by Marc Eliot
The Long Gray Line was a commercial hit, and Ford then made Mister Roberts in 1954 for Warner Bros, as a favor to help Henry Fonda make a return to major studio filmmaking. Working again in CinemaScope, Ford produced another success and the film made a star out of newcomer Jack Lemmon, who won a Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
During production, at the U.S. Navy base on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean in September 1954, producer Leland Hayward arranged a meeting between Fonda and Ford to discuss changes Ford wanted to make in the original play to make it more cinematic. Ford, who was sprawled out on the sofa with a drink in his hand, sprang up and punched Fonda in the face. Ford’s drinking and generally hostile attitude, topped off by his punching Fonda, quickly became the talk of Hollywood. Their relationship was never the same after that and Ford left the film before it was finished. It was completed by Mervyn LeRoy, who shared screen credit with Ford, and Logan, who did not.
Despite this good run, stories of Ford’s increasing hostile behavior spread throughout Hollywood and as a result, few new offers came his way. At sixty-one, an alcoholic and in fragile health, half blind, and recovering from gall bladder surgery, he feared his long career might be over. Just to keep working, he agreed to direct two one-hour episodes of the TV anthology series Studio Directors Playhouse, the contents of which are better left forgotten (one featured Wayne).
And then he got a call from Merian Cooper, saying he was restructuring Argosy and partnering with “Sonny” Whitney’s production company.
IN LATE 1954 MERIAN COOPER had accepted the offer from his good friend Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, heir to both the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes and the owner of a stable of Thoroughbred horses. Whitney had long been involved in the motion picture business. While still in his teens, with his cousin John Hay Whitney he became a major investor in the development of the original Technicolor process and then a majority stockholder in the Technicolor Corporation. They later had a hand in perfecting the technology of CinemaScope. The two Whitneys also provided much of the $3.5 million production money to David O. Selznick’s company to make his 1939 film classic Gone with the Wind, after every major studio had turned it down (it was distributed by MGM). The success of that film, shot in Technicolor, made the Whitneys major players in Hollywood.
Seventeen years later, in 1954, C. V. Whitney formed “C. V. Whitney Pictures” and offered both Ford and Cooper a stake in the company and a five-year deal to serve as its vice president and executive producer. Cooper had accepted the deal, but Ford turned it down. After all the problems he had had with Argosy, he said he preferred to just make movies freelance.
Whitney, who always loved westerns, then bought the film rights to two novels. One was a Civil War saga called The Valiant Virginians, by James Warner Bellah, who had written the short stories that Ford had used as the basis for his cavalry trilogy. The other was Alan LeMay’s 1954 western saga The Searchers, which had been serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.
Whitney decided to go with The Searchers—“The biggest, roughest, toughest and most beautiful picture ever made in America!”—over The Valiant Virginians, believing that the Civil War film would be too expensive a picture to launch the new company. Whitney, via Cooper, then offered Ford the chance to direct The Searchers as the first picture of a three-picture deal that would pay him $175,000 each and 10 percent of the profits. Ford signed on.
Whitney and Cooper took the package to MGM to sell distribution rights in return for a 50/50 split of the gross. However, before the deal could be finalized, Columbia’s Harry Cohn made a counteroffer of a 65-35 split in Whitney’s favor. Warner Bros then came in to what had become an auction, willing to advance fully one-third of the projected $1.5 million production budget and distribute the movie. Despite the bad feelings between Ford and Warner over what had gone down during the making of Mr. Roberts, Ford okayed the deal. Ford hadn’t done a western in five years, since 1950’s Rio Grande, and was eager to return to the genre and to his beloved Monument Valley.
And he wanted Wayne to star in it.
Wayne, however, was hesitant to work with Ford again. Besides all the industry buzz about Ford’s drinking and his infamous on-set punch-out of Fonda, none of which came as a surprise to Wayne, he was well familiar with Ford’s methods and temperament. According to Patrick Wayne, his eldest child and an associate producer on The Searchers, “I can’t say whether my father wanted to do the film or not.”
