by Scott Eyman
In the late 1950s, Mitchum and his wife were invited to a party at Wayne’s house. Pilar was still angry at Mitchum for forcing her husband into eight weeks of unscheduled work on Blood Alley, but she was determined to be cordial. As Mitchum and his wife, Dorothy, came through the door, Pilar was there to greet him. “Boy,” Mitchum said, looking down the front of her dress, “do you need a new bra.”
Pilar hit the roof and ordered the Mitchums out of her house. When she told her husband what had happened, he managed to keep a straight face.
In early 1955, Wayne and Pilar were going to take a quick Mexican vacation, and then he would be back at Warners for a western for his Coach.
William Wellman called Wayne’s screen character “a nice guy with a special touch of nastiness.” That nastiness had been called on occasionally—Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima—but it was the Ford western that would make special demands, that would obliterate the actor’s innate likability and replace it with something far more dangerous.
The Ford picture was called The Searchers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The middle and late 1950s were a golden period for Wayne—nearly everything he did made money, and, with occasional exceptions, almost everything he did was good, too. This was probably why he rejected a gilt-edged offer from William Paley to star in the TV version of the hit radio show Gunsmoke. The money on offer was about $2 million guaranteed, not to mention partial ownership of the show, but Wayne turned it down, instead off-loading Batjac contract actor James Arness onto the project. He was only being consistent; a few months earlier, NBC had offered him a deal to finance all or most of his pictures and give Wayne 100 percent of the profits in return for exclusivity for Wayne on NBC shows.
This offer sent Charles Feldman into a tizzy and he advised Wayne to give it serious thought. Feldman told Wayne to talk to David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and Walt Disney. But Wayne didn’t feel comfortable with television. A few years later, he would turn down another lucrative TV offer from Allied Artists to host a John Wayne Theater—seventy-eight half hours. “I don’t think the price is right, nor that I have the time,” he grumbled.
Out of friendship for Arness, Wayne offered to introduce the first episode of Gunsmoke, and on September 10, 1955, he was as good as his word: “Good Evening. My name’s Wayne. Some of you may have seen me before. I hope so, I’ve been kicking around Hollywood a long time. I’ve made a lot of pictures out here—all kinds, and some of them have been westerns. And that’s what I’m here to tell you about tonight, a western. A new television show called Gunsmoke. No, I’m not in it—I wish I were though, because I think it’s the best thing of its kind that’s come along, and I hope you’ll agree with me. It’s honest, it’s adult, it’s realistic. Now when I first heard about the show Gunsmoke, I knew there was only one man to play it—James Arness. He’s a young fella and may be new to some of you, but I’ve worked with him and I predict he’ll be a big star. So you might as well get used to him, like you’ve had to get used to me. And now I’m proud to present my friend Jim Arness in Gunsmoke.”
It was a typically generous Wayne gesture for a friend, one that imparted added value to a series that had not yet earned a reputation. Arness played Sheriff Matt Dillon for the next twenty years. A month later, in October, Wayne shot a half hour TV episode, entitled “Rookie of the Year,” in five days, for a show called The Screen Directors Playhouse. He got $5,000 for the job, although he would undoubtedly have passed it up had anybody but John Ford been directing. Ward Bond and Patrick Wayne were also featured in the TV show, which Ford handled with his customary dispatch: ten to twenty setups a day, usually finishing between 2:30 and four in the afternoon.
“Rookie of the Year” was a straight favor for Pappy Ford, but for his next film with Ford, The Searchers, Wayne was getting a good payday. He received $250,000 plus 10 percent of the rentals after Warners recouped their negative cost.
Ford and screenwriter Frank Nugent made a full roster of changes in Alan Le May’s novel, many aimed at streamlining the cast and narrative. In the novel, Ethan’s name is Amos, there are two boys in the massacred family instead of one, the kidnapped Debbie falls in love with Marty, and it is not blinded Comanches who wander amongst the winds after death, but scalped Comanches. And one other thing: Amos dies in the end.
