Years later, Ford broke one of Dobe Carey’s ribs while filming a comic fight scene in Two Rode Together, starring James Stewart and Richard Widmark. Dobe and Dick Widmark had been out drinking until dawn—they’d each polished off four double margaritas in one particular Mexican establishment—and though Widmark, who usually didn’t drink, seemed unscathed, Dobe showed up on location decidedly the worse for wear.
Ford showed no mercy in the staged fight, usually choreographed to avoid injury, but this time the director yelled, “All right, go at it! Make it goddamned rough. Action!” After a few takes, Dobe was exhausted, suffering from heat exhaustion. Dobe recalled,
Between one of the takes, Uncle Jack came over to the three of us while we were lying on the ground. I was lying on my stomach, head-to-toe beside Dick [Widmark], trying to catch my breath. Uncle Jack…came up beside me and fell to his knees. One knee buried itself in my back between my ribs. He leaned as hard as he could on that knee while he reached over and fiddled with Dick’s neckerchief. Then I heard a sound like a dry stick of wood breaking in half.
Andy Devine, who was a considerable distance away, said, “There goes Dobe’s ribs!”
SONS OF THE PIONEERS
Rio Grande is more visually stirring than the other two trilogy Westerns, with stunning vignettes: Wayne walking along the Colorado River, his weathered, pained face juxtaposed against the majestic landscape, while the Sons of the Pioneers sing their songs. Wayne has never looked as strong and iconic as he does in Rio Grande. Strong men are moved by music, Ford shows us, as we see in the faces of Yorke and Sheridan and Quincannon listening to Ken Curtis’s serenades.
Ford loved the sound of male voices singing in harmony, and he used male choruses in many of his films. Ford welcomed Curtis into the family when he married Ford’s daughter, Barbara, with the sly comment that now he could hear his favorite songs sung at any time. The use of Americana music, even if sometimes anachronistic, served both to create an ambience and to reflect the historical fact that Civil War soldiers on both sides sang to lift their spirits. There was so much suffering on the battlefield that singing was one of the few soldier’s joys.
The Sons of the Pioneers, led by the versatile Curtis, provided the almost continuous music for Rio Grande—love songs like “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” marching songs like “Footsore Cavalry,” cowboy ballads like “Cattle Call,” and working songs like “Low Bridge (Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal).” Strains of “Dixie” are played at the film’s end, suitable considering the film is set just at the end of the Civil War. Closing with this classic southern tune demonstrates that the tensions between troops from the North and the South, very much present at the outset, are resolved by the end of the movie, just as the split between Lieutenant Colonel Yorke and Kathleen moves ultimately toward a kind of reconciliation, a resolution effected in no small part by their son’s actions.
Throughout the picture, the recruits are all addressed as “boy,” and to underline that status early in the film, Yorke’s very boyish-looking son, Jeff, gets into a fistfight with a soldier who is much older, bigger, and more muscular—almost a caricature of a tough, full-grown man. We see the vast gulf Jeff has to bridge before he can be called a man, and when his commanding officer and father, Yorke, arrives on the scene of the brutal, uneven fight, he allows it to continue as a lesson to his son. It’s not important who wins the fight; what’s important is the younger boy’s willingness to engage and to defend himself. Of course, the older, heavier soldier dominates, but when the fight is over, Quincannon—the oldest and biggest one of all—punches him out.
On one hand, this is a lesson in survival, but it’s also a demonstration that to achieve maturity, the boy has to take on the man. Between Roman riding and no-holds-barred fisticuffs, it’s not clear that Jefferson Yorke will survive this man’s army. However, the boy proves his worth by helping to rescue the children kidnapped by the Apaches. And when his father is grievously wounded in the attack, he asks his son to pull out the Apache’s arrow. It’s a feat that takes physical strength and an unflinching ability to inflict pain on a loved one in order to save his life—the very lesson Yorke has been trying to teach his son all along.
