“We’ll find ‘em, just as sure as the turnin’ of the Earth.”
That line, spoken by John Wayne in the 1956 film The Searchers, is pure, classic
“Duke.” From that moment on, you just know that he is going to keep
on pursuing the Comanches that kidnapped his niece until the very
bitter end — and God help those Indians when he finally catches
up. Recently re-released on DVD in a special 50th anniversary
edition, The Searchers makes for one hell of an adventure
at times.
A lot of people think the film is even better than that —
including the type of high-brow film critics who aren’t otherwise
big John Wayne fans. As Stephen Metcalf recently wrote in
Slate: “[I]t is widely considered, by the initiated [i.e.
serious film scholars], at least, to be among the four or five best
movies of all time.” (Emphasis added)
He’s not exaggerating. Among other accolades, it was among the
first films chosen for the Library of Congress’s National
Film Preservation Board in 1989, designating it a “national
treasure.” That’s awfully high praise for a western shoot’em
up.
But why this particular horse opera and not any of the scores of
others that Wayne starred in? Few of the Duke’s fans have thought
to ask this. Most have been content to echo the praise. If the
pencil necks think The Searchers is as good as all that,
who are we to argue, they ask? It’s nice to have them recognize the
Duke’s greatness for once.
Well, the Duke’s fans should be a bit more wary of this
particular film. There’s a fairly simple reason why The
Searchers is so highly rated by critics. Whether by accident
or design, it is ultimately a liberal telling of the
settling of the western frontier.
Specifically, the film’s theme is race. It portrays the settling
of the west as an explicitly racial struggle for dominance between
the Indians and the whites. More to the point, it subtly but
unmistakably subverts Wayne’s heroic image by making his
character’s motivations all about race. Which is exactly why
liberals love it.
As the Village Voice put it, The Searchers is “a perverted odyssey
of xenophobic self-hatred and waste, with Wayne at the center in
arguably the most profound portrait of macho monstrosity ever
delivered by an American movie star.”
Roger Ebert has more mixed feelings regarding the film but
agrees with the Voice’s basic
assessment: “Countless Westerns have had racism as the unspoken
premise; this one consciously focuses on it.”
The Washington Post’s resident lefty columnist Harold
Meyerson picked up this theme in an op-ed yesterday, seeing the film as a metaphor
for the Iraq War.
Wayne’s character, Meyerson argues, is “possessed by a raging
hatred of Indians…his hatred culminating in a shot in which he
scalps the Comanche chief he has tracked for five years….”
“Defend civilization by becoming as barbaric as its enemies,
[The Searchers] suggests, and you are no longer really
part of that civilization,” he wrote.
FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T seen it, Wayne plays Ethan Edwards in the
film, a veteran Indian fighter and former Confederate officer. A
few years after the Civil War he rides west to visit his brother
and his brother’s family. They are the only family Edwards
apparently has.
“Ain’t seen you since the surrender,” remarks the local
reverend, played by Ward Bond. “Come to think of it, I didn’t see
you at the surrender.”
“I don’t believe in surrenders,” replies Edwards. “Nope, I’ve
still got my saber, reverend. Didn’t beat it into no plowshare
neither.”
Shortly after this exchange, Edwards, his brother’s adopted son
Martin (played by Jeffrey Hunter), and other local men form a posse
to track down some cattle rustlers. Too late they learn that the
missing cattle are in fact a diversion by Comanche Indians on the
warpath. By the time Edwards returns to his brother’s home, they’ve
all been slaughtered — all except the youngest, Debbie, who’s been
carried off by the Indians.
Edwards and Martin take up pursuit, vowing to go to the ends of
the earth if necessary to find them. Their quest ultimately takes
five years. By the time Edwards finally does catch up with the
Indians, Debbie is a grown woman.
The film, directed by the great John Ford,
walks a subtle line. Edwards is never presented as a really evil
guy. There’s usually ample justification for his on-screen actions.
And much of it plays like a regular John Wayne film, right down to
the occasional cornball humor and familiar character actors in
supporting roles. It’s well made too, with some starkly beautiful
cinematography.
But Ford, a famously complex, contradictory man as well as New
Deal liberal — he also directed the left-wing classic The Grapes of Wrath —
nevertheless paints a dark picture of clashing cultures.
LIKE HAROLD MEYERSON, MOST CRITICS see Edwards’ obsessive quest as
motivated as much by racial hatred as it is by a desire to rescue
Debbie. In all honesty, it’s a fair reading of the film. Ford drops
broad hints throughout.
Edwards makes it plain that he has not renounced his allegiance
to Confederacy. He makes constant derisive reference to Martin’s
own partial Native American ancestry. In one scene, Edwards
gratuitously shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian because he knows
in the Indian’s religion a man without eyes is condemned never to
enter the spirit world.
Most tellingly it’s made clear early on that Edwards is
particularly enraged by the (probably correct) thought that Debbie
will eventually become the wife (in all senses of the word) of one
of the Comanche tribe’s braves.
By the end, Martin — and the audience — begins to wonder if
Ethan’s intention is not to rescue Debbie but to kill her because
she’s “one of them” now. In one chilling scene, only Martin’s
intervention prevents Edwards from doing just that.
Ultimately, Edwards does rescue Debbie but the key scene is
oddly anti-climatic. It involves a sudden, unexplained change of
heart by Edwards that contradicts everything we’ve been led to
assume up to that point. Had the scene followed the earlier logic
of the film, Edwards would have killed her.
In fact, the film’s actual ending feels so contrived that maybe
it was Ford’s intention that we not take it seriously. After all,
it’s not as though he could have released a film with John Wayne
killing his own niece.
As Ebert has noted: “Ethan’s redemption is intended to be shown
in that dramatic shot of reunion with Debbie, where he takes her in
his broad hands…and says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ The shot is
famous and beloved, but small counterbalance to his views
throughout the film — and indeed, there is no indication that he
thinks any differently about Indians.”
It’s because of such unresolved questions that so many film
critics — especially, yes, the liberal ones — love the film. How
often do you get to see the assumptions of politically correct
history played out in a film with a conservative icon like Wayne in
the leading role? To create something comparable today Bill Bennett
would have to appear dealing drugs in a gangster rap video.
For Wayne’s fans (and if you haven’t guessed by now I include
myself in that crowd) it is long past time that they realize that
the praise heaped on The Searchers is in most cases
backhanded. The film is honored precisely because it knocks its
hero and the western genre. There are other, better films we can
put forward to honor the Duke, ones that don’t make him out to be a
racist.
Anybody seen Fort Apache lately?
