The Searchers

Duke and cover

It’s no surprise that the AFI’s choice of the greatest western of all time is a John Ford film featuring John Wayne. To those who grew up watching “old-er West” Westerns, though, the relatively late setting of The Searchers makes for a different feel. It’s post-Civil War here, set in Texas rather than the Old West, and rather than confining itself to the stereotypical Western town, it’s a journey across landscapes and vistas. It’s known largely for its cinematography, and for good reason. Ford has faith in the lone American man with his rural wisdom and ability to dominate the land without seeking to be anything more than a terrestrial creature. Ethan (Wayne) is anchored to the earth while the hybrid Samuel Clayton (Ward Bond), part captain of the Rangers and part preacher, is reaching toward heaven. He’s idealistic while Ethan’s realistic. He conducts lengthy funeral eulogies while Ethan cuts them off early to get a head start on the job he’s got to do. Clayton is principled and Ethan is pragmatic, Clayton is absolute and Ethan is relative. When, early in the film, the men come across a half-buried Indian, Ethan fires a bullet into each of the corpse’s eyes. When he’s chided, he tells the pastor, in so many words, that under his worldview the deed was pointless, but under the Indian’s, Ethan just cursed him to wander the afterlife without sight. Ethan doesn’t “believe” one or the other; it’s the relative meaning of the action that matters.

Still warm

The interesting fact of Martin’s part-Indian blood was brought to my attention. Ethan rescued Martin as a baby from Indian’s during a raid or war of some kind, bringing him to his brother’s family to be adopted and raised. It would seem that this fact is lost on Ethan when Debbie is kidnapped by Indians and incorporated into Chief Scar’s harem. Once Ethan realizes that she’s been fully integrated and at first doesn’t want to return, he sets out to kill her. It’s Martin who puts himself between Ethan’s gun and Debbie, insisting that she should live and be brought home. Ethan even says that it would be better to kill her than for her to live “with a buck.” Ford reveals the racism so prevalent among “Americans” and “Indians” in this era. Ethan is the hero of this film, but Ford doesn’t hesitate to show his ugly side. Indeed, even Laurie, the sweet woman so easy to trust in, makes a comment about putting “a bullet in [Debbie's] brain” that reeks of the ugliest kind of prejudice.

Twofer?

Ethan’s classic “colonialist” tendencies here are put into full light. He sees no problem with rescuing a half-breed raised from birth by Indians and adopting him into a white family, but the contrary deed committed by the Indians (as revenge for taking Martin?) will not be tolerated. The film spans a five-year period of Ethan and Martin searching for Debbie. Nothing is so important as finishing this quest, even if it ends in killing the girl. Every time Martin states or implies that Debbie is his sister, Ethan reacts angrily that they are no blood kin. Martin, as a half-breed, was never more than a glorified foster child in Ethan’s eyes. No matter how integrated Debbie might become, from Ethan’s point of view she’ll always be part of the family, unlike Martin.

Just between us

Ethan’s turnaround at the film’s end is provocative for a John Wayne figure. On the other hand, this is a John Ford film. Ethan was the hero, but always a kind of anti-hero at the same time. He was a product of his time, and Ford depicts him as such. In a different way, Ford depicted the titular character in his earlier Young Mr. Lincoln not so much as a product of of his time but as an image within the American memory, tainted with hero-worship and caricature. Fonda’s Lincoln is unreal and intentionally so, while Wayne’s Ethan is all too real and uncomfortably so. Ford doesn’t withdraw the suggestion that the Indians were savages, though he does give us examples of perfectly kind and personable Indians in the film. He neither vilifies nor aggrandizes any character, exactly. They’re all contextualized in all their confused beauty and ugliness. Ethan rides off just the way he rode in, the kind of character than clearly inspired Ford’s protégé, by his own admission, Akira Kurosawa, in films like Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

Just like the movies

I'll raze YOUR right hand

Land-e-scape

Ahead & above

The bends

Dominion

Bait & switch

Fair trade

Piercing

Squaw

Them's wrastlin' words

Master of his domain

Back

Outside & picturesque

Young Mr. Lincoln

Well, gee, vote for me

Most film protagonists, especially of the sort with which viewers are supposed to sympathize, are neither morally perfect nor totally evil. Exceptions tend to fit into the former category, however, as is the case with John Ford’s film Young Mr. Lincoln. It’s the sort of film that a stranger to the planet Earth might watch and wonder just what its point is. Anyone else, especially a born and bred American, knows intuitively all too well what a film like this is doing. If it were a simple fiction, Young Mr. Lincoln would seemingly have little appeal in terms of its creating a character who challenges the viewer to think critically and evaluate Abe Lincoln’s ideas, passions, words, and deeds. A black-and-white good guy, the alien viewer would likely see this film as a moral propaganda piece, something to show classrooms of youths in order to put a friendly face on justice, goodness, and determination.  Since the days of Superman: The Movie, even the comic book superhero genre has stuck to the convention of a protagonist who is flawed, who sometimes acts in her, but usually in his, best interests at the expense of the people he is supposed to protect.

Man of the earth

Henry Fonda plays Lincoln with a moral aloofness and John Ford shoots the film keeping the hero at an untouchable distance. Sometimes Lincoln’s attitude is sort of well-golly-I-don’t-know, and other times he preaches his convictions like a Baptist minister. He’s presented as unassuming and gentle, a man of nature with limited learning but an unlimited capacity for pure knowledge, the kind that can only be used for good. He is tall, of course, and his opponents tend to be short. Intellectually he towers above everyone else even more than he does physically. Though education is illustrated through Lincoln as something that builds moral character, he makes some interesting statements about a little old woman (not that old, really) whose lack of education makes her all the more pure, innocent, and, of course, womanly.

Two-fistin'

Technically speaking, this film is in the neighborhood of perfect. Even in 1939, John Ford knew well what he was doing, how to point a camera, and, even in a sometimes-unsubtle film, how to say a lot with a little. The idea of depicting the early life of one of the great American legends must have been fairly novel at the time, the sort of thing that filmmakers nowadays love doing. For example, see Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. (Most of the time now, however, filmmakers give into the pressure to film the rest of the person’s life. Examples abound.) Depicting only the early life can be an easy way to make a biopic, since the filmmaker is under much less pressure to take a position about the individual. This way, the film can wax Freudian about what made an otherwise questionable character do what s/he did. Ford is at an advantage here, having chosen as his subject the image of a man universally loved at least in the 1930s northern US, if not universally in the South. Ford hones in a little closer than, say D.W. Griffith did in Birth of a Nation, although a similar respect keeps both directors from even remotely or suggestively tainting Lincoln’s image. In the era of the Depression and on the even of the US entrance into WWII, it makes sense that Ford’s Lincoln would be exactly the image to encourage and inspire Americans to see their own humble existence as only the beginning of something that would later be remarkable.

Point blank

Man of the people?

The man. The myth. The hat.

Ending on a pedestal