THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This is not a western; it is an epic. And it needs epic proportions. One aspect of these epic proportions is colour and density. The filming of Monument Valley in this film is breathtaking, and we should see it as breathtaking. The characters inhabit a landscape that is huge and dominating. Out of this land come danger and elemental forces that only the most courageous and even pathologic men can face. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of the land in this film. Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) says that Texicans are human men way out on a limb, but that once many of their bones are in the ground “this place will be a fine good place to be.” She might have said Texicans are human men and women out on a limb, but she knew her place. In any case, Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen) does not blame Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) for the death of his son Brad (Harry Carey, Jr.), because he believes that it is “this land” that is responsible for Brad’s death (“Oh, Ethan, this country...”). The land is hard, primitive, arid, wild, mysterious, and dangerous. And most of all, it is large and defined by colour and shading and brilliant skies. We have to see this. This is landscape as sublime, in the Burkean sense of a landscape that signifies pain and terror. It represents the limit of human thought and activity. The land is harsh but also compelling. It has a spiritual dimension. Men and women and animals die here, but they also create life here. This is a land of possibility, as Mrs. Jorgensen suggests, and it is a land of regressive desire. It is redolent of a distant past, and it is poised toward a future. This is limbo land. It is a border between times and places. This land represents both something to tame and something that cannot be tamed. It contains humans within an alien space; it looks like a moonscape at times. It suggests primeval time, the world in its beginnings. Human beings who are part of this land (the natives and Ethan and, for a time, Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) are frightening in their willingness to engage in violent acts. Ethan and Scar/Cicatrice (Henry Brandon) are the two characters most closely associated with the land. Scar, leader of a band of Comanches (“say they will go one way, then they go t’other.”), is a mysterious chief whose name causes tension whenever someone mentions it. Scar and his people come and go unpredictably; they are not fixed to a place. We learn that Scar has a reason for hating white people; his sons have been killed by white men. He is the double of Ethan whose family has been killed by Indians. We can see these characters as doubles in the scene in which Ethan tries to stare Scar down, and says to him: “You speak good American, for a Comanch. Someone teach you?” A moment later, Scar remarks: “You speak good Comanch, for a white man. Someone teach you?”). Each knows the ways of the other; they taunt each other. Ethan speaks Spanish and Comanche; he knows the ways of the Comanche. He is a creature of the land, as his association with dogs and horses might indicate. And he is crazy with hatred of the Indian, just as Scar is crazy with hatred of white people. These two men are larger than life and they need a larger than life space in which to function; they are both “scarred” by their pathologies. In effect, each of these men “wanders forever between the winds.” They can have no home if we think of home as a place of circumscribed space, or a place in which to settle. Ethan walks away from the Jorgensen home at the end of the film, and the door shuts him out.

Monument Valley echoes with time in this film. It is haunted. It is a land time forgot. It reflects unconscious forces, the deep well of desire and the perversions desire can seek. The journey of the characters in this film is as much a journey to the interior as it is a journey across the American southwest. This is an inner landcscape.