From the first day of production on The Searchers, Wayne assumed a different attitude. Normally, he was the most amiable of co-workers, but Ethan Edwards required him to access the darkest part of his character, and he couldn’t turn it on and off. “My father was able to become his character,” said his son Patrick, who played a small part in the picture. “During filming, I was in the presence of Ethan Edwards, not my father. When it was over, my father was back.” Likewise, Harry Carey Jr. remembered that Wayne “had a blanket over him in that film, a mood that was pretty strong and he carried it around with him 24/7. He didn’t joke around at all on The Searchers, and Duke had a good sense of humor.”
The picture had been shooting for a couple of weeks when Natalie Wood reported to the location in Monument Valley. She didn’t have any scenes scheduled for her first day, so she spent it sunbathing, appreciably darkening her color. When John Ford saw her, he was angry—he wanted to emphasize the lightness of her skin as a contrast with the Indians—and he let her know he was angry as only Ford could.
That he was arguably the greatest American director impressed the young—seventeen years—actress not at all. “Go shit in your hat!” she told him, just before storming off.
That night, there was a knock on her hotel room door.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Mr. Ford.”
The door opened slightly, just wide enough to admit a long arm, at the end of which was a hand holding Ford’s rumpled hat. He turned it upside down and shook it, just to show there was no shit in evidence. Ford and Wood patched up their differences, although she was never terribly enamored of him. Her experience with Wayne was considerably warmer. “She thought he was a very nice man,” said her husband, Robert Wagner.
Throughout the shoot, Ford streamlined Frank Nugent’s script, trimming exposition, cutting dialogue, eliminating explanations. In the novel, the center of the story is Martin Pawley; Amos Edwards has no particular desire or even intention to kill his niece, but Ford and Nugent introduced racial rage as the central motivation of the search, and they also made Martin a “half-breed” so as to make Ethan’s unease with miscegenation central in the narrative.
The Searchers was previewed in San Francisco on December 3, 1955, on a double bill with Rebel Without a Cause (there were giants in those days . . . ). Jack Warner’s assistant Walter MacEwen thought that the picture, although “brutal in spots to the point of being daring,” was a great success and reported back to his boss how it went:
The Searchers is a very big picture and was previewed to an enthusiastic audience. . . . I don’t believe we lost more than 2 or 3 people who probably just had to go . . . the picture has a great pictorial beauty which came through with great clarity on a very big screen, no doubt aided by the fact that it was photographed on the double-size negative of VistaVision. . . .
Wayne has never been better, in a rugged, sometimes cruel role, and the audience is with him all the way from his opening shots. . . . Wayne’s name on the main title got a tremendous hand.
The whole picture has a real feeling of bigness and honesty, as if you were actually witnessing how the pioneers lived on the frontier. . . . I do not believe that there are any major deletions to be made.
The initial reviews would be respectful but not overly enthusiastic. Variety wrote that The Searchers was “an exciting western on the grand scale” but also complained that “there is a feeling that The Searchers could have been so much more. It appears overlong and repetitious at 119 minutes.” There was one exception to the prevailing response. William Weaver, the critic for the Motion Picture Herald, wrote, “The Searchers is one of the great ones—one of the greatest o
f the great pictures of the American West,” and went on to compare it to The Covered Wagon and Shane and said that Ethan Edwards was “possibly the best all-around Wayne role he’s ever had.”
Wayne went on the road to sell The Searchers. He spent two and a half frantic days in Chicago, humping it from 7:45 in the morning until eleven at night, doing everything from radio shows to luncheons for the movie editors at the four Chicago dailies, to accepting the first poppy of the annual Poppy Day Association from the Rojieck triplets.
The Searchers went on to considerable financial success, earning $6.9 million (as of 1959) against a cost of $2.5 million. But 1959’s profits have paled as the film has gone on to become a perennial, revered by critics and audiences alike for its vast formal beauty, its uncompromising treatment of a main character ravaged by racism, and the fearless intimacy between actor and character.
Ethan Edwards is a mysterious figure. He’s carrying a lot of money, which is never explained, and the Reverend (Ward Bond) says of him somewhat obliquely that Ethan “fits a lot of descriptions.” Mainly, Ethan identifies with the thing he hates: Comanches.
