Searching the Past

By a sad irony the arrival of the newly released DVD of El Cid coincided with news of the death of its star, Charlton Heston, on April 5. I had been planning a retrospective article on the way his work in El Cid and The War Lord are among modern cinema’s greatest portrayals of medieval chivalry. Although he deplored the studio’s reworking of the latter film I know he was proud of both works and I hope when the research is completed it will throw further light on a considerable achievement not just by Heston himself but also by two great directors—Anthony Mann and Franklin Schaffner—and a team of talented writers and designers.

As some readers may recall from my piece in 2002 following the actor’s dignified announcement that he was suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, I was able to interview Heston twice—three times if you count his extensive answers to a list of questions I sent him for my 1976 radio documentary on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Once you got beneath the quiet reserve—he was at first a little shy—Heston proved a thoughtful and perceptive commentator on his own and his collaborators’ work.

He was also a gracious gentleman. Just how gracious I saw when our interview backstage on the Johnny Carson Show was interrupted by someone announcing, “Charlton Heston—meet Dorothy Stratton,” and a tall, very attractive lady came into the room. I didn’t know it then but she was a famous Playboy Centerfold and Playmate of the Year who was trying to make a start as a serious actress. Heston leapt to his feet and, sensing that she was nervous at the prospect of being interviewed on national television by the hugely popular Carson, did his best to reassure her. Taking her hands, he said, “I can feel your hands are icy. He [Carson] is great; you’ll be fine.” The subsequent interview was to be one of Stratton’s last triumphs. She was murdered by her insanely jealous estranged husband only a few weeks later.

Heston was, of course, celebrated for his powerful screen presence and rightly so. But he did have great range as a performer. His General Gordon in Khartoum—complete with impeccable British accent —is a complex, multi-layered portrait reportedly achieved without much help from the director. The Long John Silver that Heston did for his son Fraser’s Treasure Island was the first to capture the character’s brutality and ruthlessness—anything but the sentimental scoundrel Robert Newton and Wallace Beery gave us. And Heston’s presentation of the Bible, shot in 1992-93 as a series of one-man performances on Middle East locations, includes beautifully judged impersonations of all the biblical characters from God to the Serpent.

I saw for myself Heston’s ability to switch between different levels in an instant when our 1980 interview was interrupted yet again; this time by one of Carson’s aides.

“Now, Chuck, we’re going to be talking about beards.”

“Yes; will these pictures do?”

“Fine, and we’ll also be talking about horses.”

“That will be okay.”

I resumed the interview. “About Macbeth?”

“Ah yes,” replied Heston, “you mustn’t let him become Richard III.”

The same time as I was first discovering Heston’s work I was also exploring the riches of the later films of John Ford. Is it really over fifty years since a film-struck boy went to a matinee at the Sydney Regent to see The Searchers, which has now been released in a penultimate restoration on DVD? Of course that first release was only the beginning. The film was well, but not over-enthusiastically received in 1956. There were regular revivals in quite good prints; and then in the 1970s it was a masterpiece! Like the master’s Young Mr Lincoln it was exhaustively analysed.

But in all the years this fine work has been studied in film societies and classrooms little or no attention has been given to the excellent novel by Alan Le May on which it was based, or that the author wrote The Unforgiven (1960) another book with similar themes that was turned into a major film directed by John Huston; or that Ford himself returned to the same issues in one of his darkest works, Two Rode Together (1962). And as far as I know there has been little or no work on either the screenwriter of The Searchers and Two Rode Together, Frank Nugent, or for that matter the novelist, Alan Le May. Most of the sources are held by archives in the USA; but I do have copies of both novels (one a first edition) and a final draft screenplay of The Searchers, so here goes.