And so we need to see epic space in order to understand at an emotional level the size of these people, and the intensity of their quests. As in all epics, the plot here involves a quest, the five-year quest to find Debbie Edwards (Lana Wood/Natalie Wood). In the end, two men accomplish their quest. Ethan makes clear that they will accomplish their end “just as sure as the turnin’ o’ the earth.” Ethan’s resolve is elemental, just as certain as night turning into day or summer into winter. He is a force of nature; he just keeps coming on. The question is, why? Why is Ethan so hell-bent on finding Scar? At the beginning perhaps we can say that he and the small band of Rangers hope to find the girls alive. But even then, we know that Ethan is intent on riding the Comanches down, fully aware that to do so will mean that the Comanches will kill the girls. As time goes on, of course, he knows that Lucy (Pippa Scott) is dead, and that Debbie has been taken into the band of Comanche people as one of them. Then it becomes clear that Ethan’s only purpose is to “put a bullet” in Debbie’s brain (“Martha would want him to,” says Laurie (Vera Miles)). Why is he so intent on killing Debbie? Well, the answer is that he hates the Indians, and he thinks that Debbie has been transformed from white person to native person; she has been tainted, sullied by contact with the native peoples. This is clear. Miscegenation is the theme of this film, and it is something Ethan detests. Why does he hate the natives, and why does he hate the thought of miscegenation? We know that his mother has been killed by Indians, and we know that his brother and his family have also been killed by Indians. And yet his rage is pathological. He shoots buffalo just to keep food from the Indians. He looks with scorn and rage and disgust and hatred at the white women who have been rescued, and he scowls: “They ain’t white. At least not any more.” He is, in short, a racist. This is fine, but we might still ask why? Why does he hate with such vehemence? Revenge is one thing, and absolute and irrational hatred is another. Even after Scar is dead, killed not by Ethan but by Marty, Ethan scalps him. This is an act of desecration, violation, a sign of Ethan’s extreme hatred of this Indian leader. And then, if he hates with such immensity, why does he not carry out his resolve to kill Deborah when he catches up with her at the end of the film? Is the end of the film just a Hollywood happy ending? Or does it make sense in terms of the character of Ethan and what we experience in the film? What Ethan fears is, ultimately, himself. He is his very ‘other.’ He and Scar are two sides of the same identity, and Ethan hates the Scar side of himself. He wants to eradicate this, and once Scar is eradicated, Ethan is no longer whole. He needs to reconcile his two selves, but this does not happen. No reconciliation takes place for Ethan as a subject, He may renounce his desire to kill Debbie, but he cannot live a half person with others, just as he could not live with others when he was a double self. Ethan’s fate is “to wander forever between the winds.”

Like so many of Ford’s films, THE SEARCHERS celebrates the human capacity for survival. This theme surfaces early in the film in the conversation between Ethan and his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), when Aaron tells of others who have gone back east, and how his wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) just wouldn’t let a man quit. Perhaps this theme is best expressed in the character of Laurie. She has waited years for Martin Pawley to propose to her. She expresses her frustration and dissatisfaction with the life she leads. Having nowhere to go, she finally agrees to marry Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis). We know that she does not love Charlie, but a young woman has to survive out on the frontier somehow. We might also consider her parents. Lars obviously has come to America from Scandinavia. His wife has been a schoolteacher (“she’s a schoolteacher, by golly.”), but they now live out here on the edge of things – out on a limb, as Mrs. Jorgensen says. Their house is larger and more architecturally elaborate (note the patterned woodwork on the porch) than the Edwards’s place. Clearly, they are trying to bring a touch of civilization to this outpost. We never do see a town in the film, and the forts that Ethan and Marty visit seem a long way from the Jorgensen’s or the Edwards’s places. One of the nicest touches in the film is Lars’s use of glasses. He cannot read, but whenever someone else reads a letter, he puts his glasses on. This gesture suggests that he ‘sees’ reading as important, an activity separate from his usual activities. He puts his glasses on as a gesture of respect for reading, even though he does not read. He also protects letters, taking the one Laurie had tried to burn and placing it in his pocket. Reading seems far removed from the necessities of life out on the frontier; nevertheless, it is crucial. The letter Jerem Futterman (Peter Mamakos) writes eventually leads Ethan and Marty to Debbie. The letter Martin writes leads to Laurie’s decision to accept Charlie’s proposal. Letters and reading suggest a new way of life coming to the frontier, and we know this way of life will remain; it will survive the vagaries of the land and its dangers. (Ford extends this theme later in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.)