The movie ends as it began, with exhausted and wounded soldiers trailing back to the fort, but now it is only Kathleen we see, scouring their faces to see if her husband is among them. When she sees him being transported back on a pallet, she takes his hand, and Yorke tells Kathleen, “Our boy did well,” hinting that the two may finally be reunited in their marriage.
SOLDIER’S CAUSE
Over the course of the Cavalry Trilogy, women take on roles of greater significance, from Shirley Temple’s Philadelphia to Maureen O’Hara’s Kathleen, who is far more Wayne’s equal than a helpless dependent. But Joanne Dru, as Olivia Dandridge, is more problematical. She isn’t tough enough to “stay the winter,” which means she would not make a good army wife, and she puts the troops in peril when she needs to be rescued. The trailer for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon says it all: “Because of her, men fight heroically. Because of her, men die.”
The woman has to be worthy of gallantry and protection—and only sometimes of desire, because Ford was not comfortable filming love scenes, which he considered going against “my nature, my religion, and my natural inclinations.” When she is not—when she has been unfaithful, tarnished, or otherwise deemed unworthy of male sacrifice and bravery, then the urge to protect turns into the urge to destroy. This is what we see in Ford’s greatest Western, The Searchers.
4
The Avenging Loner: The Searchers
Don’t let the boys waste their lives in vengeance.
—SPOKEN BY MRS. JORGENSEN IN THE SEARCHERS
I didn’t know that the big son of a bitch could act.
—JOHN FORD
The Searchers is John Ford’s masterpiece. In 2007, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked it twelfth in its list of the best hundred movies; the following year, the AFI deemed it the greatest Western ever made. Released in 1956, it was John Ford’s 115th film, his 12th made with John Wayne, and his 5th picture shot in Monument Valley. Film director Curtis Hanson, who made L.A. Confidential, among other films, has described this particular John Ford and John Wayne partnership as one of film history’s great collaborations. The film exposes America’s deeply embedded racism through John Wayne’s role as the vengeful Ethan Edwards. Revenge is a central motivating aspect of this role for Wayne, different in many ways from the hero he was by then well loved for playing. In fact it signaled a shift from his more traditional heroes to the grizzled persona that Wayne came to embody in many of the thirty-seven feature films that followed. But it wasn’t the first such character he played: Wayne’s role in Howard Hawks’s 1948 film Red River gave us our first glimpse of Duke Wayne as a hardened, take-no-prisoners patriarch, tougher than the characters he plays in Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy.
In Red River, Duke plays Tom Dunson, a rancher driven to near madness by the difficulties in herding ten thousand head of cattle from Texas to Missouri. He lashes out against his adopted son, Matthew Garth, played by Montgomery Clift, when Matthew rightfully takes the cattle away from him and diverts the herd to Abilene, Kansas. Dunson begins as a “good” man, but he is increasingly crazed by a growing awareness of his impossible journey, by his lack of sleep, and by the defection of some of his drovers, whom he’s threatened to lynch for abandoning the cattle drive and stealing rations. He becomes tyrannical, unable to admit that he’s been wrong on insisting that they head for Missouri instead of Abilene, a more direct, though untried, route, and unable to accept any challenges to his authority, especially from Matt.
Red River’s romantic subplot features Joanne Dru as the feisty Tess Millay, a dance hall girl traveling with a gambling outfit and bordello heading to Las Vegas, though she insists that she’s “not one of them”—that is, not a prostitute. After catching Matt’s attention, she brings the warring father and son together by angrily remin
ding them that they do indeed love each other. It’s a scene dictated by rigid cultural convention, the late 1940s and the 1950s idea of women as emotionally astute but living only to make the lives of their men easier.
