
In 1868, Ethan Edwards returned after an eight-year absence to his brother Aaron’s home in the West Texas desert.
Tag Gallagher wrote:
The letter sequence comes in the middle of The Searchers, the third of five acts, and it breaks into the story (following Ethan in present time) with a series of flashbacks framed by others’ viewpoints of Ethan. It thus distances Ethan from us, in contrast with the surrounding acts, in order to define him within the frame of his culture.
Jorgensens’ fireplace. The only letter Laurie (Vera Miles) gets from Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) in five years is delivered by Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis). In a comic sequence, she is forced to read it aloud in front of Charlie (an oaf courting her) and her parents. Marty writes how he acquired an Indian wife…
Flashback 1. (Laurie reads, voice-off.) Ethan and Marty trade with Indians, then find a chubby girl following them, a wife Marty has unwittingly purchased. “Come on, Mrs. Pawley!” jokes Ethan. They call her “Look.”
Jorgensens’ fireplace. Charlie is overjoyed (“Hawh! Hawh! So he got himself an Indian wife!”); Laurie throws the letter into the fire. Her father retrieves it, scolds her, pitilessly orders she read on. “‘She wasn’t nearly as old as you’!” she reads, fuming…
Flashback 2. That night. Look tries to lie with Marty, who kicks her down a hill. At mention of Scar she shows terror. Next morning (Marty narrates) they follow her trail marks.
Jorgensens’ fireplace. Laurie, eyes filled with tears.
Ford’s structure of points of views is intricate. We are watching the movie (Ford) wherein Laurie reads Marty’s words about Ethan’s attitude toward Look. Secondly, each of the characters involved offers a contrasting sensibility. Laurie’s miscomprehension of Marty’s letter contrasted with what actually happened is mirrored within her home by Laurie’s distress contrasted with Charlie’s oafish opportunism, her fathers obliviousness, her mother’s wish that Laurie forget Marty.
And that is not all. If we share Ethan’s humor at Marty’s plight while ignoring Look’s plight, we do so because we perceive Look through the filters of others’ sensibilities (all of them racist: Ethan, Marty, Laurie, her parents, Charlie). Our lack of regard for Look’s feelings parallels the general lack of regard for Laurie’s feelings. Empathy is rare in the world of The Searchers, as in our own. Ford hopes, by means of the intricate contrasts of this letter scene, to make us aware of how each person’s attitudes color reality. To do so, Ford must “distance” us from the sympathy we automatically feel for the John Wayne character and must turn our participation in Ethan’s callous racism against us:
Flashback 3. (Marty, voice-off: ) They lose Look’s trail in snow. Later, Ethan slaughters buffalo, to deprive the Indians. Then they come upon an Indian camp raided by cavalry, with corpses everywhere: men, women, children, and Look.
Ethan kills buffalo to kill Indians; soldiers kill Look. Do we now feel sorry for laughing at her? But this sequence’s chief effect is to distance Ethan. As we dissolve from Laurie into a long shot of Ethan about to slaughter buffalo, Marty’s voice tells us we are about to see something that he still has not been able to figure out: the way Ethan goes wild killing the buffalo. This episode, then, and in fact this entire third act, is a sort of “medical report” on Ethan. Elsewhere, Ethan tends to be the dramatic focal point of The Searchers and an empathy-identity figure for the audience; but in this act we see him through others’ eyes, others comment on him, his deeds are complexly contextualized, his sanity is dissected, he becomes a phenomenon to be studied, and is least able to guard from view the tenderness and terror inside him. As a result, not only is our compassion for him enriched, but his actions are objectified against the tapestry of his culture.
Flashback 3 (continued). Later, they sight the renowned 7th Cavalry, with flags, beautiful horses, and a bright Irish jig. At the fort entrance three peaceful Indians, each in different-colored blanket, enter the frame as silent onlookers. The music dies into tough-faced soldiers whipping captives, herding them like cattle into the stockade.
Ford shows the 7th Cavalry in its mythic glory, because its myth is an essential portion of its historical actuality. And he shows the Searchers responding to that glory, because that is how they felt about the cavalry.
But Ford does not thereby glorify the cavalry. On the contrary, he “frames” the evocation of their glory between scenes of massacred Indians and whipped captives. Without its glory, properly contextualized, the 7th Cavalry cannot be understood. Thus Ford treats it as he treats Ethan. And Ford shows reasons for their brutality:
Flashback 3 (continued). In the fort Ethan and Marty inspect whites rescued from Comanche. All are half-crazy; perhaps one is Debbie. In a sustained close-up, Ethan’s eyes react to the broken humans he sees and the lunatic howls he hears.
Everyone inhabits a private world: Laurie, her father, her mother, Charlie; the 7th Cavalry, the captive Indians, the peaceful Indians, the indifferent sergeant (Jack Pennick) who shows Ethan the rescued whites. The privacy of the lunatics may differ in dimension from this universal solipsism, but does it differ in kind? Where is truth midst everyone’s solitudes? In all probability Debbie is a lunatic, too: why does Ethan persist in his search? Perhaps because he recognizes something of himself in others’ lunacy: his stare outward at the terrified lunatics is really the stare inward we noted in Huw at the end of How Green Was My Valley. And Ethan had a similar moment earlier (resting his horse and gazing anxiously across the desert toward his brother’s house [I-3]) when his sensitivity broke through his armor. His vision of a comfy home is impaired by his vision of “wilderness” (in his threatened family, in the lunatics, in Debbie, in himself), but his kindnesses — his concern for Martha and Mrs. Jorgensen, his stopping Marty and Brad from seeing their dead — explain Ethan’s unbridled hate as a form of terror, a terror he can only control by exteriorizing it into the search for Debbie.
Jorgensens’ fireplace. Marty’s letter offers not a word of love; Laurie is disconsolate. Her father takes the letter, folds it into his pocket, and exits nonchalantly smoking his pipe. Laurie stares bereftly out the window (a stare mirroring Ethan’s), but Charlie, strumming guitar, saunters coyly to her side, singing, “Gone again, skip to my Lou, my darling.”
Coda. Laurie’s thoughts are visualized by a long dissolve into a sunset vista of Ethan and Marty riding the wilderness.
The searchers - John Ford (1956) 1080p.mkv
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