1980s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Western

Silverado (1985)

Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Screenwriters: Lawrence Kasdan, Mark Kasdan

By Roderick Heath

In memoriam: Brian Dennehy 1938-2020

Miami-born, West Virginia-raised Lawrence Kasdan had ambitions to become a filmmaker since childhood. Determined to break into 1970s Hollywood with the aim of becoming a director, he nonetheless made his play as a screenwriter. Kasdan spent stints as a teacher and advertising copy writer before he landed an agent with a screenplay called The Bodyguard, a work that would take another seventeen years to hit movie screens. The first script he had produced was the romantic comedy Continental Divide (1978), shepherded by Steven Spielberg in one of his early forays into producing. The film wasn’t a great success but clearly Spielberg was impressed by Kasdan, as he and George Lucas tapped Kasdan to write both Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strike Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), swiftly establishing Kasdan as a talent equal to the challenge of the blockbuster age, a keen and canny wordsmith and a member of the Movie Brat tribe with a deep affection for genre fare of yore. Kasdan was swiftly rewarded with a shot at directing. Despite his skill at fleshing out fantastical material, Kasdan’s own taste was more earthbound and old-school, and he would challenge himself often during his directorial career to revive waned genres like film noir, westerns, and screwball comedy with a modern edge and relevance, and finding varying levels of success.

Kasdan’s directorial debut, the lean and mordant neo-noir Body Heat (1981), instantly grabbed him attention, and his follow-up, The Big Chill (1983), a comedy-drama rooted in Kasdan’s experiences in studying former ‘60s student radicals settling into comfortable middle age, was hugely successful and admired at the time although it eventually became a pop culture punchline. Kasdan’s later career slowly waned as he made a few too many middling comedies and smug, touch-feely dramedies. For his third film, Kasdan resolved to take a shot at reviving the Western. After the general box office catastrophe that met Heaven’s Gate (1980) and The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), the Western had been declared dead, but Kasdan felt it only needed a loving hand determined to remind the mass audience what a fun genre it could be, harking back to fare like The Big Country (1958) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Silverado is probably the high-water mark of Kasdan’s directing work, albeit one that was only mildly successful at the box office, ironically because the studio was so excited by the wild audience reaction at test screenings it was sent to theatres without a proper build-up. It even helped spark a sputtering revival for the Western, initially in the teenybopper shoot-‘em-up Young Guns (1988), and more substantially as Kasdan’s young acting discovery Kevin Costner would go on to score an Oscar-garlanded hit with Dances With Wolves (1990) and give impetus for a handful of new entries in the 1990s. Most of those didn’t land with audiences, however, and Silverado itself, despite its best intentions, might well reveal why the genre couldn’t truly return.

Kasdan executed the film with a sprawling sense of the genre’s visual and storytelling lexicon, but still made it adhere to his own, more personal fascination with a gallery of motley characters drawn together in because of a shared cause and experience. The film starts memorably and deliberately on a claustrophobic note, with a sequence that feels close to the climax of Blood Simple (1984). Emmett (Scott Glenn) is a man sleeping in a dark and tiny cabin, when someone starts shooting through the walls at him. Emmett manages to grab his rifle and fire back, killing his attackers, and he steps outside with the reveal that the cabin is perched on a ridge above a glorious landscape of valleys and snow-capped mountains, a great moment for cinematographer John Bailey. Kasdan nods to the famous opening of The Searchers (1956) here whilst also performing his own, specific piece of visual legerdemain, releasing the Western from a cage of dolour and reduced horizons. Emmett has just been released from prison, and he’s making his way back to the town of Silverado, where some of his family reside, with the ultimate intention of reach California with his younger brother Jake (Costner). As he crosses a stretch of desert, Emmett encounters a man laid out on the sand. This is Paden (Kevin Kline), who reports he was held up and robbed by some men he was travelling with, and left without water to die. Paden seems an amiable man, perhaps out of his depth, although anyone would look like a twit in such circumstances. Emmett helps him out of the desert.

When they reach a frontier hamlet, Paden sees one of his attackers, and hurriedly buys a poor pistol with his last dollar. He shoots the thief, revealing his brilliance as a gunman, and reclaims his horse. Another man passing through town, Cobb (Brian Dennehy), vouches for him: Cobb and Paden were once partners in an outlaw gang together, but Paden is determined to go straight. Paden continues travelling with Emmett, until they reach a more substantial town, Turley, where Emmett expects to meet up with Jake. As they eat in a tavern, they watch in interest as a black cowboy, Malachi ‘Mal’ Johnson (Danny Glover) comes in and orders a drink, only to be brusquely told by the owner to leave, and a couple of local heavies take pleasure in backing him up. Mal instead pummels all three, only to attract the attention of the town’s very English, very strict Sheriff, Langston (John Cleese), who runs him out of town. They soon learn that Langston has Jake in prison awaiting hanging for killing a man in a gunfight, which Jake swears was self-defence. Emmett resolves to break Jake out, and Paden tells him he doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the law again, so they part amicably. But Paden spies another of his robbers, this one wearing his signature hat, and when the thief tries to shoot him Paden guns him down, which gets him thrown into the same cell with Jake. The duo work together to escape and link up with Emmett.

The way Kasdan introduces and develops Paden signifies his clever and witty approach to reclaiming the Western. Paden is first seen stripped to his long-johns, and speaks not with a hard-bitten western accent but a polite and bewildered lilt, a seemingly absurd figure who might be at home in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) or The Missouri Breaks (1975) or any number of other mud-and-blood Westerns, or even Blazing Saddles (1974). He’s mocked by his former fellow bandits for having dropped out of their number because concern for a dog triggered his capacity for empathy. Casting Kline, better known as a comic actor, compounds the initial miscue. But once Emmett helps him to civilisation, Paden begins reclaiming both his possessions and his pride, reassembling himself and the aura of his breed piece by piece, unveiling his near-supernatural talent with a six-shooter and an unyielding and fearless streak, hard to provoke but truly fearsome once activated. His progression makes literal Kasdan’s purposeful shift from recalling the shambolic and cynical strain of the genre seen in the ‘70s and moving back in the genre’s history to restore the figure of the Western hero in all his glory. This motif threads through the film’s first third, at the same time Emmett, Paden, Jake, and Mal form together into a band and make their way to the titular town, their amity fused by their shared and complimentary talents and their common experience of various forms of injustice, of which Mal’s struggle with racism is the most blatant example, although Emmett, Jake, and Paden all face their own versions.