He finally did, because there was something gnawing at him ever since High Noon had been hailed by critics as “the greatest western ever made.” Every major male star now wanted to be in a so-called adult western, including Clark Gable (Raoul Walsh’s 1955 The Tall Men), Gregory Peck (William Wyler’s 1958 The Big Sky), Henry Fonda (Anthony Mann’s 1958 The Tin Star), Robert Taylor (Robert Parrish’s 1958 Saddle the Wind), and Jimmy Stewart (Anthony Mann’s 1954 The Far Country), to name a few; and Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott only made westerns now.
TV, too, had fallen in love with the genre. In 1955, Bill Paley of CBS decided to move his network’s long-running radio series Gunsmoke to TV, and he approached Wayne about starring in it. He said had no interest in TV series work and suggested, instead, his friend James Arness. Arness was given the role and wound up playing it for two decades. Wayne agreed to introduce the first episode to personally endorse Arness and give the series a leg up.115
TV westerns were cheap and easy to make, especially since they could use the ready-made permanent sets of the movie studios. After the ratings success of Gunsmoke, westerns popped up on every network. By 1959, they reached their peak with twenty-eight different prime-time weekly series on the air with a crop of newcomers who made their names on the little box, including Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, and Michael Landon. These shows became the new B westerns with “adult westerns” now reserved for the big screen.
Wayne always became visibly rankled whenever he heard the phrase “adult western.” He thought he and Ford had been making them since Stagecoach. Now, it seemed to him, every studio in Hollywood wanted another High Noon. Wayne was determined not just to make a better western; he wanted to give a performance so powerful and moving it would remind audiences that he, not Cooper, was Hollywood’s greatest cowboy actor. That’s why, after reading Frank Nugent and John Ford’s script, even though it meant going back to work for Ford, he agreed to make the film. Wayne believed The Searchers was that good.
HE SIGNED ON WITH C. V. Whitney Pictures for $125,000 up front (paid out in weekly $1,000 installments), against 10 percent of the film’s profits, payable after it earned back its production costs. Ford’s deal was $175,000 and 10 percent of the profits for directing and cowriting the screenplay with Nugent.
The original Alan Le May novel was loosely based on a true-life incident that occurred in 1836, when a nine-year-old white girl by the name of Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by the Comanches, Kiowas, and Caddoes at Parker’s Fort on the Navasota River. They renamed her Naduah and she became the wife of Peta Oconoa, war chief of the Nocomi band. She was freed in 1860. Some accountings, including Le May’s fictional adaptation, claim it was a “recapture,” and after, when she tried to return to her tribe, she was held under guard until she starved herself to death. Her son, Quanah Parker, was the last free war chief of the Comanches.116
Ford and Nugent made one crucial change from the novel. They shifted the story from the girl’s being the primary character, to her rescuer, Ethan Edwards, to accommodate Wayne’s star power (Ethan was named Amos Edwards in the novel, changed for the film because of the popularity of the Amos ’n’ Andy comedy radio and TV shows). Ford loved the idea of following Ethan, the existential wanderer, searching for the kidnapped Debbie, and her abductor, Scar, so he can kill them both. Ethan’s sidekick for much of the pursuit is Martin Pawley, the part-Cherokee seventeen-year-old adopted child of Aaron and Martha Edwards, Ethan’s brother and sister-in-law, a character whose presence allows Ethan to
verbalize his feelings during their ten-year search for Debbie.
