead Indians?" Sure. Go with that. But, a lot of settlers are killed, too, and the hunt in The Searchers is precipitated by one such massacre, the matriarch of which is the one woman that Ethan Edwards loves. It's what entwines his search into one of need and of vengeance. 

No, the thing that makes me cry is the act that comes right before the line "Let's go home, Debbie." That line. From that character. At that time. Despite all evidence to the contrary. It's what gives one a small tiny quantum of hope that belies the sentiment of "That'll be the day..."

** And now, it's a few years shy of its 70th.  I wasn't even a year old when it was released.  It's like an old friend that's grown up with me.

*** Screenwriter Robert Towne has a better term for it, the "camera-love" phrase implying a happy accident that doesn't give enough credit to the actors, their craft and experience. He says that actors like Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Gary Cooper are "ruthlessly efficient" in that they can communicate differing emotions with an economy of expression. Those words are particularly apt for Wayne's performance in The Searchers.

**** And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

The History of John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

When Orson Welles was asked what movies he studied before embarking on directing Citizen Kane he replied, "I studied the Old Masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." 

Running parallel with our series about Akira Kurosawa ("Walking Kurosawa's Road"), we're running a series of pieces about the closest thing America has to Kurosawa in artistry—director John Ford. Ford rarely made films set in the present day, but (usually) made them about the past...and about America's past, specifically (when he wasn't fulfilling a passion for his Irish roots). In "The History of John Ford" we'll be gazing fondly at the work of this American Master, who started in the Silent Era, learning his craft, refining his director's eye, and continuing to work deep into the 1960's (and his 70's) to produce the greatest body of work of any American "picture-maker," America's storied film-maker, the irascible, painterly, domineering, sentimental puzzle that was John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) Even the mention of the title invokes a cynical irony for those who have seen it. This crowning glory in the long accomplished (dare one say legendary) career of director John Ford, 68 at the time of its filming, is a bitter pill of a film and a meditation on the inexorable march of time and the brutal boots of history.

It is about "becoming"—not just in the strictest sense of transitioning (although the town of Shinbone, in which it is set, is in the midst of leaving its old West roots behind to take its place as part of the Union of States), but also in the less used sense: of reflecting favorably on the subject to its advantage.

It is also about, as so many of John Ford's films over the years, the taming of a wilderness, and the creation of a society. And the unbecoming truth that to create the veneer of civility, sacrifices must be made, just as sure as Sunday dinner.

Senator Rance Stoddard and his wife Hallie (James Stewart, Vera Miles) return to the town of Shinbone to much hoopla. It is their home-town, of course, but as the Senator now spends all his time in Washington he doesn't get back there much. So the press start nosing around to get the where-fore's of why "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (and rode that acclaim into politics), is there now. The occasion is a funeral for a man nobody knows (or has little regard for), but he's very important to the Stoddards—he is, after all, the man who brought them together. And as Hallie places a cactus on Stoddard's plain pine coffin, Stoddard relates the tale, one that blows away the Senator's folksy bluster with a scouring truth.

The Senator talks of his first coming to Shinbone as a greenhorn lawyer* and his run-in's with local bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, gloriously over-the-top), a malevolent thief and enforcer for the cattle industry who has the small town of Shinbone afraid to come out of their houses. Beaten and bleeding, Stoddard is brought to recover under the roof of the Ericson's (Jeanette Nolan, John Qualen, Miles) by Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who's sweet on Hallie and is building a house for the two of them outside the city limits. Doniphon is contemptuous of Stoddard's belief in law and order (calling him "Pilgrim," only one of two films where Wayne used that oft-parodied term), believing that the only way to stand up to anarchists like Valance is a loaded pistol.

I say "anarchists" pointedly, because The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Get it? "Liberty" Valance?) is as much about politics as it is a story about a love triangle in the Old West. You have the anarchistic, irresponsible Valance on one side and you have the "book-larned," law-and-order, taming-the-West-by-education-and-civics Stoddard on the other. In between, you have Doniphon, who's all for government (far as it goes) but in his time, you tame the West with bullets and hard work. But that time is passing. Doniphon is late to realize that that taming means the passing of the bad guys who will disrupt, but also good guys with a sense of entitlement. Ford chooses sides, and it's for civilization—because anything else is stagnation and waste. For all the talk of "Freedom" and "Rights," those are granted only under the auspices of control and Law. Because Valance represents not only unbridled freedom, but also the seeds of despotism. As a rancher, Doniphon knows those seeds will take over unless something stronger, hardier is planted in its stead.