The storyline, once the plot proper kicks into gear, actually uses the same basic plot as Heaven’s Gate in dealing with a range war sparked by a greedy cattleman, only in a less virulently anti-capital and more crowd-pleasing way. The opening credits, with Bruce Broughton’s grandiose, Alfred Newman-esque score thundering over shots of Emmett riding past vast and gritty-beautiful landscapes, situates the characters in a purely mythical movie zone. The films swiftly racks up a vivid sense of the genre’s classic motifs – the monumental landscape, the tough but decent heroes unveiled in all their badass brilliance. That said, Kasdan resists getting po-faced and square in restoring the classical Western grandeur, deploying a loose comedic edge to give familiar figures and ideas a new instability, particularly with an offbeat approach to casting, putting actors largely known for comedy in serious parts and vice versa. This extends to Cleese’s ingeniously droll and aggravating performance as Langston, bullying and railroading people with a very proper English manner, Basil Fawlty with a six shooter, and the diminutive Linda Hunt as Stella, the female bar owner who becomes Paden’s best friend but needs a raised platform behind the bar to serve drinks. Jeff Goldblum enters the film with his customary rubbery intonations as a gambler named Slick who seems at first like he might be an ally to the heroes but proves instead a villain. Most vitally, Kasdan gave young Costner, whose mature screen persona would often be dismayingly stolid, the part of jovial, livewire, fast-shootin’ Jake, making him an instant star.

The film’s first third consists of a series of rolling challenges to the heroes that also draw them together, in a freewheeling and picaresque fashion that nonetheless obeys a particular logical flow. We move from Emmett rescuing Paden to Paden and Jake busting out of jail together with a goofy ruse, with the aid of Emmett, who blows up the town gallows to distract Langston and his deputies, and then with the intervention of Mal, who covers their flight from the sheriff with such frighteningly good marksmanship Langston decides his jurisdiction ends well short of the county line. This segues into a calculatedly iconic depiction of the four heroes riding abreast across the countryside with Broughton’s heroic theme swelling, all without a hint of irony. One the road to Silverado they come across a wagon train that’s been robbed by thieves posing as trail hands. Emmett and Mal’s altruism inspires them to go after the thieves, whilst Paden is more motivate by gaining the approval of one of the women of the train, Hannah (Rosanna Arquette), although she’s married to the bullish Conrad (Rusty Meyers), who, suspicious of the gang’s motives, elects himself to accompany them. The thieves prove to be part of a larger gang led by Dawson (James Gammon), but a successful combination of Emmett and Paden’s ruse and Mal and Jake’s shooting allows them to snatch back the train’s cashbox in a breezy, near-slapstick action sequence. Conrad holds the heroes up at gunpoint and demands the cashbox from them, but he is gunned down by one of the thieves.

Eventually the four heroes arrive with the wagon train in Silverado, where they go their separate ways: Mal to join his father Ezra (Joe Seneca), who owns his own ranch, Emmett and Jake to visit their sister Kate (Patricia Gaul), who’s married to the local land registrar J.T. Hollis (Earl Hindman) and has a son. Paden pays court to the widowed Hannah but is turned off by her professed determination to build her parcel of land into a great ranch. He soon finds Cobb is not just a local business owner but also the Silverado sheriff, positions he’s reached because he’s also the chief enforcer for the great local cattle rancher Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker). Paden takes a job running the gaming in Cobb’s saloon the Midnight Star, managed by Stella, after Cobb fires and gut-punches the man who was in the job, Kelly (Richard Jenkins). Kelly vengefully tries to shoot Cobb but Cobb blows him away. Emmett has reasons to be wary of McKendrick, because he was in prison for shooting the cattle baron’s brother in self-defence. McKendrick professes to be satisfied by Emmett’s incarceration, but Emmett quickly learns the horse he’s riding, taken from one of the men who tried to kill him at the opening, has McKendrick’s brand, telling him McKendrick ordered the attempted hit. McKendrick is trying to take over all the nearby territory, terrorising the smaller land owners, including Ezra, who’s had his cabin burned down and now hides in a cave, and Mal’s resentful sister Rae (Lynn Whitfield) has moved into the town and become a prostitute. Upon Mal’s return he and Ezra stand up to McKendrick’s goons, but pay the price when Ezra is ambushed and shot dead.

Silverado was reportedly cut down from a greater running time prior to release, and it tells in places, but it doesn’t entirely excuse the film’s lumpiness. The way plot strands and characters pile up suddenly a good distance into the running time robs it of the gallivanting charm and pace established early on, and even a screenwriter as skilful and adroit as Kasdan can’t easily negotiate the speed bump. There’s enough raw material for a film twice Silverado’s already solid length, assembling elements at a frantic pace to build up a storyline busy enough to engage all of his heroes and justify the inclusion of an array of assorted classical genre tropes. In this regard it stands in contrast with the economic structure Kasdan managed for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and unlike that film, which so sleekly performed osmosis on generations of pulp adventuring it emerged diamond-hard, Silverado rather makes you more conscious of Kasdan’s attempt to rope together clichés. Such multiplying is also proof of Kasdan’s honourable desire to offer his fun with substance, fleshing out his heroes and providing each of them with a strong stake in the drama, even the professionally disengaged Paden.

