The Searchers

In John Ford's The Searchers (1956) Ethan Edwards is a Confederate Civil War veteran who returns home several years after the war's end. Although we do not know where he has been or what he has been doing since the end of the war, the look on his sister-in-law's face suggests that she believes he has been up to no good. He does have suspicious gold coins in his possession. The implication is that he has been involved in robberies or other criminal behavior. Ethan's identity as a Confederate war veteran is crucial to the film. First and foremost it makes him an outsider, like a man without a country. He no longer has anything to swear allegiance to, so he is a man out for himself and his own goals. Now that the North has won the war and is the source of legal authority, it makes him as well a person who resists and distrusts authority—in fact, a man who distrusts any form of organized authority, be it the Texas Rangers or the federal cavalry. Thus he is the quintessential individual.

A second element of Ethan's Confederate identity is of course his racism. Since we do not have African Americans in this film, racism is aimed at the Native Americans, whom I hereafter refer to as Indians because that is what they are called in the film—they are mainly Comanches. Although the exact cause of this racism is not made clear, it is easy enough to believe in because many people in Ethan's time hated Indians (remember Sherman, who thought they should be exterminated) and also because early in the film Comanches raid the farm of Ethan's brother, killing him, his wife, their son, and kidnapping two daughters, one of whom is later found dead and scalped. The other daughter, of course, is the object of the title search.

Ethan hates Indians not merely because they killed his relatives and in general (in this film) exhibit brutal behavior towards whites. He hates them in a basic, fundamental way—he does not see them as human and speaks of them as if they are a species apart from the whites. That is, he is a racist. Although at first the search for Debbie is a rescue mission, it gradually becomes Ethan's obsessive quest to find and kill Debbie. By living too long with the Comanches, she has, he believes, becomes one of them and therefore must be killed out of deference to who she once was, and to the fact that as a woman presumably befouled sexually by Indians (the film does not imply one way or the other whether Debbie was sexually molested by the Comanches) she deserves killing. (Underneath Ethan's hatred of Indians, and its focus on their sexual defilement of white women, is a basic revulsion against female sexuality). Martin Pawley, whom Ethan's brother adopted as his own son after his parents were killed, is 1/4 Indian, and Ethan refuses to accept him as a member of the family. At the same time, they become friends during the five years they spend searching for Debbie, and when Ethan thinks he is going to die he writes a will leaving all his possessions to Martin (part of the reason he does this is his belief that since Debbie has "been with" Comanches too long she is no longer his relative). Martin follows Ethan partially because he wants to find his sister but also because he wants to prevent Ethan from killing her.

We should consider the extent to which the film itself in its treatment of Indians parallels the racism of Ethan. On the one hand it attempts to portray the Comanches and other native Americans as human beings, not simply as savages. Clearly the band led by the chief known as Scar is a renegade band—everyone thinks of it in that way. Other Indians are apparently afraid of Scar and for that reason refuse to tell what they know about him. Indians are portrayed as intelligent and wily—they often outwit the white men who are pursuing them. On the other hand the Indians are shown as capable of much savagery, which they fully exhibit in their attack on the farm of Ethan's brother. Of course, there is ample record of Indian raids and brutality against white settlers. What The Searchers fails to make clear (few films of its time made this clear) is that there was a full record of similar atrocities committed by white settlers against Indians, not to mention the fact that Indians regarded the whites as encroaching on their land. To the Indians, the whites were invaders.

I believe Ford was attempting to do justice to the Indians even as he was portraying the racism of the whites. Debbie and Martin are key characters here. Martin has a small portion of Indian blood running in his veins, while Debbie has lived with the Indians long enough that she has, in Ethan's eyes, become an Indian. Ethan does accept Martin as his partner and even the inheritor of his worldly possessions. Although Ethan intends to shoot Debbie and at one point moves tries to do just that, in the end he embraces her and brings her back to her family. Roger Ebert in his excellent discussion of the film and its racism wonders whether this scene is enough by itself to redeem the rest of the film from its racism, and whether the film's anti-racist sentiments were too subtle for audiences in 1956, which would have been more inclined than audiences a half century later to share Ethan's racism. This is an important point to consider, whether the film is as racist as Ethan is even as it attempts to back off from that position. Click here to read Ebert's review.

Thus it is interesting in this film regarded as a study in racism that the main racist is a Southerner. It is somewhat paradoxical as well since many Indian haters were non-Southerners—hatred of Indians was not a regional attitude. But of course The Searchers was made at the beginning of the modern civil rights era in America, so Ethan as an Indian hater becomes an emblem of American racism and the challenges it pose.

John Wayne's persona doesn't vary much from one film to the next, at least in the ones I have seen. But however limited his talents may have been, within those limits he fully inhabited the persona. He has never been better than he is in this film—the rugged individual, masculine, resistant to authority and romance, single-minded in his goals, unwilling to deviate from his principles and beliefs. I do not know whether the film was written with Wayne in mind (it probably was, since Wayne was a leading actor in other Ford films), but it was an ideal vehicle for his persona. Wayne's acting in this film is three-dimensional, multi-faceted, credible.

John Ford is often mentioned as a director whose love of landscape, especially the landscape of the American West, is a leading characteristic in his filmmaking. This film may be in part responsible for that aspect of his reputation, but the landscape in The Searchers helps to make the search itself and Wayne's struggle with his hatred of Indians the epic challenges that they are. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times review of The Searchers appropriately criticizes it for having too many scenes shot on sets. Next to the beautiful landscape scenes, they seem half-hearted and cheesy, However, they don't bring the film down. In general, the landscape cinematography in this film is spectacular.

This film certainly deserves the high reputation it holds. It's a full, rich, wonderfully complex film, highly entertaining, beautifully filmed, well acted, and a pleasure to watch.