Even if it means the death of his way of life.

Sacrifices must be made.

By the time the tale of Stoddard and his benefactor/mentor and rival is told, a bloom has, impossibly, appeared on the cactus, because like Stewart's lack of youth in the flash-backs and the old-age make-up for the young actors in the present, Ford is also playing with time, even going to his own past, using a piece of music from 1939's Young Mr. Lincoln (that put a melody to Lincoln's loss of his first love Ann Rutledge) for the scene of Hallie regarding Doniphon's burnt-out homestead. And so, the telling of the tale of a lifetime is enough time to ensure new life in movie terms.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford goes so far as to state outright something he'd been alluding to throughout his career as a film-maker, story-teller and chronicler of the United States. Given a choice between printing the unvarnished truth or a myth for the common good, the newspaperman says, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes truth, print the legend."

There was never a better-stated justification of film-making.

It's a definitive statement of Ford's career directing movies. But Liberty Valance is also a bridge from Ford's early Westerns to the "modern" "oaters" of the 60's as Valance's wormy toadies are portrayed by Lee Van Cleef (of Sergio Leone's "Dollar" trilogy) and Strother Martin (part of Sam Peckinpah's stock company). Those film-makers were inspired by Ford, and in their own revisionist methods of "printing the truth," made their own legends.

And so the film is its own truth, summarizing one director's past as a pioneer and presaging the future of the Western film, on the edge of its demise, both "becoming" even in the depth of their cynicism.

* One of the criticisms of the film is that both Stewart and Wayne are playing young men when the two were both in their 50's. Wayne can get away with it (as he always plays old...and other reasons), but Stewart doesn't come across as a man in his 20's. I have something to say about that towards the end of the review.

Anytime Movies (Transplanted): The Searchers

While I have a few reviews "in the works," It's as good a time as any to re-boot (actually transplant from the old movie blog) a feature I started years ago, when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List. 

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin. 

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies. 

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

It’s a film that chills me right down to my bones and makes me cry every single time. It throws itself into the deepest pits of despair and within moments, prat-falls into low comedy. It’s a western…about race relations, and in the house of mirrors of a “genre” piece deflects the self-righteous tone of a sermon. It stares into the soul of people at their worst, and exults in their best.

It is arguably John Ford’s best film (and he made many great ones). It is inarguably John Wayne's finest performance on-screen, while completely working against the image that Marion Morrison built as “John Wayne.”

Oh no. We’re talking about The Searchers—a “western” made during the somnambulant 50’s …and with John Wayne, ferchrissakes! How corny can you get?

Back up, pilgrim.

The Searchers has just been re-released (to mark its 50th anniversary*) in a gloriously re-mastered DVD, and has come under critical review for being too corny, too obvious, and more than a little dated. Worse still, it has been branded a “film-school darling” that has skated too long on an undeserved reputation as a masterpiece.

Bullshit.

Like Pauline Kael’s faulty detective work dissecting Citizen Kane and Elvis Mitchell’s naïve un-analysis of 2001, the work in Slate smacks of a critic either looking for something to write about or make a name for themselves bucking “conventional wisdom.” Having to spend a summer reviewing the third X-Men movie, the fifth “Superman” opus AND an entirely superfluous “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel is bound to make anyone crabby.

But it shouldn’t lower one’s standards, and there’s enough slip-shod work in the article to indicate that’s the case. At the very least, it’s a terrible gloss-over.

At the worst, it displays a film reviewer who hasn't even seen the film he was supposedly watching for the prejudices and pre-conceived notions that he would rather cling to rather than objectivity.