To find the right actor to play Martin, Ford tested many of the new crop of studio-contract pretty boys. At first he’d wanted Fess Parker, Disney’s TV Davey Crockett, but “Uncle Walt” had Parker under contract and wouldn’t lend him out, intending to use him in additional episodes as the character who set off the coonskin hat craze among the children of ’50s America. John Agar, who had appeared in two of the three parts of the cavalry trilogy, and whose career had since begun to fade, desperately wanted the part, but Ford no longer had any interest in him. He also briefly considered Robert Wagner, but Ford really wanted one of Wagner’s best friends, the up-and-coming Jeffrey Hunter.117
Hunter was a handsome, strong young actor with a face as pretty as a studio starlet. He had signed a two-year contract with Twentieth Century–Fox in 1950 after the studio’s talent scouts spotted him while he was still an undergraduate, in a play at UCLA (the contract would be extended every two years for the rest of the decade). Ford asked Zanuck for a loan-out of Hunter, the studio head agreed. However, smelling fresh meat, he couldn’t resist giving Hunt the Ford “treatment.” At the audition, after making him read scene after scene, and filming him, he made him take his shirt off and turn slowly around while flexing his muscles. Only then did he tell him he had the part. (Hunter became a favorite of Ford’s and would go on to make two other films for the director: The Last Hurrah in 1958 and Sergeant Rutledge in 1960.)
To fill out the cast, Ford used many of his stock company regulars, including Ward Bond, Olive Carey (Harry Carey’s widow), Harry Carey Jr., Ford’s son-in-law Ken Curtis, and the young and beautiful Natalie Wood, who was already under contract to Warner Bros as the grown-up Debbie. For the child Debbie, Ford used her younger sister, Lana Wood. Pippa Scott played Lucy, Debbie’s older sister. Vera Miles played Laurie Jorgensen, the daughter of the Edwardses’ neighbors. She becomes entangled in a love triangle with Charlie McCorry (Curtis), who is available but without passion, and Martin, who is absent but filled with it. This subplot does not merely supply some romance and comic relief from Ethan’s decade-long hunt for Debbie; it also serves as a warning of sorts to Martin, that he may turn into another Ethan, a lonely, bitter wanderer, if he doesn’t settle down and marry Laurie. The relationship between Ethan and Martin also reflects (and inverts) the one between Ford and Wayne, with Wayne/Ethan the paternal, if tough Ford, and Hunter/Pawley the younger, greener Wayne.
The Searchers is immeasurably enriched by Wayne’s extraordinary performance, filled with deep passion, a strong, if repressed sense of humanity, great physical strength and endurance, weariness, courage, and an eerie coldness, all wrapped up and held together by a controlled rage that is a window into Ford’s personality and moral complexities.
The Searchers begins in the middle of the story, as Ethan arrives on horseback at his brother’s home, his sagging body evidence of a complicated, dark life lived hard and tough. The audience soon learns he is a wanderer, but unsure from what or to where, whether he is running from something he did or running to something he wants to do, a character Andrew Sarris described as “representative of a peculiarly American wanderlust.”
Ford gives Wayne his best star entrance since the zoom-in of Ringo in Stagecoach. He is beautifully captured in deep focus by Ford’s brilliant cinematographer, Winton C. Hoch. We discover Martha from behind as she opens the door of her dark house to see who is coming. There is a degree of fear in her manner as she walks outside. The frame of the door expands as if by magic until it disappears and the camera follows her out. Ford has taken us from the dark, close confines of Martha’s home to the brightness of the wide-open plains (a scene reminiscent of Dorothy’s stepping into Oz). Over her shoulder, we then see what she sees, her brother-in-law, Ethan, in the distance. He seems to have appeared out of nowhere riding slowly and deliberately into the center of the frame, toward Martha, and the audience. As Martin Scorsese remembers from the first time he saw the film as a boy, during its initial theatrical run, “Suddenly, this character, this lonely character, comes out of the desert or something, and he’s absolutely terrifying.”
Terrifying and, as we soon learn, an obsessive bordering on and frequently crossing the fragile boundary between sanity and insanity. Sarris satirized Ethan’s character by borrowing from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Some [characters] start out mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon them.” Ethan is not unlike Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie in Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo, a ’50s film with distinct echoes of The Searchers. Both films are focused on characters obsessed with retrieving their past. Both are wanderers, whose searchings make their lives deeper and darker. Both are trapped in their own self-imposed emotional prisons. Both are figures of authority. Scottie is a retired police detective, Ethan a former Civil War soldier. And each causes the deaths of other men. The primary difference between the two characters and the films in which they appear is essentially stylistic; each reflects the personality of their respective directors. Hitchcock’s Scottie is an innocent wanderer drawn into a complex scheme of stolen identities from which he seeks his liberation, while Ford’s Ethan is a wanderer similarly obsessed by a crime of stolen identity but is by no means innocent. Scottie seeks redemption through lost love regained; Ethan seeks his by killing lost love.
