Apart from being one of the finest movies ever made, The Searchers lay at a pivotal point in the careers of both John Wayne and John Ford, and the development the United States of America as a whole. Much has been written on the changing attitude of movies towards Native Americans and I don’t wish to go over that ground again. The point is that Ford and Wayne, a pair of thorough-going rednecks if ever there were, shifted their ground with this film, and I am sure it is no coincidence that the shift occurred against the background of the McCarthyist witch-hunts.
Now Ford and his alter-ego Wayne were both unerring patriots and if their country went down a wrong road, so did they. But neither gave evidence to the McCarthyist Inquisitions. It has been argued that they probably didn’t know any communists, but in fact their close friend Ward Bond named more names than anyone else and so we can assume he did their squealing for them. After all, it was definitely not part of the Wayne persona to run tattle-tale (as he put it himself) under any circumstances.
Much is made of how the barren landscapes of The Searchers reflect the loss of traditional values, but it seemed to me that Ford made all his films that way. The only difference between this and the others is the way the John Wayne character is played.
Wayne plays a bigoted, violent, revengeful man. He scowls throughout the film, is nasty to everyone, and goes as close as Wayne ever got to playing a villain. This is in marked contrast to Ford’s earlier exuberant films in which Indians were pursued and slaughtered with glee, and Wayne’s customary relaxed, sardonic manner in other films.
There is a suggestion that the shift was all Ford and that Wayne didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe so, although it seems unlikely that he could have played such a dark character without being aware of it. But it is true that just a couple of close-ups (in a film where vast distances dominate) of Wayne’s face clearly state the depth of his racism and especially when it comes to white women that fall into Indian hands.
It wasn’t in this film that the Indians were allowed to be human for the first time (that was in Broken Arrow). They are still blood-thirsty savages who can be killed or tortured without the slightest conscience, although the scene where Wayne shoots out a dead Indian’s eyes so his spirit will never be able to find the happy hunting ground is rather jarring. But a white man plays the Indian chief, and the Comanche’s are portrayed by a tribe of Navajos, and they are presented as rogues, and in no way typical of their race.
The attitude to the Indians is unaltered from previous Ford films; it is the attitude that we are to take toward the white character’s attitudes that is different. John Wayne played a bigoted racist in almost every film he appeared in, but never importantly. Now suddenly we were required to hate him for it. And he plays it so heavy that there is serious doubt if we will be able to forgive him this time.
In the course of the film, that the girl must die seems a reasonable proposition (or at least one not to be cared about) until Natalie Wood turns up in the role and suddenly Wayne’s bigotry appears monstrous. At this stage, Wayne is now playing one of the most unsympathetic characters in all movie history and it probably took all of his immense fame to allow him to get away with it.
Now the only real savage in the film is Wayne. When he kills the Indian chief, he scalps him, as if the point has not been made plainly enough. Jeffrey Hunter kidnaps the girl before Wayne can scalp her too,
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But he goes after them and runs them down. It is one of the most horrifying moments in all filmdom, as Wayne catches her and grabs her and everything we know about him tells us he will shoot her. But of course he doesn’t. The basic humanity that he had lacked throughout the movie overwhelms him in the end.
The point is that Wayne did not change —he remained as bigoted as ever. Nor did Ford at this stage—the Indians were still subhuman savages here. The only thing that changed was us. What we saw in the movie and the way it affected us was the difference. You can only wonder how many million people who had never thought about the matter before suddenly became aware of the falsity of their values. And in that way, The Searchers is one of the most important movies. It isn’t really amongst the top ten, not even the best western (High Noon is) but it is one of the few to have a profound influence on the way we see the world. In the end, the film seemed to suggest that hereafter, the native Americans might begin to be regarded as human. The two big Johns had granted their permission.