What then are the themes that link these three films? In a word—racism: together they are among the most thoughtful and perceptive dramatic treatments of the issue ever made. Of course in Ford’s case there is also manifest destiny—the idea that the pioneers were destined to occupy and civilise the American continent. (This is best expressed by Frank Nugent’s description of the US Cavalry in the closing narration of Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon: “whatever they fought for, wherever they rode, that became the United States of America”.) Confining the racism portrayed in these films to Indians often played by white actors in makeup, meant audiences could sympathise with victims of racial prejudice knowing that they were not “really” of mixed blood. Nevertheless it was still an effective way of preaching enlightenment to an America that at the time was profoundly racist.

More or less ignored in all the commentary on John Ford’s direction of The Searchers has been how good an adaptation it is of Alan Le May’s novel. In the book a band of Comanches raid the Edwards ranch, killing Aaron and his son, and raping and mutilating his wife Martha before murdering her. The older sister Lucy is found later raped and dead. The younger, Debbie, is carried off by Scar, the chief of the Comanche raiders. Martin Pawley, an orphan raised by the family, and Aaron’s brother Amos Edwards (Ethan in the movie), who was in love with his sister-in-law, embark on a long search for Scar and the girl. Throughout, Pawley is afraid Ethan’s hatred of the Indians will make him kill Debbie, polluted beyond redemption in her uncle’s eyes by her life as an Indian squaw.

All this was faithfully translated by Nugent and Ford in the film, together with a few additions that serve as enrichments of the original. Martin is made a quarter Cherokee, a reason for Ethan to distrust his young follower. Before the settlers are drawn off by the Indian cattle rustling, there is a marvellously Fordian family sequence as the Edwards host a breakfast for a troop of Texas Rangers led by Ward Bond’s flamboyant Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton, where much of the byplay appears to have been improvised on the set. The superbly staged scenes as Aaron and his family wait in the dusk for the Indian attack come directly from the opening of the novel.

There is a fascinating note in the script to cinematographer Winton Hoch about this and the following scenes: “J.F. has in mind the same kind of dramatic use of red you achieved in ‘Yellow Ribbon’ in the scene telling of Custer’s defeat.” For the earlier film Hoch lit the set so that the light of a blood-red sunset seemed to pour in through the window of the room while the shadowy figures of Captain Brittles and his major read the casualty lists, the wreaths of smoke from their pipes appearing startlingly white against the red and the black. The scene in The Searchers repeats that effect for the interiors and floods the exteriors with red—a superb example of classic studio lighting.

The novel has a deliberately anticlimactic resolution for Amos’s quest. He rides down an Indian woman, believing her to be Debbie:

“Martin yelled, ‘Amos—no!’ He fired wild at Amos’s back, missing him at a distance at which he never missed. Then, unexpectedly, Amos raised his pistol without firing and shifted it to his rein hand. He reached down to grab the girl as if to lift her on to his saddle.
“The girl turned upon the rider, and Mart saw the broad brown face of a young Comanche woman, who could never possibly be Debbie. Her teeth showed as she fired upward at Amos, the muzzle of her pistol almost against his jacket. He fell heavily; his body crumpled as it hit, and rolled over once, as shot game rolls, before it lay still.”

Le May’s Marty is more successful. When the Rangers and Cavalry raid Scar’s camp, Marty is able to track and find Debbie on the prairie:

“He thought she was asleep, until she spoke, a whisper against his chest. ‘I remember’, she said in a strangely mixed tongue of Indian-English. ‘I remember it all. But you the most. I remember how hard I loved you.’ She held on to him with what strength she had left; but she seemed alright, he thought, as she went to sleep.”

As every film buff knows, the main difference between the novel and film is the transformation of Le May’s Amos into the towering figure of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. No longer is he the “deadlocked” character in the novel mooning after his brother’s wife. Ethan has become the hero of a revenge tragedy. As John Ford said to Peter Bogdanovich:

“It’s the tragedy of a loner. He’s the man who came back from the Civil War, probably went over into Mexico, became a bandit, probably fought for Juarez or Maximilian, because of the medal [he gives to Debbie]. He was just a plain loner who could never be one of the family.”

