THE SEARCHERS

THE SEARCHERS, Warner Bros., 1956.
Dir. John Ford, Perf. John Wayne, Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter, and Vera Miles.
Review by Sam Rahn

In the history of popular Westerns, Sergio Leone’s fistful of Spaghettis (featuring Clint Eastwood) are arguably the most renowned and frequently mentioned as genre touchstones. For critics and scholars, however, perhaps no Western is more celebrated than The Searchers, the 1956 collaboration between director John Ford and his favorite leading man, John Wayne.

Occurring towards the latter half of each man's career, The Searchers is said to embody both Ford’s full maturity as a director and Wayne’s as an actor. With its complex characters and epic scope, The Searchers has a uniqueness and presence that far exceeds that majority of the studio Westerns produced so prolifically through the 1950s and 1960s. A famous many directors, too, cite The Searchers as a source of major inspiration, and as it is plotted, the film is indeed an icon of the Western’s cinematic values. However, the awkward realization of its script and inconsistent direction render it a critically flawed film that frustrates as much as it fascinates.

The film’s most glaring issue is also its most untouchable: John Wayne himself. Integral to the Western genre and as revered a contributor as John Ford, Wayne’s performance in The Searchers is frankly amateurish. Though perfect as a gritty, hardnosed loner, tenacious cowboy, and even a bitter but proud old man (the performance in True Grit [1969] that won him his Oscar), Wayne struggles to realize the complexity of Ethan Edwards. In areas where Ethan is akin to classic Western men, Wayne has no difficulty and is as convincing a frontier cowboy as ever swaggered before the camera. However, Ethan has other qualities—reverence for his family and consequential vulnerability, a caring, albeit callous, spirit, and even an occasionally light sense of humor—to which Wayne can merely pay lip service.

We see hints of his suffering, but these rarely correspond to the primary dilemma regarding his niece, Debbie Edwards, who has been captured (i.e. corrupted) by the Comanche. Rather, it is relatively easy suffering that comes from mourning the lost and “pure” spirit of his other niece, whom the Comanche killed before she could be assimilated into the tribe. Another display of anxiety occurs in the immediate aftermath of a standoff with the Comanche when the captain-cum-sheriff instructs Ethan to cease firing. Wayne’s temper flares, but not because of latent rage he feels towards the Comanche for the massacre of his family, but rather because of the sheriff's affront to Wayne’s own sense of authority and independence. This pride-related anger is natural to classic Wayne and expected of him, but not of the Ethan first introduced.

This inconsistency of character is complicated by the scant precedence set for Ethan’s familial affection, with little being done throughout the rest of the film to support this end. Ford makes a habit of aggressively outlining characters when they are introduced—thereby plotting out their conflicts and desires—and then failing to color them in, so to speak, or support their actions with meaningful interactions and dialogue. Instead, more time is spent on lighter subplots of dismissible stock—an accidental wife, simpleton as sporadic comic relief, nosey but well-intentioned foreigners as neighbors—while skimping on the more compelling and serious narrative.

On the technical side, the most consistent issue is the inexpert handling of time passing, both in the scene-to-scene segues and through the film at large. Aside from Debbie, who suddenly grows from a child to a fully developed Natalie Wood, other characters show no physical or personal effects of aging. Instead, demarcations of time are conspicuously thrust into the dialogue, and rather than consistently seeing evidence of time in characters or seasons, the audience is merely told of its passage and must therefore accept it.

The handling of emotional subtexts in the film is similarly brusque. Ethan struggles between his supposed love of family and his obvious hate for the Comanche, but we never learn the source of either emotion and see their interaction but rarely. Even in his dealing with a grown and Comanche-spirited Debbie, Ethan is either entirely hostile or entirely docile. During the climactic chase of her down the slope, only the peripherals suggest tension: the score, his young companion giving chase and crying out (heavily leading the audience), and the physical context of her flight. Once Wayne catches her, the gun he drew on her in camp is ignored, he embraces her without deliberation, and symbolically carries her to the threshold of home. Other relationships, such as the romance between Laurie Jourgensen (Miles) and her sometimes beau Martin Pawley (Hunter) are less complex, and thus more tangible in this instance, but barely more credible and largely superfluous.

If The Searchers is wholly successful in any respect, it is visually. The breathtaking landscapes and bold cinematography fully immerse the viewer in each event. Only the representation of the Comanche war chief Scar (Henry Brandon) seems hackneyed, but such caricatures were inevitable in this film’s time and have only recently been overcome. Unfortunately, after showing its setting so vividly, The Searchers is content merely to tell us the story, and in doing so it fails that paramount tenet of fiction: show, don’t tell.

10/10