We know that Ethan can read. He reads better than Martin. He reads in more than one sense. He reads letters and he can write his last will and testament in something resembling legal language. He can also read signs. He knows a Comanche lance when he sees one. He knows what the dead bull means (and by the way, the killing of the cattle is an act as ugly as Ethan’s killing of the buffalo later in the film). He can read Look’s (Beulah Archulette) reaction when she hears the name Scar. He can read the intentions of a man like Futterman. And yet with all his skill at reading, he is left behind by the coming civilization. He has no place in the social group. We might ask why he remains outside the group even after he has changed his resolve and returned Debbie to the Jorgensen place? Why does he not shoot her? A number of reasons come to mind. First, Debbie is Martha’s daughter. We see him lift her when he first returns to the Edwards’s home at the beginning of the film. He lifts her the same way at the end just before he says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” He learns during the five-year search for her that Martin Pawley is a good person, despite being an eighth (or is it a quarter? Ethan’s assertion is hardly a mistake.) Cherokee. Martin quite literally removes the poison from Ethan, and Ethan is prepared to leave all his worldly goods to him. The scalping of Scar serves as a ritual cathartic, purging Ethan of his hatred; the scalping is the only ritual Ethan participates in and he does so privately. Seeing Debbie cringe in fear moves him to change his resolve. And so we might conclude that Ethan is not the same demented person at the end of the film that he was at the beginning and through much of the action. And yet we know that he is a man marked by mystery. He belongs nowhere. He has this mysterious past. He has not changed his sword into a ploughshare, and he believes in taking only one oath at a time and his is to a lost cause, a war over and done with for everyone but him. He lives in the past, not for the future. He lives with an unrequited love. He is, in short, marked by something – call it a sin or an evil or a wrong choice – that keeps him from full partnership in the human community. This is why he has a special relationship with Mose Harper (Hank Worden), the half crazy old galoot who also knows how to survive (he eats dirt and pretends to be crazy when the Indians capture him). And even Mose joins the community at the end by succumbing to his insanity; he may be off his rocker, but he finally gets the rocker he wants. He won’t tell Ethan where the Indians are camped, but he will tell Marty (“Seven fingers, Marty. Seven fingers.”) Ethan is insane but not insane. He succumbs to nothing but his own iron resolve. Even at the end, he tells Clayton (Ward Bond) that there are about half a dozen Indians for each of the Rangers, “enough to go around.” Ethan, like his brother, has a biblical name. These two are Old Testament figures, members of the wandering tribes of Israel, although Aaron (brother of Moses) is a priest of the Israelites. Ethan is associated with music (possibly the author of the 89th Psalm). The names are not particularly precise, but they do locate these figures in a chronotope of search for a promised land.

References to belief systems run throughout the film. Ethan explains what the Comanche believe about death and the spirit world. We have the two Christian rituals of death (funeral service) and marriage (wedding dance). At both the funeral and the wedding musicians play, or the people sing, the same piece of music: “We Shall Gather at the River.” The Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton is also a Captain of the Texas Rangers. Religion and law go together. And religion and law are two things Ethan does not accept. Religion and law are marks of civilization. Both are associated with ritual, and ritual is also a mark of civilization. Even Marty and Charlie fight in a ritual manner, and Clayton keeps warning them not to cheat by biting or gouging. The clashes between white men and Indian that we see in the film also have the quality of ritual (the ritual putting on the war bonnet before the Indians charge). Indeed, the entire film has a ritual quality, beginning and ending with shots that echo each other. Standing outside the various rituals – even violating ritual -- is Ethan Edwards. We also have at least two other violations of ritual: the attack on the Edwards’s ranch and the slaughter of the native village (a scene that is reminiscent of the Sand Creek massacre). In other words, the wholesale slaughter of innocent people by either side is condemned in this film. We might remember that the cavalry are not always innocent or even ethical in their actions, and Scar and his group are not representative of the entire Comanche nation. Violence is not celebrated in this film.

We might also consider money and its uses in the film. From the look of things, money is not in great abundance on the frontier. It is also not necessary on the frontier since the ranchers seem to make a living from the land. And yet the opening scenes make clear that money is important. Ethan has a couple of bags of newly minted double eagles – gold coins that are obviously worth a lot. His brother shows his self-interest (greed?) when Ethan gives him the money. Aaron does not spend much thought as to where Ethan has got his money, and Martha seems anxious that no one probe too deeply into what Ethan has been up to for the past three years. Then we have Futterman who is obviously interested in money, even if he has to write letters to get it. Or even if he has to kill to get it. Money leads to criminal activity. Or we could say that money is just what serves as capital in a good market-influenced society. Money reminds us of capital. Capital for the Natives takes the form of goods such as blankets, hats, cigars, blue prize ribbons, and so on. Ethan wants to trade goods for information, but Martin ends up trading for a wife. The bartering for various things is a rudimentary sort of economic activity. What Martin’s mistake shows is the importance of communication in such economic dealings.

What do you make of Look’s role in this film?