It’s also plainly a style of drama Kasdan liked, the narrative with a panoramic sense of character and their individual straits which he visited in quite different keys in The Big Chill and later with Grand Canyon (1991) and Dreamcatcher (2002). Moreover, the film shifts gear from a romp to a more concerted melodrama as the heroes face Cobb and McKendrick, ruthless and competent villains determined to protect their interests. But some elements, particularly Paden and Emmett’s attentions to Hannah, don’t have the time to go anywhere. Hannah’s obviously been included as a sop to a more contemporary female ideal, she doesn’t really add anything to the film, unlike Whitfield’s Rae, who’s crucial to the plot and describes a neat character arc in herself. Pointedly perhaps, just about the only aspect of a good classic Western Kasdan fails then to encompass is a good romance, with Jake’s affair with good-natured saloon waitress Phoebe (Amanda Wyss) a very minor aside, whilst Paden’s quick but fierce platonic friendship with Stella ironically comes closest as a meeting of ironically inclined lost souls. Kasdan does better in racking up a number of swiftly and neatly described enemies, including Tyree (Jeff Fahey), another member of Paden and Cobb’s old gang and a more feral personality itching for a chance to take on his old comrade, and lesser imps like Slick. A string of events pitch the story towards crisis point. Ezra is murdered. In a crafty scene, Emmett is glimpsed in a regulation activity for a Western hero, practicing his shooting in a suitably quiet and deserted area. Once he empties all his guns, McKendrick’s goons suddenly spring out of hiding and attack him, only for Mal, who’s been hiding since his father’s death, to intervene and save Emmett who suffers a bad blow to the head from Tyree riding repeatedly over him. Mal is then captured and jailed by Cobb. McKendrick and more goons break into J.T.’s registrar office to burn all the land deeds, killing J.T. shot and kidnapping his and Kate’s son Augie (Thomas Wilson Brown), whilst Jake vanishes, presumed dead.

Early in his directing career, Kasdan revealed a genuine knack for spotting star talent, and his first three films launched a handful of big names. One great and obvious pleasure of Silverado is its excellent cast. Indeed there are few movies that include such a large percentage of my favourite actors, most of whom are given carefully crafted roles, and even the relatively small parts sport actors of the calibre of Seneca, Gammon, and Brion James filling them out. Even Costner is terrific in an atypical role as the jaunty, irrepressible Jake, a strong contrast to Glenn’s weathered intensity as his brother and Glover’s everyman grit. Dennehy wields enough bluff charisma to light up Manhattan. Only Kline feels slightly uneasy in his part. He’s good when playing Paden’s courteous side and portraying crisis of conscience when push comes to shove. But when Paden’s dangerous streak is roused, Kline aims for lethal focus in his glare but achieves only woodenness. When Glenn as Emmett resolves to go out and fight, you believe it, but Kline looks like he’s biting his tongue on a witticism: deadpan is not the same as seriousness. Paden is pushed into a quandary as he tries to obey his desire to avoid trouble but finds his friends in trouble and Cobb and McKendrick’s war intensifying and costing innocent lives. When he signals his displeasure to Cobb after trying to extinguish the fire consuming the registrar office and learning of Augie’s kidnapping, the sheriff responds by making veiled threats on Stella’s life to hold Paden in check. Paden and Stella get drunk together and Stella realises this.

Kasdan’s desire to balance aspects of the revisionist urge with a more classical and grandiose sensibility would see him return to the Western with the much undervalued Wyatt Earp (1994), on that occasion with Costner in the lead for a darker and more interrogative attempt to weld the two hemispheres, epic and expansive in form but psychological and troubled in details. Silverado notably only avoids dealing with Native Americans in ticking off genre clichés, whereas Costner with Dances With Wolves would make the issue central: between the two films they revealed that a neo-Western had to either entirely ignore Native Americans or commit wholly to examining their plight. Silverado patterns itself more after the type of Western that exploited the genre for a mythical stage for depicting social problems in microcosm: every Western town with its open main drag became a free-floating ahistorical island where moral drama was reduced to an essential scheme. Kasdan doesn’t entirely neglect this aspect despite the film’s generally high-spirited tone even. Many an old Western had the crooked sheriff and the bullying landowner, but Kasdan nudges the template along to make the heroes all outsiders to varying degrees, and where the social order often portrayed in the old westerns is made more explicitly a battle of those outsiders against corrupt blocs of power.

Consequentially, Kasdan’s west can encompass black heroes and tough and unusual women: the emphasis on the Johnsons as black landowners threatened by racists and bullies is historically pertinent and little treated in the genre, and the subplot of Mal and Rae’s mutual resentment, as Mal returns from running off the big city, is the most substantial in the movie, and leads to Rae, after spurning her brother, trying nonetheless to save Mal from jail and getting clipped by a bullet for her pains. Kasdan works a strong if obvious visual idea in the climactic shoot-out framing Paden before the town with the white-painted church prominent in the background, whilst Cobb is pictured poised on the edge with the wild landscape behind him, suggesting one has become symbolic of the community whilst the other is the barbarian meeting his end. Part of the problems with Kasdan’s method of doubling up tropes lies in the very fact that he doesn’t quite use Dennehy, who was born to play a sagebrush feudal lord, effectively as a tyrannical figure, with villainy spread over Baker’s much less vivid and interesting McKendrick.

