#529: The Searchers
A difficult movie with a difficult hero
Initial release: May 16, 1956
Director: John Ford
The western is a genre with a complex relationship with race. From the frequent portrayal of Native Americans as savages arrayed against good, God-fearing white cowboys, to the frequent use of brownface (especially in Euro westerns, but American-made films were by no means innocent) — it’s tough to argue that the western, especially as it existed prior to the 60s and 70s, is anything but a vestige of a dream of empire. And nobody embodies that dream better than John Wayne: the ultimate man’s man, the guy who would not only help define the classic western hero, but whose racist politics and pugnacious persona helped push American conservatism towards the ugly reactionary attitude it’s known for.
Which brings us to The Searchers, directed by frequent Wayne collaborator John Ford, and regarded in some circles as Wayne’s best role — though, ironically, not by him: it wasn’t racist enough. Or to put it another way, The Searchers shows John Wayne as he really is, and not the morally black-and-white western hero that he’s known for.
The film begins simply enough. Wayne is Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran come home three years after the war ended, just in time to see a band of Comanche murder his relatives and kidnap his niece, Debbie. Aided by Marty, his adopted nephew (whom Ethan frequently reminds that he doesn’t see Marty as a family member, given that Marty is part Cherokee) they spend the next five years tracking down the Comanche band that did the deed. As the search wears on, it becomes clear that they’re animated by very different goals. Marty, of course, wishes to rescue his sister. Ethan, already jaded and driven by a desire for revenge, just wants to kill as many Comanche as he can. Frequently they argue over what Ethan intends to do should they find Debbie alive — Ethan would sooner shoot Debbie as “tainted” by her experience among the Comanche, making his contempt for Native Americans screamingly obvious as often as possible. In a different film, this might be taken at face value, but he faces near constant pressure from Marty to hold off.
It’s halting and incomplete, but The Searchers might be regarded as one of the earliest Westerns to dig into the racism that shaped the western as a genre and fueled the frontier conflicts that inspired them. Far from being the stereotypical cowboy hero, Ethan is a haunted man; he arrives at the homestead of his brother still wearing his cavalry uniform, refuses to explain where he’s been since the war (save only to say that he wasn’t at the surrender) or where the money he’s carrying around came from. His relationship with Martha, his brother’s wife, is subtext that’s everything short of being just plain text; there’s an unspoken history there that suggests much in the way of why he left for the war in the first place. He’s frequently cruel, desecrating Comanche corpses and firing upon a retreating warband. In a very real sense, he’s far more inhuman than the walking stereotypes he fights against. He never really learns to let go of his hate; but when he finally catches up to Debbie in the film’s finale, he embraces her like she were his own daughter — which she very well might be. The Comanche aren’t just faceless braves whooping their way into battle. They are that, of course, but an encounter between Ethan and Marty and the Comache chief, known as Scar for the nasty scar across his face, reveals that Scar has his own reasons for doing what he does: his two sons were murdered by white men. Scar and Ethan are thus two sides of the same coin, violent men driven by revenge and contempt for their enemies. For every atrocity that Scar’s warband commits, Ethan does something as bad or worse. He is driven by obsession, a need for revenge, a bloodthirst that pushes an already questionable man into something unto villainy.
Wayne has done two things with this character: one, he’s played his greatest role yet, a complex figure of violence and hatred who, in the end, must go on alone; and two, he’s accidentally revealed to the world the real John Wayne. We know that Wayne was a racist and homophobe (and low-key an antisemite) who openly praised white supremacy. Legend has it that Wayne had to be restrained by security before he could drag Native activist Sacheen Littlefeather off the stage at the Oscars (Littlefeather having been invited by Marlon Brando, who was boycotting the event in protest of Native mistreatment at the hands of the film industry.) He’d built his film career shooting as many Native Americans as he could on the silver screen. But to this day he still remains a symbol of masculinity in the tough, uncompromising world of the Old West, with little examination of the baggage that comes with that. Ethan Edwards is John Wayne laid bare: a violent reactionary, a relic in a world that he increasingly doesn’t understand anymore.
It’s not a perfect movie by any means, far from it. The portrayal of the Native Americans is more or less what you’d expect, character depth on Scar’s part notwithstanding; a sequence where Marty does some trading with a band camped by a Bureau of Indian Affairs agency office and accidentally winds up getting married to one of them had me cringing so bad I thought I would turn inside out. The film feels disjointed at times, even episodic; part of this is due to the long timeframe, of course, but it’s not helped by the frequent return to side characters, many of whom are cartoonish caricatures, archetypal to the point of cliché. Ford’s use of soundstages undercuts his much more beautiful naturalist photography, shot in Ford’s favorite shooting location of Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona border. The film is a technical masterpiece when it wants to be, but in general it’s a sketchy background for a slightly daring character study at a time when the kind of hate and viciousness that Ethan embodies was never supposed to be so obvious.
The Searchers is a complicated movie; released during the last period of the Hays Code’s relevance, at a time when racism was not just the norm, but expected, it represents the very slightest of initial attempts to subvert the traditional themes of the western and its archetypal heroes, while at the same time being rife with much of the same issues as the films that embody those themes. It’s John Wayne the actor at his best, because it finally lays bare what John Wayne the person is like at his worst.
No wonder he preferred Rio Bravo.
