Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: The Searchers (1956)

Pickings have been slim. The Olivia Wilde-helmed The Invite has been hanging on for months, a comedy with a solid 7.5 or so on IMDB. I've thought about going to see it a half-dozen times and, frankly, it just gives me the creeps. There's a John Boorman documentary on how he screwed up Exorcist II: The Heretic that gives me Jodorowsky's Dune vibes but it's awkward to get to. So I says to the Boy, I says, "Well, what if we went to see The Searchers?" 

And what if we wore hats?

I had seen The Searchers twice before. The first time was as a relatively young nearly 29-year-old. (I approach 29 like Xeno's Paradox: I get closer and closer to it every year but never quite hit it.) After having avoided Westerns all my life—living in a dry, dusty place gave me an aversion to going to see movies about dry, dusty places, and all Westerns are thus—the Old Man and I took in a series at the local Laemmle. (Both the Old Man and the local Laemmle are gone, alas.)

This series turned me around, as I had absorbed some of the negative stereotyping of Westerns being one-sided, simplistic, macho—and I presume there's probably an element of this in the serials and the Republic-type B-pictures, but the movies we saw presented Indians as a threat but not necessarily as bad guys. There was a strong understanding of the difference between macho and hard, where "hard" meant doing what had to be done and not whining about it no matter how much you hated it.

The Searchers, in fact, was sort of shocking and, when I first saw it, I felt it was racist.

Hey, I said I was a young nearly twenty-nine.

In fairness, very few Germans fought cowboys in the Old West.

My thinking was that, clearly Ethan (John Wayne) is meant to be racist, which doesn't make the movie racist. But the movie seems to agree with his stance which would make the movie racist. 

How does it "seem to agree" with his stance? Well, it shows the victims of Comanche captivity as becoming insane, barbaric, retarded, etc. 

The second time I saw it, with The Flower, I liked it better. And I started to wonder. I was much further along the road to 29 at that point, and I did a little research and discovered that, well, yes, the Comanches were savage in this particular wise, and the source book is very well researched. (Though the actual story it's based on is inverted, with the kidnapped woman preferring to stay with the Amerind tribe. That's a whole ball of wax, tho'.)

As it turns out, The Boy had never seen it, and this was my third time viewing. And I liked it even better.

That's Ethan's mother and father in the older graves.

First of all, the movie's been given the 4K treatment, and it is gorgeous. A lot of those old westerns had sharper contrast than the noirs, and Monument Valley probably doesn't even look this good in person. Like Blade Runner, every frame's a painting. Unlike Blade Runner, The Searchers isn't like watching a thousand paintings dry.

While watching this, I kept thinking: "This reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia. The landscape becomes its own character. The sense of scale makes everything feel static and urgent at the same time. Allegedly, David Lean watched The Searchers repeatedly while preparing for Lawrence.

Second, John Wayne! TJMP has an insightful video on movie stars, and Wayne is a perfect example: He was very limited in the roles that he could perform. Not necessarily by his talent, but definitely by his star status. Here, while working completely inside this tough old cowboy role, he manages to act up a storm—subtly. 

When Ethan shows back up at the family home after the war, he's welcomed by brother Aaron (Walter Coy) and sister-in-law Martha (Dorothy Jordan, coaxed out of retirement by her husband Merian C. Cooper and longtime friend John Ford). The feelings between Ethan and Martha are so plain, some speculate that Debbie (Lana, and then Natalie Wood) is actual Ethan's daughter. 

Actually, it came across like a five-alarm fire this time, but people have actually missed this mutual attraction in the past.

This doesn't work, timeline-wise. And dramatically, it's far better for the unconsummated love to have driven Ethan away—he's unable to give a woman a decent home. This doesn't change his feelings for Martha, and makes the drama all that much more intense. When the posse goes out to investigate the missing cattle, and he realizes it was bait so that the Comanches could go after the houses, he stops, rests and feeds his horse—while Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) rushes back.

Ethan states the facts: The horses need rest. But when Martin has run off, we can see the agony in Ethan's eyes. He's as worried as any of them. And as much as he dislikes Martin—who is part Indian—he's also rather protective of him, not wanting him to see what he's seen, and trying to keep him from getting killed.

Seriously, Wayne is terrific here, and this character and performance would inform the rest of his career. The cast is pitch perfect: Vera Miles as the maiden waiting for Martin to settle down. Harry Carey, Jr., as the love-stricken boyfriend of Pippa Scott. You almost never notice he's 15-20 years too old.

Third, the mythic level of the film—that Ethan is the spirit of the Men who tamed the Wild West, and having tamed it, are no longer welcome—hits on so many levels. It works for the specific context of a tamed country. It works for every situation where men are sent to do rough things, only to find themselves changed and unsuited for a domestic life (if they ever were). It's Moses and the Promised Land.

This was an homage to the late Harry Carey, who used to hold his arm like this.

The music is all traditional, arranged by Max Steiner, and is perfect. The mandatory cowboy crooning song is...well, it's probably better than most. Those songs don't usually hold up well, in my opinion. At least when they did this kind of stuff in the '80s, the "for the Academy's consideration" generic pop songs were played over the closing credits. This one is less generic and only played at the front and back.

The Boy liked it, though he found the distinctions between the outdoor shooting and on-set shooting jarring—and these are the sorts of the things the 4K restoration tends to exaggerate and make more obvious.

But otherwise, it works very, very well indeed, and I understand now why it's often regarded as the greatest Western ever made. You can see its influence in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the aforementioned Lawrence of Arabia, Star Wars, of course it's musical '80s remake, Streets of Fire, and many, many more. Hollywood has been threatening to remake it as sci-fi or horror for decades, and I think we can be grateful that's never happened.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:30 PM

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