The Searchers is a masterpiece—the culmination of decades of film-making experience that John Ford had accumulated since the silent era—while crystallizing Ford’s growing disenchantment with the Myth of the West. In a time when westerns were still basically built around the simplistic formula of “Cowboys vs. Indians,” Ford was starting to speak out more explicitly for the latter sixteen years before such accepted “consciousness-raising” films as Little Big Man or Soldier Blue. Like any masterpiece, it displays the sum of a body of work and breaks new ground, paving the way for the future.

The Searchers tells the story of an obsessive 10 year hunt for a lone family member taken in a violent Comanche raid. It’s led by the worst person possible: the child’s uncle--a hate-obsessed confederate soldier, self-exiled from his family, who still carries his saber on his hip, bitterness in his soul and his heart on his sleeve. Mix in a venomous race-hatred for all non-whites and you have the most flawed anti-hero to appear in movies. Ethan Edwards starts his search to bring his niece back alive, but as the years pass and she matures, he gives her up as one of the Enemy, and sets out to kill her. At the center of the film’s black heart is that most archaic and useless word: miscegenation.

It’s rough stuff. Rougher still are the attitudes of the settlers towards the Indians that border on hysteria. There’s a haunting scene late in the film where Edwards and his fellow traveler (played by future Captain Pike and “Teenage Jesus,” Jeffrey Hunter) ride into a fort on the Trail of Tears to inspect some kidnapped white women who have been captured—"rescued" they would say—by the Cavalry. “It’s hard to believe they’re white” a sergeant says. 

“They ain’t white,” spits Edwards, and at the sound of a shriek from one of the women, he turns to look at her. Ford trucks in the camera fast onto Wayne’s face (mirroring the shot he used to introduce Wayne in their first film together, Stagecoach) and it’s amazing. Wayne was always blessed with a mug that the camera loved*—it could read every emotion that played across it—and in a performance minus the “hero façade” and that turns on the full after-burners that usually blew his co-stars off the screen, this one quiet moment radiates a combination of hate, disgust…and abject fear. No words need to be said to make the point. No words could.

It's what made Ford a great director and Wayne a great actor.

"No, Ethan!  No, you don't!"

And yet, for all its depths of despair amid bloodshed and the race-hysteria, Ford tries to balance it with entertainment. That’s quite the tight-rope walk. But then, it’s not a sermon. It’s a Western. Ford was never so pretentious to be caught lecturing. He’d say if you want to send a message, use the Pony Express. Better to sneak the lessons into the fabric of the story, and distract with shenanigans about wayward lovers, goony old men, and green cavalrymen with pointy swords. One of the incidents involves the unintended marriage of Hunter’s character to a portly Indian maid. It’s the source of raunch comedy in the vein of Ford’s The Quiet Man—all roughhouse and bad taste. But when Ford’s good guys “The Cavalry” decimate a Native village and the luckless character along with it, Hunter is left to ask “What’d they have to kill her for? She never hurt anybody!” The question hangs in the air with indictments all around.
The Searchers begins and ends with a black screen. In the beginning, the blackness gives way to the vast magical vista of Monument Valley (which figures in two of my anytime movies. If God lives anywhere on Earth, I think it’s on that vast acreage of land overseen by the Navajo) that to Garry Wills suggests an irising lens, but to these eyes seems more of a proscenium arch. At the end it shuts out Ethan Edwards who is left out of the warmth of a family embrace to wander the desert (Of course, Wayne’s character is going to come in eventually and eat…but Ford chooses to leave Edwards outside). His prejudice does not belong with home and hearth...and society…and Civilization. Yet it is also Ford’s choice to leave the character alive, the wolf always at the door.

It’s as if having made his plea for tolerance, Ford cautions us that it will always exist, somewhere.

Will we ever...finally...lose the hate?

“That’ll be the day.”

Robert McGinnis' portrait of Wayne in The Searchers.

The Searchers
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And now, it's a couple years shy of its 60th.  I wasn't even a year old when it was released.  It's like an old friend that's grown up with me.

** Screenwriter Robert Towne has a better term for it, the "camera-love" phrase implying a happy accident that doesn't give enough credit to the actors, their craft and experience. He says that actors like Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Gary Cooper are "ruthlessly efficient" in that they can communicate differing emotions with an economy of expression. Those words are particularly apt for Wayne's performance in The Searchers.