The conflict in the movie, which is far more important than the actual plot, in which Ethan figures as an agent of disruption as well as reconciliation, is not between Ethan and society, but between Ethan and Ethan. Ethan has to be respected, but he can never be understood. His fury is not exactly unmotivated, but it is irrational. You can, as Garry Wills does, point to Ethan’s loss of the woman he loves to his brother, loss in the war, loss of his comrades, loss of the woman he loves to an Indian he hates. Yet none of that quite explains the blast furnace of rage and guilt that Wayne unleashes—unafraid, unapologetic.
Ethan is a racist, openly contemptuous of Martin Pawley for being part Cherokee. Not only that, he’s a murderous racist, committed to killing his own niece because she has become the squaw of the Indian chief Scar, who killed Debbie’s father and mother—the woman Ethan clearly loved.
Yet the roots of Ethan’s racism are unexplained. It’s clear that he hated Indians long before things became personal. Ethan just is. This mystery at the heart of the character’s darkness forces the audience to sit up and wonder, to make its own best guess about what comes next, and about just what Ethan is capable of.
In his malevolent determination to kill his niece because she has become a contaminated creature, as well as in the fury that Wayne expresses, largely without dialogue, the actor goes further than he ever had before or ever would again, and in the process he brings something new to his persona.
As Glenn Frankel wrote, “This was the heart of Wayne’s art. He came on direct, angry, and unbending, daring you to test him and prepared to deposit your ass on the ground with a punch to the jaw. Yet there was a certain sadness to the whole enterprise. Wayne’s character seemed to be constantly looking back, searching for something—a way of life, a code of honor—that had ceased to exist.”
And he also brought something new to the western, a genre that seamlessly encompasses all the great American themes—the trek west, the shifting balance between individual independence and communal alliance, and the challenges of technology: the stagecoach, the telegraph, the railroad. It’s a genre about ceaseless change.
Ford and Wayne introduce a particularly virulent racism into the equation, not as something to be vanquished (Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow), but as something to be assimilated. They also access a profound truth: Ethan is an outsider who can never be anything but an outsider, the sort of hard man mandatory for the taming of a nation or the waging of a war, but who cannot live in the aftermath, in a calmed environment.
As one critic noted, “Ford goes very far with Ethan. . . . A central character who spews racist invective at every opportunity, who mutilates the bodies of the dead . . . and [scalps] an adversary, even though he did not ‘earn’ that warrior right by killing him himself, who slaughters buffalo in an insane rage just to deprive Indians of food, and who is out to murder a child?”
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the hero.
Ford knew he could get away with it because Ethan was being played by John Wayne; he knew that Wayne had the strength to play profound psychological weakness—The Searchers is a Conradian tale in which an outward quest is really a metaphor for inner definition.
Ford and Wayne invite the audience to take Ethan as an extension of Hondo, as the John Wayne type—a completely competent loner of utter integrity, the only man capable of accomplishing the necessary task. As Randy Roberts and James Olson wrote of Ford’s landscapes and Ethan’s emotions, “Such landscapes and feelings trivialize religion, language and culture, because strength matters more than faith, action more than words, individual men more than women and families.” If it wasn’t such an insistent part of the fabric of the film, the audience could glide by the character’s murderous racism. But they can’t, because the dramatic movement of The Searchers is dictated by hate.
In the middle and latter stages of Wayne’s career, his characters’ fierce single-mindedness is often indicated by his refusal of the erotic: Tom Dunson holds himself aloof from emotional involvement in Red River, offering a woman a chance to bear his child only as a financial transaction; Ethan Edwards refuses to indulge his repressed passion for his brother’s wife in The Searchers; Tom Doniphon renounces the woman he loves in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance because another man is better for her. Among all the stars of his generation, only Wayne could consistently get away with this recurring motif of renunciation because only Wayne could believably play men who only needed themselves.