When Hawks uses immigrants and nonwhite characters, such as a stock Irishman and a comic Indian sidekick, it’s merely to add flavor. Absent is Ford’s profound dedication to presenting the expansionist history of America and the nation’s melting pot character—the Irish, the Chinese, the Welsh, the Swedes, and the many other ethnic groups who came and often fought together to make the land theirs. Also absent is Ford’s willingness to acknowledge that this expansion came at the cost of the Native American way of life—a fact Ford increasingly saw not only from the Anglos’ point of view but from the Indians’ as well. In The Searchers, the Comanche raiding party is shown as savage, but the scene of a smoking Indian village ravaged by the U.S. Cavalry attempts to balance the equation.
This was Wayne’s first major role as a vengeful antihero, and it made John Ford reconsider his protégé’s range as an actor. In Red River, John Wayne is completely convincing in the role of single-minded avenger—a fact that was not lost on Ford. “I didn’t know that the big son-of-a-bitch could act,” he reportedly said after seeing Hawks’s film, and he subsequently cast Wayne as the older Captain Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, aging him with gray hair and reading glasses. On the occasions admirers thought that Red River was a John Ford film, he took the compliment gracefully and didn’t correct their error. Red River does seem Fordian in visual style, mood, and content, and it was made by a director Ford admired; Hawks greatly admired and looked up to Ford in return. Indeed, Hawks employs elements pioneered by the older director: sweeping western landscapes under roiling skies, a focus on masculine camaraderie as well as disruption among ranks, and few women, but strong, outspoken ones, willing to fight for their man. It’s worth noting that Ford’s influence was not confined to Hawks’s vision for the film; Ford actually worked on the project in a small way, overseeing some of the editing. But Red River, though a powerful and enjoyable picture, is less profound than Ford’s Searchers, which investigates the darkness at the heart of America’s western expansion. And Ford would never have resolved a conflict with a speech, as Hawks does; Ford’s preference was always for strong visual language, for showing rather than telling.
What is most powerful in Red River—besides the beautiful, restrained acting of Monty Clift in his screen debut—is the image of John Wayne as Thomas Dunson stalking Matt with intent to kill. The final scene is merciless: Dunson arrives in Abilene and strides relentlessly through a crush of milling cattle, pushing them out of his way in order to confront his adopted son. The fact that he will not be assuaged—the inevitability of his vengeance—is terrifying. He has gone from hero to villain over the course of the movie, and the audience indeed fears that he will kill Matt. There is an Old Testament quality to Dunson’s rage.
This is new territory for John Wayne, whose roles to this point involve increasingly tough characters but not a willingness to kill a loved one. Peter Bogdanovich observes that it took Hawks to discover “the most iconic way for Duke to behave. He could have remained a very likable leading man, but not an icon. Hawks was extraordinary in finding a niche in which the star was most attractive. The same thing with Bogart—he found the quintessential Humphrey Bogart” in To Have and Have Not—“and the same thing with Cary Grant, in Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday: two sides of the same coin.”
Ford was irritated that Hawks saw this dimension to Duke before he did, just as he had been angry at Raoul Walsh for poaching his protégé and being the one to give him his new name. But he respected Hawks nonetheless, and the two men remained friends. Hawks, for his part, “had enormous respect for Ford,” says Bogdanovich. “In fact, when he was around him, he seemed like a kid around the school headmaster.”
Monty Clift makes for a fascinating on-screen combination with the older John Wayne. Clift was a product of the newly influential Method technique by way of Lee Strasberg’s famed Actors Studio in New York, while Duke Wayne, B Westerns veteran, cobbled together his approach by absorbing the techniques—or at least the confidence—of his more polished co-stars while under Ford’s tyranny. And yet they mesh beautifully, with both actors giving riveting performances. By now Wayne’s sheer size and bulk, and the lines on his roughened but still handsome face, give him an authority that contrasts with Clift’s youthful, unlined prettiness. In a way, it’s an ushering in of Method acting, which would come to dominate in the next few decades, but in this film both styles deliver the same punch. As Martin Scorsese has noted, John Wayne “was always underrated as an actor,” but Red River shows us the dark depths of his range.
The Searchers would sear those depths into cultural memory.
