by Louis Williams

Created on: July 11, 2009

THE SEARCHERS

The moment when John Wayne, as Ethan Edwards, sick cookie supreme, rides his Comanche captive niece (Natalie Wood) down and then swings her high before cradling her in his arms - this when every indication has been that he, racist and psychotic, is going to kill her as he has been promising for most of the movie, is one of the greatest moments in film. This really grips you, because it seems such an unexpected reversal and it demands an answer: why does he do what he does? His vows to destroy her because she's become an Indian aren't the crack-brained barbershop courage of some old croak in his dotage because Ethan is clearly hale enough, and certainly crazy enough. Yet, the physical moment arrived, he doesn't kill her but instead takes her to his bosom.

But, then, she is the last link he has, not only with his biological family, but most importantly with his husband's wife, whom he clearly loved. Who knows? Deborah may be his own daughter. Still, daughter or no, she is a link, the link, with the woman we see only briefly at the beginning of the picture, but whom Ethan has been seeing perhaps his whole adult life. Why she married the brother rather than Ethan we don't know.

There's a lot more we don't know, either. Aside from Ethan's having been a Confederate soldier during the Civil War, we know little else about him. Where did he get all that money? The implication is illegally. Where has he been, the War three years over? He doesn't care to say. He appears alone and all hope of a normal life apparently fled with his brother's marriage, he remains alone. Grim on the best day of his life, the massacre of his brother's family - all save Deborah, the youngest girl - turns the grimness into a furnace-red desire for vengeance. He goes after the girl, not to save her, but, as he says again and again, to kill her. Yet, as we see, instead of killing her he, seven years later, brings her home.

We last see him framed in a doorway alone and he is clearly the man, like James's John Marcher, to whom nothing (further) is going to happen. His true love is dead, the ranch belongs to Deborah, his quest is at an end and he has nowhere left to go save into the far reaches of Monument Valley, here undoubtedly for him, though the future may stretch for decades, the Valley of death, the monuments all finally his.

He's simply ignored in the end, as the others rush to make Deborah at home. His young companion Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) will marry Laurie, the ranks will close and the Duke will be left out.

Of course here we have less Duke and more Ethan, because this is one of Wayne's finest performances. The steady-state amiability that Wayne practically had a patent on is not evident here. Here instead you have a dark man with a dark heart who somehow, in the matter of Deborah, overcomes its worst impulses.

For the rest, the film is blessedly devoid - well, mostly - of the usual dim witted John Ford horseplay. What there is is parcelled out over the whole film, tucked in here and there and mostly forgettable. After all, there's no comic business that would relieve Ethan anyway.

Probably not the West as it ever particularly was, The Searchers is yet a masterful movie, one of Wayne and Ford's best outings ever.

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