This kind of imprecision chokes off the film’s melodramatic potential just when it should be building to a pitch. The relationship between McKendrick and Cobb likewise lacks a sense of their dynamic as very different men with the same purpose in contorting the world to their will, and the impact of their reign over the town is, ironically, not as sharply described as Langston’s over his. And that leads into something that goes subtly awry with Silverado despite the general excellence on display. Kasdan never quite finds the live nerve of real emotional danger and ferocity. Whilst he provides each of his heroes with a strong spur to action, the stakes tend to drown each-other out. Instead Kasdan constantly provokes awareness that so much that’s in the movie because he wanted it in there. Such trope-harvesting movie has a habit of assimilating genres to a point where they extinguish them. Witness the way Star Wars has long since subordinated the entire space opera tradition, and who knows when anyone will try to make a pirate movie that doesn’t lurk in the shadow of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And yet Kasdan ultimately did a remarkable job of taking the most low-tech of genres and giving it a scale that didn’t feel out of place amidst ‘80s blockbusters, and he succeeded in his core desire, to make a Western that didn’t feel like a solemn chore, a lesson too many attempts since it was made haven’t kept in mind. Once Kasdan reaches clear ground to let his heroes off the leash again, the spectacle comes on hard, particularly with an excellent set-piece where Emmett and Mal ride to take back Augie at McKendrick’s ranch, with Paden finally and fatefully riding up to join them, before unleashing one of McKendrick’s cattle herds as a weapon by stampeding them through the homestead. A great gun battle ensues as the heroes take on McKendrick’s private army, with Jake reappearing and joining the fight, and Emmett managing to penetrate the McKendrick manse and save Augie whilst McKendrick himself flees to town. The heroes give chase, cueing the best of Kasdan’s shots that aim blatantly for instant genre iconography, as the quartet split apart on the separate paths into Silverado, with Augie watching them from a ridge as the incarnation of boyish admiration beholding mythologised grown-up bravery.

Today, in this regard, Silverado feels less like a revitalisation of the Western than a very early trial run for the popularity of superhero movies, envisioning the Western hero ultimately more as the realisation of a young person’s fantasy rather than an adult’s in the way, say, Sergio Leone’s films are, nor grand panoramas of social identity in the manner of John Ford’s. The distinction is minor, perhaps, but consequential. The battle that unfolds around Silverado gives all the heroes a crowning moment whilst also piling up different kinds of action resolution. Mal knifes Slick as he threatens the wounded Rae, Jake takes out multiple foes at once with brilliantly cocky moves, Emmett battles McKendrick on horseback and gets revenge when his nag kicks McKendrick’s head in, and Paden confronts Cobb at last for a classical shoot-out. Dennehy’s man-mountain falls before Kline’s gangly animal lover, and the epilogue sees the men parting ways with Paden now the anointed sheriff, the fitting end-point of his journey from the desert, whilst Mal and Rae return to the land and Emmett and Jake ride into the sunset in search of the next horizon. It’s ultimately true that Silverado tries too hard. But it’s a grand kind of trying too hard.

1950s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Western

The Searchers (1956)