Ethan is the most morally compromised and disturbing protagonist in any western of the period and it always seemed possible that Jeffrey Hunter’s likeable Marty might have to kill his Uncle Ethan to save Debbie. It doesn’t happen, of course. But the long shot when Wayne’s Ethan pursues Natalie Wood’s Debbie remains one of the most terrifying moments in American cinema.

Both novel and film condemn the Indian-hating bigotry of frontier America in general and Ethan in particular, but Ford, Nugent and Wayne compel us to sympathise with the character’s racism before rejecting it. Above all we are shown why the man is as he is. It is Ethan who confronts the full horror of the Indian atrocities. There could be no equivalent in the film to Marty finding his Aunt Martha scalped then seeing Amos clasping her severed arm, as in the novel. But somehow Wayne embodies these experiences and shows us the character’s rage and anguish. And when Ethan picks up Debbie and takes her home the film purges the racism and vengeance it has portrayed so well.

The final revised screenplay by Frank Nugent includes an alternative ending where Ethan spares Debbie when he sees how much she has come to resemble her mother. Good as it is, Ford and Wayne found a better resolution when they went on location in Monument Valley, Arizona. The screenplay also contains evidence that Ford intended to take The Searchers’ portrayal of the white man’s atrocities against the Indians further than he did in the final cut. It seems that Nugent and Ford intended a far more elaborate pay-off to the story of Look, the Indian squaw Marty marries by accident. In the novel she helps Marty to learn Comanche then disappears. Much the same happens in the film, only she seems to be trying to find Scar and Debbie for them. At the outset this is written and played as comedy, then Ethan and Marty find Look among the dead after a Cavalry raid on Scar’s encampment.

When I began to study The Searchers seriously I thought the shots of the Cavalry riding through the snow accompanied by “Garry Owen” on the soundtrack had to be an allusion to General Custer’s infamous massacre of the Washita—one of the cavalry leader’s famous victories over peaceful Indians and their women and children. The engagement took place in the snow, and the Seventh Cavalry had played “Garry Owen” before charging into the camp. I used to mention all this in my lectures but I’m afraid my students were inclined to dismiss my Custer allusions as one of my not infrequent digressions. Why? Because no other Ford writer even mentions it. In the commentary on the DVD Peter Bogdanovich wonders if Ford really approved of such a sprightly musical accompaniment to such a sequence. In the screenplay, however, after finding Look’s body Ethan and Marty are taken to a press conference given by a general “loosely modeled upon a certain other well known glory hunter of the Indian wars”:

Ethan: …I’m looking for my niece …she was in that camp when you attacked.
General: Unfortunately the hostiles murdered them as we enveloped the village …
Ethan: Are you sure they didn’t die of carbine shots fired by a bunch o’ Yank bluebellies … “As we enveloped the village”? Next time you envelop a village hit it where the fighting men are … You won’t get any headlines for killin’ squaws.

There were good reasons for omitting that scene. We need to get to the moment when Ethan sees the captives and that famous close-up when the camera tracks to show us those haunted eyes. Perhaps Ford decided that to add a Custer allusion at this point was to include one complication too many. It is still a well-written scene with its heart in the right place, and now there is no doubt that composer Max Steiner used the “Garry Owen” theme to refer to the Washita disgrace as Ford intended.

The final revised screenplay does not have the famous opening and closing images—literally a door opening and closing on the landscape. Indeed you’ll look in vain for any description of the images that appear in the film. To be sure, Nugent includes suggestions for set-ups—very tentative ones—he was after all dealing with a notoriously irascible director; it is just that Ford didn’t use them. What he does use is just about every detail Nugent mentions in one superbly framed shot after another. And of course Ford and Hoch knew how to make the most of the Monument Valley locations that were the ideal setting for the dark poetry of Ford’s vision.