VENGEANCE IS MINE
The insatiable vengeance possessing Tom Dunson is taken even further in the role of the relentless Ethan Edwards. In The Searchers, Ethan enters the picture as a man motivated by his racial hatred of Indians, which is only deepened when a Comanche raiding party slaughters his brother, Aaron; his beloved sister-in-law, Martha, and her son; and kidnaps their two daughters, teenage Lucy and six-year-old Debbie. Ethan joins a posse of deputized Texas Rangers rounded up by Ranger captain the Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton, played by Ward Bond, and they set out to find the kidnapped girls. Lucy, a young woman, is found raped and murdered by her captors, but of Debbie there is no sign. What follows is the seven-year search to rescue her, carried out by Ethan and his nephew, a handsome youth named Martin Pawley, played by Jeffrey Hunter. Ethan had rescued Martin as an infant after his family was killed by Indians, and Aaron and Martha took the baby in to raise as their own. Though adopted, Martin is very much a part of their family, and he considers Debbie his true sister; he wants nothing but to find her and secure her safety and freedom. As far as he’s concerned, she is the only family he has left.
Visually, the film is extraordinarily beautiful, beginning with the now famous opening shot of a western expanse—the red formations of Monument Valley—framed by the threshold of a homestead’s dark interior, and a prairie wife, Martha, looking out as Ethan Edwards approaches on horseback. Though the film and the book it was based on—Alan Le May’s The Searchers—are both set in the flats of West Texas, Ford shot in his beloved Monument Valley. His vistas are clearly inspired by the paintings and photographs of western artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, particularly in his depictions of Indian camps. His love of horses is expressed here as well, in lyrical but gratuitous shots of the animals swimming and cavorting in rivers, all adding to the painterly grace of Ford’s sweeping vistas. Indeed, Scorsese calls The Searchers “one of the most beautiful films ever made.”
Duke Wayne as the implacable racist Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, 1956. His most terrifying role, and one of his greatest performances.
In that opening shot, the cabin’s interior is dark against the bright beauty of the landscape, and the waiting woman is reminiscent of the cavalry wives stoically waiting for their husbands to return from their battle with renegade Indians in Rio Grande. Historically, Ford shows, men fight, and women wait. The shot of the landscape framed by the cabin’s threshold is haunting, and it is also reminiscent of a powerful threshold image in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 film, I Know Where I’m Going!, in which a self-possessed young woman bent on marrying a wealthy industrialist is seen framed in the doorway of a Scottish country house where she will stay the night on her journey to meet her fiancé. She pauses at the threshold and, by entering, entirely changes her fate. This doesn’t take away from Ford’s originality, because he certainly learned from other directors, such as his atmospheric use of fog and mist in The Informer, inspired by F. W. Murnau. Like most great artists, Ford was an avid learner who took what he needed.
But the threshold image is used differently in The Searchers. Ford underlines a fundamental conflict in the heart of his hero, an
d in his own heart as well: the deep pull of domestic, familial, and community places, versus the call of the windswept frontier, beyond the blessings of civilization—the yin and the yang of femininity and masculinity, two realms Ford celebrated and struggled to reconcile in his personal life.
Not to say that women haven’t also felt this pull between hearth and horizon—indeed, that yearning helped drive the second wave of feminism—but in Ford Westerns it’s the hero who is torn, while female characters express their strength and individuality in other ways. Usually they fight to maintain the integrity of the home, threatened not just by external events but by their men’s restless longings, ambitions, or sense of duty, dramatized later in The Searchers when Martin sets out on the long search with Ethan to find his captive niece. Martin’s fiancée, Laurie Jorgensen, played by Vera Miles, is furious about being left to wither on the vine. “I wasn’t cut out to be no old maid!” she wails. She bosses him, she kisses him, she fights with him, she makes it clear that she loves him and that she is his equal, but she finally gives in to his need to follow Ethan on his heroic quest, even giving him her own horse—angrily, reluctantly—to continue the pursuit. One can easily imagine her joining the search in a modern-day, revisionist Western.
Wayne and Ford Page 10