Ford reveals early on what has brought Ethan back home, when his sister-in-law Martha, played by Dorothy Jordan, is caught by the camera, and we see the visiting Texas Ranger/clergyman Reverend Samuel Johnston Clayton, played by Ward Bond, who is having coffee in the kitchen. He is both an authority figure and a religious one, a character filled with the self-righteous entitlement that justified the great and violent expansion west. While Johnston is at the table, Ford’s camera allows us to glimpse Martha caressing Ethan’s cape as she stands alone in her bedroom, a telling moment so subtle it was missed by most viewers in 1956.
Nonetheless, as we will soon discover, it is the key to Ethan’s character and explains all that follows. Peter Bogdanovich asked Ford about that moment: “Was the scene, toward the beginning, during which Wayne’s sister-in-law gets his coat for him meant to convey silently a past love between them?” Ford: “Well, I thought it was pretty obvious—that his brother’s wife was in love with Wayne . . . you could tell by the way she picked up his cape and I think you could tell from Ward Bond’s expression and from his exit—as though he hadn’t noticed anything.” In the novel, their relationship is even more ambiguous. It is Amos who loves Martha but never confronts or expresses those feelings. We understand better now one reason for Ethan’s wandering.
He has returned from a three-year absence, the war over and reconstruction the order of the day. He brings with him a considerable amount of gold pieces and a fancy Mexican Revolution medallion in his possession. During his visit, Ethan gives Debbie, his young niece, the medallion, a talisman of Ethan’s prideful paternalism. It may be that Debbie, is, in fact, his own unacknowledged child, perhaps the real reason he left the homestead. Debbie’s coming fate may be seen, at least in part, as Ethan’s punishment for his forbidden love for Martha.
Not long after, Ethan, Martin, and a small party are lured away from the house by the Comanche, only to return to find everyone murdered and the house burned down to the ground. The Comanche have left behind a message, of sorts, Debbie’s doll. They have taken Debbie and her older sister, Lucy. The moment Ethan realizes the girls are still alive, it ignites his obsessive desire to retrieve them. He vows he will bring both back. He sets out with Martin, the girls’ half-Indian adopted brother, and Lucy’s fiancé, Brad Jorgensen (played by Harry Carey Jr.). When Ethan eventually discovers Lucy’s dead body (off-screen), an enraged Brad makes a suicidal attack on the camp of the Comanches (also off-screen) and is killed, suicide by Indian. Death stalks Ethan wherever he goes.
A decade-long Ahab-like pursuit on Ethan’s part ensues. As the seasons change, and others’ lives go on, Ethan’s chances of finding Debbie
alive grow slimmer. He learns that Debbie was taken by Scar (played by Henry Brandon, a European), the great white whale chief of the Nawyecka band of Comanches, and that he has made her one of his wives. There is a measure of vengeance working through Scar as well. The “white man” has taken his land, and he will take their women. Scar reflects the darker side of (the already dark) Ethan, and Debbie is reflected in Martin, Debbie’s half-Indian stepbrother. Ethan reveals to Martin that he intends to kill Debbie when he finds her because Scar has made her his wife; he has violated her in a way that can never be taken back. The film then becomes a personal battle between Ethan and Scar as much for Debbie’s soul as it is for her flesh. In the film’s shockingly brutal climax, Ethan scalps an already dead Scar shot to death by Martin (Scar, we know, scalped both Martha and Lucy), and then goes after Debbie, to kill her. A desperate Martin tries and fails to stop him. When Ethan has Debbie cornered, he gets off his horse, twirls his six-gun, his signature move, and, in a transformative and redemptive instant, he swoops her up in his arms with the same majestic Fordian swoop Wayne used with O’Hara in The Quiet Man.118
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.”