Director: John Ford
Screenwriter: Frank Nugent

By Roderick Heath

John Ford was hardly lacking in fame and acclaim when he released The Searchers. He’d already captured four Oscars as Best Director, proof he stood for his peers as the most admired of American filmmaking talents. Given how rarely Westerns were given such awards and serious critical interest, Ford seemed to be looking for almost the opposite of acclaim in his constant returns to the genre. He was chasing something more elusive, something lodged fast and discomforting, like a thorn under skin or a shard of niggling shrapnel. Ford returned from World War II without quite a few of his cherished illusions, but also nursing some ambitions he set about making realities. He moved to gain a level of independence from the Hollywood studio system by setting himself up as a producer-director for his own Argosy Pictures outfit. Keeping up that kind of freedom was to prove a tall order in the following years, but Ford began to come into his own in terms of how we think of him now, as the man who declared bluntly later in life after a career of diverse movies, “I make Westerns.” That was the genre he had found early success in with The Iron Horse (1926) but scarcely returned to during the 1930s, until Stagecoach (1939), a film that not only provided Ford with a big hit and suddenly earned new critical interest and respect for the genre, but gave a boost to its leading man John Wayne.
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Wayne had been lingering in cheap oatsers since his initial breakthrough The Big Trail (1930) had proved a box office disappointment. During the war Wayne’s star had only grown brighter, leaving him poised to become Hollywood’s biggest draw, but he found himself in conflict with his former pal and mentor Ford, as he’d failed to make good on his promises to join up, leading to tensions on the set of They Were Expendable (1945), Ford’s first civilian film in several years. Ford made good on his desire to make Westerns with My Darling Clementine (1946), starring Henry Fonda and evoking the romanticised version of the OK Corral shootout he claimed to have heard from Wyatt Earp’s own lips decades before. The past seemed to be on Ford’s mind too, as he directed Wayne to mimic his old leading man Harry Carey Snr in some places. Despite their personal differences, Ford and Wayne soon proved the kind of teaming that makes for movie legend in the following few years as Wayne became the sturdy frame Ford hung his Cavalry trilogy – Fort Apache (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950) – upon. Ford was trying to reprocess the generational experience of the war into terms that could be contained and mediated through the Westerns and tragicomic dramas he liked. His films from this period are filled with sundered but reunited families, bands of soldierly brothers, gatherings of old former comrades, old enemies finding common cause, all trying to get on with nation-building enterprises.
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Native Americans had been provided as cosmic foils in Stagecoach, but whilst they were still often the enemies in the Cavalry trilogy, their situation was no longer so one-dimensional: in Fort Apache they’re provoked by arrogance, treachery, and double-dealing into warfare, in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon they’re neighbours to be disarmed rather than battled, and in Rio Grande a cruel renegade is hunted and surgically taken down. Wayne made one more Western in this phase, Wagon Master (1950), without Wayne, and then took a break from the genre. Ford’s Irish fantasia The Quiet Man (1953) proved his biggest hit to date and gained him his fourth Oscar. But skirmishes with Fonda during the making of Mister Roberts (1955) proved a troubling rupture. Fonda resisted Ford’s desire to follow his usual instinct and scuff up the property, for Fonda wanted to retain the essentially noble spirit of the source play. Frustration eventually, so the legend goes, saw Ford punch his leading man and retreat into a drinking binge that brought on serious illness. To recover, after some forays into TV directing, he looked back to the Western again to find some project that could expiate the poisonous, near-fatal experience. He found the project in a novel by Alan LeMay, who usually wrote scripts for Ford’s rival, and occasional nemesis, Cecil B. DeMille. The Searchers was well-received and successful upon release, but by this time movie and TV screens were so busy with Westerns it was hard to stand out. Only a few years later as Ford became one of the select rank of heralded auteurs in studio cinema, and as young movie lovers grew up and became critics and directors, would it start gaining the reputation it has now as a pinnacle of popular cinema.
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There’s a telling and fascinating conjunction in Ford swinging from a disaster like the Mister Roberts shoot into making his greatest film, and it becomes clearer in concentrating more closely upon the troubled soul of the subsequent film. The Searchers is a study in finding grace in the face of cruelty and hate in large part because it’s coming from a bleak and stymied place. Only cinema, that pool of light between black, rigid fields, offers relief. Small wonder the film starts and ends like it famously does, perfect black broken open and then resealed. The opening, which sees Ethan Edwards (Wayne) returning to family after years away at war, poses the film as the last of Ford’s homecoming-from-war movies. The setting is Texas, 1868, although the location is Monument Valley. Usually Ford’s returning veterans have the benefit of fellowship; Ethan is solitary, embittered, giving away his awards and regalia to kids and negotiating the many psychic eggshells spread about the domicile of his brother Aaron Edwards’ (Walter Coy) frontier homestead. Here also lives Aaron’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) and their three children, Lucy (Pippa Scott), Ben (Robert Lyden), and Debbie (Lana Wood), as well as the adopted and raised family member, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a lanky lad with Cherokee heritage (“At least that’s what they tell me”).
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In Ford’s earlier Westerns the wandering men of fortune were usually helping out the people who wanted to put down roots. Here the gulf is muted but unbridgeable, despite Ethan’s seeming desire to reintegrate himself at last, or at least to the extent he’s prepared to be, which isn’t much. He has mysterious wealth in a bag of fresh-minted dollars and still considers himself to be a under oath to the defeated Confederate States. Lucy is the first bobby-soxer, trying to snatch her moments with her beau, Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.). Judging by the way she folds Ethan’s coat and swaps a charged look with him, Martha might well have been his lover before Ethan left to fight. Ethan, Martin, and Brad are quickly pressed into helping a posse led by local minister and lawman Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnson Clayton (Ward Bond), after some cattle are stolen away, presumably by a roving Native American band. But when they find the cattle dead, Ethan realises the purpose was to lure away defenders from the ranches, for a “murder raid” of punitive action against settlers.
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By the time Ethan and Martin return, they find the Edwards homestead ablaze, Lucy and Debbie missing, and the other three killed. Clayton’s posse continues after the Indian band, who prove to be a tribe of Comanche under the glowering leadership of Chief Scar or Cicatriz (Henry Brandon). After barely escaping an ambush by their quarries, the posse breaks up and heads home, leaving only Ethan, Martin, and Brad to keep up the pursuit. When Ethan finds Lucy’s dead body, discarded by the Comanche, Brad gets killed riding into their camp in a mad charge, and the other two lose track of the tribe in snow, forcing them to break off the pursuit. After being briefly taken in by Brad’s parents (John Qualen and Olive Carey) and sister Laurie (Vera Miles), who carries a torch for Martin, Ethan and Martin set out again to locate the band after receiving a possible clue to their whereabouts. Martin becomes increasingly worried that Ethan doesn’t intend to rescue Debbie anymore, but plans to kill her in case she’s been “living with a buck.” After several years on the trail, thanks to a Mexican trader, Figueroa (Antonio Moreno), Ethan and Martin finally gain access to Scar’s camp and find him not only aware of who they are, but all too happy to taunt them with the scalps of their murdered family members on his spear, and the sight of a now-grown Debbie (Natalie Wood) become one of his wives.