Aside from the shots of Monument Valley, what is most distinctive about the filming of this film? For me, two aspects of the filming are noticeable. First, and most obvious, are the many doorways that frame things: the opening and closing doorway shots, the first time we see Martin as he dismounts easily from his horse and we see him through the doorway, the doorway through which we see Lucy and Brad kissing, the framing of Ethan in shadow of the doorway as he looks inside the burning building at the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, the open teepee doorways (once when they find Look’s body, later when they sit inside Scar’s teepee, and still later when Marty rescues Debbie), and the distinct cave opening that is reminiscent of a doorway when Martin and Ethan escape from the “hostiles” in New Mexico. Have I forgotten any? Well, perhaps. We have clear use of a door in the scene in which Martin and Charlie fight when Ethan guides Mrs. Jorgensen inside the house and shuts the door on her. She just goes to the window and leans out, but this simply reinforces the framing motif and takes us back to the beginning when Debbie leaves the Edwards’s place through the window and her mother falls prostrate over the sill. And we might collects other doors – at the fort when Ethan and Martin see the rescued white women, in the New Mexico canteen, in Futterman’s place, the double doorway when Ethan, sitting outside on his brother’s porch looks back inside and sees his brother enter the bedroom to go to sleep with Martha, and the doors that the Reverend Clayton kicks shut and leaves from in the opening breakfast scene.

Mention of the opening breakfast scene allows me to segue into the second aspect that strikes me as important in the filming. This is when, at the end of the breakfast scene (which itself is amazing), Clayton stands at the table holding a donut and a mug of coffee. He looks to his left and sees through the bedroom door Martha picking up Ethan’s coat. As he watches, she strokes the coat affectionately (something early viewers of the film did not seem to notice). Then she comes back into the dining room and we have a scene in which no dialogue occurs and the viewer must watch two simultaneous actions – one is the stance of Clayton and his eyes as he stares intently forward, and the other is what goes on behind him when Ethan takes his coat from Martha and then leans down to kiss her on the forehead. Ethan then leaves, Clayton turns and he turns away from Martha so that he never does make eye contact with her as he departs through the door. She leaves her hand raised as if in futile gesture to caress the now departed Ethan. This is a remarkable scene. Clayton has respected the privacy of Martha and Ethan. Ethan and Martha have respected Clayton’s presence and their own position as brother and sister-in-law. And Ethan and Martha have expressed their own love. Nothing needs to be said in this scene and yet so much body language communicates more than words can say. First Ethan, and then Clayton depart through the door and this is the last they will see of Martha Edwards alive. Something we might note here concerning doors: doors shut out the outside; they are defenses from outside threat. But we learn that they are easily broken defenses.

And so we come back to doorways. The doorway reminds us of that which separates. Doors are reminders of passageways in and out, in and out both literally and figuratively. In John 10: 7-9, Jesus calls himself a door. In a film so resolutely about passage (from this life to another, from one state of being to another through marriage, from a wild past to a civilized future), the doors are reminders of the way—I mean this in the Biblical sense of the way to the Promised Land. Doors are also reminders of how vulnerable such a way is. Doors may be broken. From another perspective, doors, like windows, also frame characters. The frame is a richly ambiguous reminder of how circumscribed the lives of these people are. The frames belie the openness and freedom of the big sky and the far horizons. Only by being framed can people find safety and community. People need to be contained within structures, whether these structures be concrete (towns, forts, or ranches), or abstract (marriage, the law, believe systems and rituals). One thing noticeable in this film is the relative absence of fences. The front of the Jorgensen ranch appears to have no fence; it simply merges with the expansive landscape of Monument Valley, as unfettered horses wander about water holes. We do see a fence when Martin takes Laurie’s horse to follow Ethan. The fence is clearly visible because Laurie leans upon it as we see Martin ride away behind her. She leans on the fence for support—at this point in the story, she really does need support, something that Charlie McCorry will also offer to her. Ford often uses the fence (we have a clear instance of this in both STAGECOACH and MY DARLING CLEMENTINE) as a borderline, the thing that separates civilization from the wilderness. Here the fence separates (not literally when we watch the scene, but strongly figuratively) Laurie from that which she has waited and wished for- marriage with Marin Pawley.

