The SearchersBy Edward Buscombe, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Abstract

Edward Buscombe knows his Westerns. He has written several books on this film genre that he clearly loves as well as understands. The Searchers is an insightful analysis of the classic 1956 John Ford film of the same name. It is an entry in the BFI Film Classics series that provides readers with succinct overviews of classic movies. Buscombe's study was originally published in 2000; this updated edition differs from the original largely through an afterward that makes some observations about The Searchers in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement and compares it to Tom Hanks' 2020 film News of the World.

The Searchers is a handsomely mounted paperback, gratifyingly concise at 96 pages, and generously illustrated with color stills from the film. This is not an exercise in revisionism. John Ford's film is widely regarded as a landmark of American moviemaking. A later generation of cinematic innovators like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas referenced The Searchers in their work. The movie influenced popular culture in other ways as well. The title and refrain of Buddy Holly's classic rock tune “That'll Be the Day” is taken from an expression used by John Wayne throughout the film. Buscombe shares this longstanding critical consensus, arguing that John Ford crafted a film that contains both stunning cinematography and a challenging narrative, boldly addressing what was and what remains a timely theme of race hatred.

The core plot of The Searchers is simple. Shortly after Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards belatedly returns home to Texas three years after the conclusion of the Civil War, his brother's ranch is attacked by Comanche raiders and most of the family is killed. Missing are two daughters, one of whom is later found murdered in the wilderness. Ethan and his brother's adopted son Martin Pawley set out on what will become a five-year pursuit of the surviving kidnapped girl and her captors. Nothing else about the central quest in the film is straightforward. Ethan Edwards is not simply a righteous uncle intent on rescuing his flesh and blood. Brilliantly portrayed by John Wayne in one of his most iconic roles, Ethan Edwards is a dark and driven man. He was in love with his sister-in-law, who reciprocated his feelings, a situation that perhaps helped explain his long absence. His obsession with vengeance for his family is accentuated by a virulently racist hatred of Indians. He regularly insults Martin Pawley because he is one-eighth Cherokee, shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian, thereby condemning him to “wander forever between the winds in the afterlife,” takes scalps, and fulminates over the likely rape and concubinage of his niece Debbie among the Comanche. One reason Martin stays with Ethan over the long years of their search, at the expense of his own romantic interests, is because he is convinced that Ethan will kill Debbie when he finds her, violently expunging the taint of miscegenation. The 1950s often saw troubled heroes in Westerns, such as Alan Ladd's disillusioned gunfighter in Shane (1953), but rarely one as psychologically problematic and ethically ambiguous as Ethan Edwards. He is an emanation of a surprisingly bleak vision of the West.

In the film, the Texans and Comanche are locked into a grim struggle for dominance and survival in a primal environment, Ford's favorite setting of Monument Valley in Arizona. Both sides are remorseless and engage in the slaughter of noncombatants. Buscombe notes that Scar, the Comanche chief who takes Debbie, is a Native American mirror image of Ethan Edwards, a killer embittered by the deaths of his sons at the hands of the white men.

Ford did not offer his audience the usual heroic tale of pioneers settling and civilizing the West, tragically displacing “noble savages.” Instead, by reworking the tropes of the traditional American captivity narrative, he focused attention on the harrowing price paid for the opening of the frontier. This moral seriousness undergirds both Ethan's evolution as a character and one of the most visually memorable and moving endings in cinematic history. Ethan Edwards attains a partial redemption, but he cannot enter the promised land of home and family; like the Comanche soul he consigned to hell, he is doomed to remain a wanderer in the wilderness. Replete with a wealth of information on the production of The Searchers, and graced with thought-provoking commentary, Buscombe's book is a stimulating introduction to a great American film.