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The set-up here – the ragged warrior and the settled family, the pining matriarchs and hero-worshipping boy – is reminiscent of Shane (1953). Ford might well have internalised that hit, that most aesthetically purified and self-consciously mythic of Westerns, trying to decide if it meant anything to him or not, and proceeds from the realisation that George Stevens wanted his fabled concept just a little too unspoilt. Shane lived and died for the sake of letting civilisation getting on with its follies, stirring its contradictions but not despoiling them. No blonde seraphim to stir hearts and take the rap here. Ford speeds through that work in miniature and comes out the other side to leave desolation and terror where the little house in the prairie stood. Ethan is no-one’s idea of a white knight. But the actual aesthetic antagonist to be wrestled with here is My Darling Clementine and the Cavalry trilogy, their perfection as a summary of Ford’s concept of the west revisited, tested, and finally endorsed again, but only after the deepest agonistes. Martin is the family’s adopted son, regarded with squint suspicion by Ethan when he sits down to eat at the dinner table: “Fella could mistake you for a half-breed.” Ethan’s jagged, reactionary-racist sensibility is already fully on display. So too is his humane streak, as he rescued Martin as a child from the wreckage of a massacre. Martin and Ethan’s relationship compels the film even as they seem to barely tolerate each-other’s company and even at points seem to be mortal enemies, as Ethan explicitly denies Martin any kind of familial status to him early on, but also becomes almost a caricature of the hard-bitten, tough-love paterfamilias.
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The Searchers’ DNA is scattered today throughout the length and breadth of contemporary cinema, from the dreamlike transpositions of the Star Wars films to the grimy, pensive immediacy of Taxi Driver (1976) and all their descendants in turn. The greater part of The Searchers’ power and vitality wells precisely from contradiction. It’s a film where the hero is also its villain, where the American landscape is both worshipped and regarded as suspicious and duplicitous. The narrative itself rests upon contradiction, as the characters tread the length and breadth of the American heartland and yet find their reckoning mere miles from where the hunt started. It’s no cutely liberal take on the Western like Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow (1953), but that’s precisely what allows it to dig into the dark side of the American enterprise, capturing the marauding mindset of men like Ethan and Scar, who both operate out of motives of vengeance and tribal identity. Perhaps that’s why Ford socked Fonda over Mister Roberts and then turned around to make this: a little voice in the back of Ford’s mind insisting the only way you could grapple with what infuriates you was not to play wise elder but to swallow the hot coal.
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Ethan is reminiscent of Jesse James as a veteran whose post-war crime spree seems to him at least have been a mere extension of the conflict, as it’s hinted Ethan might have been supporting himself in a similar way. “You match a lot of descriptions,” Clayton notes when Ethan won’t take his deputising oath because “it wouldn’t be legal.” Later, he guns down the duplicitous Futterman (Peter Mamakos), a trader who sells Ethan and Martin a clue for gold but who then tries to kill them to get more, and his helpmates with cool thoroughness, so much so that later he and Martin are suspected of murder. Ethan and Scar are the frontier death-dream incarnate. There’s a tonal reflex reminiscent of horror cinema in some of The Searchers, particularly the creepy moment when Scar’s shadow falls upon the child Debbie in the graveyard where her grandparents are buried and soon too will be the rest of her family, and the rhyming scene at the climax as he looms over Debbie and Martin. The bookending doorway shots feel more than a little inspired by Hugo Fregonese’s Apache Drums (1951), a film which transmitted its producer Val Lewton’s psychological and folkloric sensibility into the Western, and perhaps Ford absorbed a little of that sensibility along with the technique. The struggle for domain that takes place in the course of the movie is physical but also subsists on this atavistic level, fought on the level of symbols and totems, to which in a way Debbie is reduced often throughout.
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Scar’s spear loaded with scalps, including those of the Edwards clan and Martin’s mother, is held out as a triumphant standard, in the grip of Debbie, another captured prize. Ethan removes any dividing line between himself and his enemy as he stoops to claiming Scar’s scalp. But the laws of tribalism negate the need for moral discernment. What I do to you is righteous and what you do to me is savagery. Ford’s celebration of space throughout, the grandiose forms and climes of the Monument Valley locations and all their primeval strength, is constantly contradicted and complicated. Ethan is all too aware the posse’s been drawn out just far enough to stop them fending off the murder raid; the vastness becomes a trap under such circumstances. Scar’s tribe are able to remain ever so tauntingly ahead of Ethan and Martin. The open area around the Edwards homestead harbours enemies advancing unseen and nightmarish. The bluffs of Monument Valley are a canvas to describe the tension: they stand grand and worshipful but also dominate and dwarf Ford’s characters as the posse rides out to chase down. Ford constantly captures his actors with the rock forms behind or looming over them, trying to cage their elastic physicality, their volatility, their challenge to nature.
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Stagecoach was a legend that skirted Monument Valley but found its stage in the open ground; The Searchers inhabits vertiginous zones where the moral danger seems mapped out in canyons and caves. Scar’s tribe exploit the folds of land to surround the posse, riding along parallel ridges, whilst the posse use a river as a defence. Ethan and Martin wander a continent but the first time they attain their goal they’re chased inside a cave that seems like a zone of moral nullity, a cave that looms again at the end as Ethan hunts down Debbie with apparent murderous intent. This oppressive use of the landscape is particularly apparent in a uniquely vicious scene in which the posse, still in the early stage of its pursuit, come across the body of a dead brave, actors and rock forms constantly caught in dialogue. Spiritual violence is stirred: Brad picks up a rock and pummels the corpse, but Ethan has a more exacting sense of justice, shooting out the body’s eyes so that the dead man’s spirit must roam the afterlife in blind desolation.
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Ford’s frontier homes and outposts have low, slightly oppressive ceilings (one of many lessons Orson Welles took from Ford: in cinema, the sets don’t just frame drama but generate it), and his camera framings obey the rectilinear demarcations of the architecture as much as his exterior framings respond to the jagged upthrust of the land. Here cotillions form and rituals of marriage and justice unfold, obeying their own social architecture, cordons far more unyielding than any cavalry column into which Ethan and Martin crash upon their second return home. Years of fruitless wandering, is reported via a letter Martin writes to Laurie, a missive she’s obliged to read out to her parents and to the letter’s deliverer, the guitar-picking, haw-hawing local flash Charlie McCory (Ken Curtis). A great chunk of narrative and time is ingeniously compressed this way, whilst making other points, as Charlie presents a romantic threat to Martin whilst Laurie’s increasing exasperation with her peripatetic beau boils over at the news that Martin picked himself up a wife. Accidentally, of course, as Martin thought he was trying to trade for a blanket but found he’d purchased a squaw instead, a woman he dubs “Look” (Beulah Archuletta) and whose presence, helpful as she tries to be, he can’t stand. When he and Ethan got the idea of asking her about Scar, she became fearful and left them, and they later found her dead in an Indian village, attacked and left in carnage by a Cavalry patrol, leaving the perplexing question as to whether Look was merely trying to get away or was trying to help Martin.
