by Marc Eliot
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 infl
uenced 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.
The Searchers barely made money at the box office, but Wayne realized his recent movies weren’t breaking any records. Blood Alley managed to break even in its initial theatrical run. The Conqueror, released domestically a few months before The Searchers, had proved the disaster he knew it would be. It failed to turn a profit (not including the millions Hughes spent after it had finished its run to buy back the negative). The Searchers did okay, but it was not by any means a blockbuster. RKO then released the nearly eight-year-old Jet Pilot (reportedly Hughes owned that negative as well), and it proved another bomb, unable to make back its production costs. Suddenly, Duke the indestructible couldn’t buy a hit.
After The Searchers’ critical failure, Sonny Whitney decided to get out of the film business. Whitney was a wealthy kid who treated movies the same way Howard Hughes did, like a toy. After The Searchers opened, Whitney was already in preproduction on The Valiant Virginians, with Ford in place to direct, when he suddenly pulled the plug on the project. He met personally with Ford to assure him it had nothing to do with the success or failure of The Searchers. He now wanted to buy a chain of television stations, a medium in which be believed it would be much easier to make a lot of money.
C. V. Pictures made only two more films, both in production and hard to pull the plug on without taking a financial bath. One was Jerry Hopper’s 1958 The Missouri Traveler, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century coming-of-age story starring Brandon deWilde (the towhead from Shane), Lee Marvin, a Ford stock company member, Gary Merrill, and Ken Curtis. The other was Ted Tetzlaff’s 1959 The Young Land, starring six-foot-one Patrick Wayne, who bore a remarkable resemblance to his father but was only seventeen years old and needed both his and Josephine Saenz’s written approval to work full-time (Wayne’s only condition was that his boy work as an actor in the summer and agree to return to school in the fall). Whitney had signed Patrick to a $200-a-week contract for forty weeks, or $450 a week if the picture took less time, whichever was the larger amount. The Young Land also featured Dennis Hopper, Yvonne Craig, and Dan Dailey. When the two pictures wrapped, C. V. Pictures was history.
Ford suffered a period of severe depression after the cancellation of The Valiant Virginians, during which time he wrote a letter to Wayne, saying the pleasure of making movies had left him. The business was changing, Ford said, and he felt lost in this new world of independent-driven moviemaking.
CHARLES FELDMAN QUIETLY BEGAN NEGOTIATIONS with Twentieth Century–Fox’s production head, Buddy Adler, to secure Wayne a ten-year, minimum three-picture nonexclusive deal that would pay him $200,000 each year, with Feldman’s commission to be paid by the studio and Batjac having the option to produce any or all of the movies.
It was a big score for Wayne in an industry that was rapidly shrinking. When asked by one reporter how he had landed such a great deal, he turned back to the past as a way of explaining the future: “There are only a handful of big stars left . . . They won’t spend any money to make stars. They won’t take a chance on kids. And the new ones who have come along all go in for that mannered [Method] acting. They won’t take any direction.” It was Wayne’s defensive explanation of his own success; there was nobody left from the old days who was any good, and the new actors weren’t his, and presumably his audience’s, cup of tea. Wayne appeared to disregard his rather formidable contemporaries, including Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Taylor, Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Rock Hudson, and others who had come out of the system, as he had, and the younger crop of all studio-developed talent, including Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, and all of whom were turning out quality movies.
And there was something else. The power of the notorious blacklist was at last beginning to fade after the 1954 censure of Senator McCarthy, and over the next several years the majors began to relax their official ban on “Communists.” In addition, television was based on the East Coast and with close physical proximity to the theater, which was not vulnerable to Hollywood’s blacklist. The medium still suffered, mostly because the revived postwar foreign markets wanted films that ignored the blacklist on actors, writers, and directors and gave a lot of the best exiled American talent, names like Robert Rossen, John Berry, and Bernard Gordon, among them, a second chance overseas.
At the same time, Wayne, who had once felt compassion for those he felt victimized by the blacklist and the HUAC hearings—which he pulled back from when he feared becoming a victim himself—now began once more to harden his stand against the left, a form of self-enshrinement he felt he deserved for all he had done on the front lines of the war on Communists. While more and more blacklisted actors began to find work, and writers and directors had kept working under assumed names, and those who had instigated or supported the blacklist were either dying off or fading from power, Wayne remained uncompromising in his anti-Communism (some of his criticism of the ne
w crop of talented youth who wouldn’t “take orders” was Wayne’s veiled accusation of their lack of respect for the industry, to him a step below a lack of respect for the country). His resistance to change was granite hard and the more doctrinaire he became, the more out of fashion he appeared. While the rest of the industry looked to survive by moving forward and changing with the times, to Wayne, the future was the enemy of the past.
ADLER HAD FULLY EXPECTED WAYNE to start immediately producing motion pictures for Twentieth Century-Fox. Wayne, however, demurred, telling Adler he needed a break. He said he had just become a new father and wanted to spend some quality time at home. Adler said he understood how Wayne felt, and that he should do what he needed to do.
He did—and decided to go out on tour to promote the long-delayed overseas opening of The Conqueror at the personal request of his good friend Howard Hughes.
Wayne had reasons to want to go. He had never been a doting father type, and the shift in dynamic from romance to rock-a-bye just wasn’t doing it for him. And there was family trouble. It began before The Searchers ended, when Mary Antonia “Toni” Wayne, his nineteen-year-old daughter from his first wife, learned her father’s new wife was going having a baby just three weeks before she, Toni, was to marry twenty-seven-year-old law student Donald La Cava. Toni asked Wayne to walk down the aisle and give her away, and after, sit next to Josie at the church. To make things worse, Pilar was not invited.