Martin rides off to catch Ethan. And eventually Martin will kill Scar. Why have Martin kill Scar and not Ethan? The act of violence that results in Scar’s death is “justifiable” because Martin acts in self-defense. What follows is not justifiable – the raid on the Indian encampment. In this raid, we see an innocent mother and child shot. The raid reminds us of the earlier raid in which Look was murdered. Violence, the film seems to say, is irrational, an aspect of life lived without reason. Take for example, the scene in which the Indians attack the Rangers across the river. As they retreat, Clayton says let them carry off their dead, but Ethan continues to fire his rifle until Clayton physically stops him (“Well, that tears it, Reverend,” Ethan spits out. He uses the word “Reverend” rather than “Captain” to show his contempt.). Ethan’s savage shooting marks him as wild, uncontrolled, irrational. He is marked by violence. The scene in which he tells Brad that Lucy is dead serves to clinch his impossible connection to violence; he remains passive as Brad rides off to his death. Brad’s act is as irrational as anything in the film, and Ethan lets him go accepting Brad’s need to succumb to violence. But let’s return to Martin. Ethan gives him reason to want to kill Scar when he tells Martin that one of the scalps they saw on Scar’s lance was that of his mother. Martin pauses and then says, “But that don’t matter.” This is a crucial moment in the film. Ethan’s motive has had something to do with vengeance since the beginning, and he expects Martin to seek vengeance too. But Martin renounces vengeance. He is a man of peace, not a man of violence. When he shoots Indians at the river early in the film, he breaks down and cries and Old Mose takes his rifle to continue the shooting. Martin can look to a future with the Jorgensen family (Lars never carries a gun), whereas Ethan can only remain part of the wild and irrational land that has witnessed so much bloodshed.

The structure of THE SEARCHERS, beginning and ending with the same (or a similar) shot, gives the film a classic form. The plot is circular, taking the characters away from home and returning them to home at the end. This is the plot of THE ODYSSEY. The hero moves away from home, leaving a woman and family behind, and returns to make a life with that woman and family. In between the initial departure and the final return, the hero faces many challenges, even descending into the underworld where the encounter with death is most intense. The structure gives the film an overall frame, but it may also create some artificiality in the action. Why, for example, should Scar and his people return to the area of an earlier crime just at the end when Marty and Ethan return to interrupt the wedding? The hero in this case is ambiguous, in two senses: both Marty and Ethan are heroic, and Ethan’s heroism is anti-human.

What role does the Cavalry play in this film? The easy answer is that the film makes fun of the cavalry, especially in the person of Lieutenant Greenhill (Patrick Wayne). But our answer should be complicated by the very medium of film itself. Film differs from literature in significant ways, one of which has to do with the fact that we often (if not always) know the characters on the screen in a double sense. We know Ethan Edwards as a character who takes part in certain actions in the plot; in other words, we know Ethan as one of the actants in the diegesis. But our viewing is complicated because we also know that Ethan is John Wayne and John Wayne brings to the screen a whole range of meanings that are outside this film. The same is true of most of the “stars” who perform in films. In the recent film, MR AND MRS SMITH, we know the eponymous characters as characters, but we also know them as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Consequently we are seeing double when we watch actors (or some actors) on screen. And so we might know that Lieutenant Greenhill is also Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne. And the actor young Greenhill most interacts with is Ward Bond, close friend of John Wayne off screen. We might extend this to the whole Ford company in this film, and we then add a dimension to our viewing of the film. But what has this to do with the cavalry? Well, Patrick Wayne plays a cavalry officer, a role his father John Wayne had played in three previous Ford films (and in at least one more to follow). And so the relationship of this film to other Wayne films and other cavalry films is evident. Here the tone is parodic; Ford and his actors are having fun with a theme they have used seriously in earlier films. But the fun is parodic rather than satiric. In other words, Ford continues to show sympathy for the cavalry, although he does so in a gently humourous manner. The humour cuts across yet another dimension of the cavalry in this film: they are murderous. In other words again, the ambiguity apparent in the hero Ethan is also apparent in the heroic Cavalry. Ambiguity is the watchword for this film. It is deeply ambiguous, bordering on tragedy. Ford is beginning to examine values he has held for many years and to see some of these values in a darker light than he had once done.

Oh, by the way, New Mexico became a state in 1912. It was proclaimed a territory (much larger than the later State of New Mexico) in 1850, 18 years before the action of the film.