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The Searchers is as much a film about generation conflict as Rebel Without A Cause (1955), which Wood had starred in the year before, and its many followers. One reason, perhaps, why so many young men watched the film and found in its something like their cinematic bible, over and beyond its imagistic and storytelling force. Home, the locus of simplicity and order, is shattered early in the film, and tensions were already brewing; gruff pseudo-father and maturing pseudo-son are then obliged to chase the ghost of common meaning. So easy to see the conflict between Ethan and Martin as the uncomprehending gap between a generation of fathers who had been off to war to defend a settled world and sons who wanted to renew it, and the bewilderment and sullen anxiety of the young in the face of their elders’ mysterious prejudices and unreasoning demarcations. Despite his many protestations to disinterest in Martin’s lot, Ethan acts like his father – one of the great bits of movie business comes in the cantina scene in which Ethan keeps foiling Martin’s attempts to get a drink of liquor even as the conversation involves something else entirely. It’s a moment that’s just as revealing and even more cunningly parsed as the more famous scene with Martha folding Ethan’s coat: bonds of family, of love, of instinctive connection take place on a level that’s near-subliminal. Moreover, this sort of thing illustrates exactly what a filmmaker like Ford can conjure, and any great filmmaker, over and above even the layers of Frank Nugent’s already tight-wound script.
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Martin seems exempt from the ranks of tribalism as such identities are melded in his frame as well as nullified by his youthful openness. Ethan and Martin represent a dichotomy of experience commonly seen in Ford’s films but usually safely contained by social constructs like the military, the youth learning about the world and passing through baptisms of fire, and the older, hardened, life-scarred man. Look to one of Ford’s early films like Seas Beneath (1931), where the young man has his first erotic experience with a senorita and the older man is the stalwart captain shepherding all through the curtain of fire. Here the rhythms are off-kilter, the figurations twisted. The captain is a landlubber Ahab chasing after a girl who may or may not be his daughter from a transgressive romance, and the young man, played by Hunter with his stark blue eyes and passion play physique as a beautiful gelding, never gets time to get it on with Laurie or the flamenco dancer making eyes at him in the frontier cantina. Sexual transgression lurks behind so much of The Searchers, in the barely-coded anxiety over miscegenation and sexual slavery, but its tenor is rather one of neurotic severance from the erotic. The ascending order of racist neurosis is invoked, driving Confederate holdout Ethan crazy, and Scar’s motives are calculated as revenge by precisely triggering them, for the chieftain who’s lost two sons to the encroaching white man knows well what hurts his foe. The resulting sense of obsession builds relentlessly to specific moments of baleful paroxysm, as in Martin placing himself between Ethan and Debbie as he moves to gun her down, and the final battle. The film repeats the generational conflict in miniature towards the end with a level of in-joke humour. Ethan and Clayton find themselves confronted by green, young, sabre-waving Lieutenant Greenhill, envoy of his Cavalry commanding father, breezing in to alert the elders to Scar’s presence with callow energy, and played by Wayne’s son Patrick.
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The margins of the central drama are filled out by such a gallery of oddballs and frontier grotesques, covering a range of types and cultural entities, filled out by ingenious detail and performances. Clayton is a leader both spiritual and temporal, embodiment of all social authority in the sparse precincts of the frontier and perfect contrast to Ethan’s individualist indomitability. Yet he’s anything but abstract in his bristling, bustling vigour, tying his top hat to his crown with a handkerchief and vowing to get himself “unsurrounded” and barking at Greenhill to “Watch out for that knife” only to cop it in the backside in the midst of battle. Crackpot Mose Harper (Hank Worden) longs for a rocking chair and makes fun of the Comanche by mimicking their war cries, tolerated and patronised by all who know him, which proves to be a great survival talent, as he gives Scar the slip and alerts the heroes to the tribe’s return. Brandon, a character actor who bobbed about Hollywood for decades and who had bigger parts than this but none more famous, makes a tremendous impression although Scar remains for the most part an antagonist over the horizon. His appearances early in the film galvanise the characters aura of threat and dark, scowling, brutal charisma, from looming over young Debbie as he comes across her attempting to flee the homestead to putting on his chieftain’s bonnet and sporting the medal Ethan gave to Debbie about his neck. When he and Ethan finally meet, the doppelgangers stand almost touching in their fearsome mutual challenge, whilst refusing to break the rules of the chivalrous game of hospitality.
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The Searchers also undoubtedly contains Wayne’s best performance, lacking the slightly calculated feel to some of his other major turns like the aging Nathan Brittles in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and ornery Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969). His Ethan Edwards simply is – his smouldering aggression, his patronising assurance, his surly turns of phrase (“That’ll be the day”) and grit-toothed ferocity and private moments with eyes deep pools of sorrow and regret and flashes of lunatic rage. For a man of undoubted, bullish presence and martial skill, Ethan is trapped in states of impotence throughout much of the film, reduced to finding and burying the mangled remnants of his family. Wayne’s performing intuition grasped gesture as the essence of film acting, the sort of considered motions generations of kids have mimicked in trying to grasp the essence of screen cool. The badass spectacle of whipping out his Winchester from its holster before riding in to the burning homestead. The spins of his revolver as he shoots out the dead Comanche’s eyes. More than that, though, here Wayne uses such gestural precision to describe Ethan’s frustrated power, finally blatant in the seething fury in his eyes as he barks at Clayton for spoiling a shot at Scar and finally near-lunacy as he shoots down buffalo in his desire to starve the Comanches, becoming in his unreasoning wrath and sense of punitive mission the embodiment of the dark side of the Western conquest, and his schoolyard posturing before Scar when finally they men meet.
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Ford, like Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks, had always made complex Westerns, although there was certainly a general accuracy to the notion the genre was becoming more meditative in its historical considerations. Although his political allegiances were becoming more conservative, Ford was becoming more direct and questioning about who could be considered American and what the country could mean to them were becoming more pointed. He would soon construct creation myths for African-Americans (Sergeant Rutledge, 1960) and finally Native Americans (Cheyenne Autumn) in terms of his traditional Western form, on the way towards the cosmic crack-up of his last film 7 Women (1966). The sequence here where Ethan and Martin encounter the massacred tribe and the Cavalry who did it evokes his Cavalry trilogy through music cues and images but there’s no sense of heroic necessity: Martin is bewildered by their motives. This is the west being bludgeoned into passivity and coherence rather than coolly policed. The ruined, lunatic women the soldiers gather, inspected by Ethan and Martin in hope Debbie is amongst their number, are the by-products of civilisations crashing together. “It’s hard to believe they’re white,” one of the Cavalry officers comments, but notably, the women are all in a crazed state after being rescued, whilst Debbie, when they finally encounter her, remains entirely lucid and intelligent enough not just to simply remember her old life but to try and save Ethan and Martin from imminent attack. Ethan repays the favour by advancing to shoot her down, with Martin thrusting himself between them. Fortunately, Scar and his braves interrupt the moment of truth.