Ford emphasizes Ethan’s vehemence, his harshness, his inscrutability. At times, Ethan is like some creature from the id, a walking representation of the enormous cost of repression. And at the film’s conclusion, as Ethan lifts Debbie over his head—a moment not in Frank Nugent’s script—duplicating a gesture from the first moments of the film, he emphasizes the tidal pull of family. As he cradles her like a child, he murmurs, “Let’s go home, Debbie,” and the film moves toward reconciliation and toward its legendary ending.
Ethan’s symbolic aspect might be why Ford has the other characters move around Ethan in the film’s final scene as if he isn’t there—Ethan has become a ghost in a darkness he can’t dispel. No one thanks him, no one acknowledges his existence. Now that he’s completed the task only he could accomplish, now that the darkness is gone, so is Ethan, left to wander in the winds.
Harry Carey Jr. was on the set when Ford shot the ending.
The big man standing alone in the doorway, the red desert stretching out behind him. The other players in the scene, which included my mother, had passed by the camera, a joyous moment. Debbie was home at last, brought there in the arms of the man in the doorway. Uncle Jack told Duke that he was to look and then walk away, but just before he turned, he saw my mother, the widow of his all-time hero, standing behind the camera. It was natural as taking a breath. Duke raised his left hand, reached across his chest and grabbed his right arm at the elbow.
My father, Harry Carey Sr., did that a lot in the movies when Duke was a kid in Glendale, California. It was Duke’s tribute. He’d spent many a dime just to see that. He stared at my mother for a couple of beats, then turned, walking away into loneliness across the red sand. The Jorgensen cabin door slowly closes.
It’s a daring shot. As cinematographer Winton Hoch observed, “We had a vertical doorway and a horizontal frame. But here again, you’re bold and you gamble and it is a shot that Jack wanted. He had his reasons.” More subtly, Wayne’s walk is different in the last shot. He no longer moves with his purposeful, graceful stride; as the door closes, he’s almost staggering, aimless. For the first time, Ethan gives evidence of not knowing where he’s going.
Wayne always had a thrilling command of physical rhetoric—the one-handed cocking of the rifle in Stagecoach, walking malevolently through the longhorns at the climax of Red River. But his work in The Searchers is even more expressive: when Ethan sees the burning cab
in of his brother, Ford cuts to a low-angle shot of Ethan on his horse. Wayne unholsters his rifle by flinging it behind him, the scabbard flying off behind the horse, then brings the rifle back, all in one fluid motion. It’s a moment that takes longer to describe than it does to witness—the piercing beauty that movies were made for.
Some of these movements were Ford’s (lifting Debbie over his head); some were Wayne’s (holding his elbow and ambling away as the door closes). That Wayne was capable of carrying off these bravura moments is his actor’s glory—he had been what Brecht would call an “epic actor” before, and would be again, but the greatness of this performance is in going all the way with such a largely indefensible human being, who embodies what D. H. Lawrence referred to as the essential American soul: “harsh, isolate, stoic and a killer.”
Besides his rage, Ethan has intelligence, faith, unexpected flashes of generosity, loyalty, purpose, audacity, skill. That’s the way he’s written, but Wayne brings a touch of something else: the hope of redemption. And Ford and Wayne brilliantly suggest the stifled sexual desire at the core of his racist obsession.
In the past Wayne had gotten close to the power he summons here, but either the script or the director had let him down. But in The Searchers, his life as a man coalesces around his gifts as an actor: the residual bitterness he carried from growing up in a brooding, recriminatory household; the years of working in films he felt were degrading, that led to him being ignored, scorned, or condescended to, of being sloughed off by the industry he respected. And, perhaps, guilt over his own mistakes. Here he summons his rage and pours it into a vehicle that can contain it—barely.
Wayne never puts any comforting space between the character and the actor. He never asks for our sympathy. Wayne understands this distressed and distressing loner. Ethan has seen a lot of ugliness—in the breaking of the land, in the war, in the acts of the Indians, in himself. But he stops just short of the one unforgivable act, and in the final image, embodies resignation as well as a plaintive loneliness—the same towering power that brings Debbie home also makes a domestic connection impossible.