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Ford stands today as one of the definitive classicists in film technique, but to watch The Searchers is to experience an unusual approach to storytelling and cinematic structure. To see Ford utilise the mid-‘50s widescreen colour format is to see a born cinematic eye unleashed upon a natural habitat, exploiting space from actors’ faces looming in close to features in the peering distance. Ford’s DP Winton C. Hoch isn’t exactly one of the celebrated cinematographers of his time, and yet few films are better shot than The Searchers. Hoch imbues Ford’s precisely-composed tableaux with life through jostling, precisely inscribed detail even in the midst of colossal landscape shots. Ford and Hoch work in hints of Expressionist texture into interior and dialogue scenes, hinting at the repressed and the fetid in even the most seemingly easygoing interludes, and capturing the intensity of existence out in these tiny abodes and hamlets through the decor in a homestead. The Searchers is a big movie, and yet big moments are almost thrown away, like the final confrontation between Martin and Scar. Exposition scenes double as character revelations, jokes distract from momentous discoveries and urgent truths. Nothing in The Searchers is ever just one thing, one reason Ford was able to knock over such an epic tale in less than two hours. Perhaps the most notable example of this discursiveness comes in the action climax, as the long-nursed thirst for revenge against Scar comes as fast as reflex, in perfect contrast to the ceremonial death-dealing in Sergio Leone’s Westerns. Few directors could resist the bloodthirsty spectacle of moments like Ethan’s discovery of Lucy’s body and Brad’s subsequent ride to a quick death, but Ford elides both, describing the first by Ethan’s harassed and snarling behaviour afterwards, and marking out the events of the latter purely by sound.
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The hint of Expressionist influence in the film is hardly surprising. Ford had gained a great deal of early acclaim and admiration for his skill in fusing that heady Germanic style with Hollywood exigencies in movies like The Informer (1935) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Like many directors who had started working in the silent era now confronted by the blazing colour and stretched screen of ’50s film culture, he seemed to be thinking back to those days wistfully in shots like one filmed in silence and silhouette, in which Martin is lowered down a cliff face as he goes to pluck Debbie from the midst of Scar’s camp. One of the best shots in the film – in cinema in general – comes when Debbie appears on the sand dune behind Martin and Ethan as they bicker outside Scar’s camp, unnoticed for a long time as she approaches. The perfect economy of Ford’s framing allows the epic, even the miraculous, to suddenly transform the drama, as if the land itself has finally unleashed its captive. Ford’s love of alternations in tone between high drama and slapstick humour has long been one of his peccadilloes that can vex contemporary viewers. But it’s also essential to his cinema, where sobriety and clowning are indivisible as part of the texture of life, expressions of the unruly energy released by common humanity, mimicking and to a certain extent offsetting more genuinely chaotic instincts. This aspect of Ford’s art had been purveyed with careful, contrapuntal rhythm in his Cavalry trilogy, but here comes in a series of violent swerves and headlong crashes. Certainly the “comic relief” of Martin’s irritation with Look never sits well, particularly as he shoves her rolling down a slope when she tries to sleep by his side: it’s supposed to play as rambunctious in a brotherly manner, echoing Laurie’s exasperated assaults on Martin, but just comes across as mean and bullying.
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The awkwardness is also a by-product of the film’s hysterical, blue-balled intensity, an aesthetic reflex on Ford’s part in registering the need to relieve its perpetually gathering psychic thunderclouds. Better moments of comedy include Ethan tossing a glass full of rotgut tequila on a fire to save Martin from unthinkingly drinking it, and the full-on physical comedy of Martin’s fistfight with Charlie, upon returning him to find him about to marry Laurie, another moment that converts the larger tension of the drama into an absurd islet, as the two young men battle over their lady. Ford’s unique blend of precision and elision in staging reaches its height in the finale, as Clayton’s posse join Greenhill, Ethan, and Martin in a raid on Scar’s encampment. Ford’s dashing tracking shots move with the charging horses through the camp offer the deliverance of unfettered movement after the tight and stifled precursor, but also with haphazard speed and reckless force: Ethan riding in it to chase down his foe casually knocks over a fleeing Comanche woman. Nobody’s standing around duelling or going down in noble last stands.
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Martin sneaks into Scar’s tent to locate Debbie: the sound of the great war chief cocking his rifle is matched to a mere shot of his legs in the tent flaps. Martin spins, lets loose with his revolver. By the time Ethan arrives, he finds only the oblivious corpse of his foe, felled by the kid. The famous upshot, one of those moments that can make ancient cynics get misty, one that tormented even Jean-Luc Godard with its mysterious impact: Ethan chases down a fleeing, fearful Debbie, only to snatch her up like he might have as a child, cradle her in her arms, and softly suggest, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” Some of the power of this lies in surprise, but also in its subterranean logic. Scar, his mirror, his task, his animus, is dead. Ethan’s concerted rage is spent, and all that’s left is an ageing man clutching the last thing he might call kin in the world. It’s easy to hate Ethan Edwards so often throughout The Searchers, but then you love him, much as Debbie runs in terror from him only to curl up against his chest, like a father who has lapses of inchoate and unknowable darkness at night but returns like the sun in the morning.
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Ford’s 1961 follow-up Two Rode Together would deal explicitly with the problem elided here, as the protagonists of that film would become obliged to help the woman they rescue from living with an Indian tribe overcome stigmatisation as someone beyond the pale, socially and sexually speaking. Ford obsessively examined a schism in his own mindset that was also a schism in his concept of America, albeit one that could also manifest in his portraits of Ireland and Wales and anywhere else. The need to belong to a community, an ordered way of life, a hierarchy, striking sparks against an opposing truth, the desire for freedom, for essential being, for standing beyond the power of the corrupt and the hypocritical, those ignoble foils that always come with society. Younger Ford had happily sent Ringo and Dallas off to be “saved from the blessings of Civilisation” at the end of Stagecoach.
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Older Ford envisions the possibility of a future free of racial neurosis and violent instinct, and knows it’s right, but also knows very well it means the end of something else he cherishes, that great stage upon which his dreams live and die. When the door closes on Ethan, much as it found him, it closes not just upon the character and his embodiment of the Western hero cut off from the settling world, but upon an entire concept of the genre, perhaps even the genre itself. Everything else was just waiting for Sam Peckinpah to come and shoot it full of holes. Ford’s overreaching artistic desire, to create mythic-styled narratives about becoming and finding, here admits at last a failure, a point where some things cannot be contained, reconciled, kneaded into the great American project. History rolls on, leaving its ruins, its dead, its forgotten, heroes and villains all churned together in the dust.