Of course the resolution of John Ford’s The Searchers solves nothing. With Marty partnered with Vera Miles’ Lori (she waits for him in the film) the only one with whom Debbie can have anything in common is Ethan. The idea almost certainly occurred to Ford and Nugent because they used it in Two Rode Together, the second western they made about racism and bigotry on the American frontier. Here it is important to remember D.H. Lawrence’s adage to trust the work because the author is likely to be a drivelling liar. According to Ford he did the film as a favour to Columbia boss Harry Cohen, and the script was “lousy”. Shirley Jones agrees: “The script was the problem. We were only getting pages each day.”

But the writer was our old friend Frank Nugent and the film reworks themes from The Searchers, only this time as the blackest of comedy; which may be why the two stars, James Stewart and Richard Widmark, always claimed they “had a ball making the film”. What’s more, both appeared with distinction in other later Ford movies. So why did Ford disparage one of his most interesting films? I believe the reason was personal. During the shooting Ford’s old friend and collaborator Ward Bond died. And indeed there were problems with the script which seem to have been more to do with Will Cook’s original novel than anything Nugent was writing. It is likely these affected Shirley Jones’ character but until someone finds the book (Comanche Captives) we can’t be sure.

The script more or less picks up thematically where The Searchers finished. The Comanches have a treaty and the frontier is at peace. The Indians still have white captives and the corrupt Marshal Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart)—he gets 10 per cent from every business in town—is enlisted by Major Frazer (John McIntire) to buy them back. Frazer only wants to placate the settlers now camped around the fort. The Comanche Chief, Quanah Parker, played by Henry Brandon (he is also Scar in The Searchers) needs to get rifles to hold off his warlike rival Stone Calf (Woody Strode) while McCabe only takes the dirty job to get away from his partner—in every sense—Belle (Annelle Hayes) who wants a more permanent relationship—“She’s started to call me Guth. At first I thought she’d got something stuck in her teeth.”

The quest results in at least one tragedy, as McCabe in a frightening drunken outburst predicted; while the marshal’s rescue of the beautiful Elena (Linda Cristal) —Stone Calf’s woman—only serves to unleash the bigotry of the officers and their wives at the fort. Ultimately McCabe finds in Elena something “he doesn’t want ten per cent of”. But for all the panache of his exit, the by now ex-marshal rides out with Elena enthroned beside the driver on a stagecoach—we know he will need to keep his guns handy to defend her for the rest of their lives.

Ford really had no reason to disparage Two Rode Together. Collaborating with cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr, this time on real Texas locations, the film is in the director’s painterly style and characteristically he takes full advantage of the rich noir lighting Lawton did so well. Again the film casts a disturbing light on American racism. Instead of the comedy contrasting with the more serious episodes, the sarcastic wit, particularly in the exchanges between McCabe and Widmark’s Lieutenant Geary, together with the brutal slapstick, embody bitter reflections on values Ford and Nugent had earlier taken for granted. The one criticism that can be levelled at Two Rode Together is the portrayal of Quanah Parker. Certainly many Indians were corrupted by their contact with the white man—Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were murdered by Indian police—but the real Quanah kept his integrity. Ford and Nugent should have picked another name for their unscrupulous chief.

The other important film based on an Alan Le May novel is The Unforgiven (1960). The book turns The Searchers’ situation on its head. This time it is an Indian girl who has been adopted as a baby by a family of Texas ranchers. They conceal her identity from their bigoted neighbours and the local Kiowas. When the truth comes out they are abandoned by their former friends and the Indians lay siege to their ranch-house. A rancher himself who at times shared the perspective of his forebears, Le May portrays the way these brutal revelations are ultimately evaded and concealed by Ben, the Indian girl’s foster brother who has come to love her.

Writer Ben Maddow and director John Huston are having none of this. They turn it all into a hugely enjoyable melodrama with superb performances from Audrey Hepburn (very believable as Rachel the Indian girl), Burt Lancaster as Ben, and Lillian Gish playing their formidable mother. Above all, the Indians are treated sympathetically and bigotry is condemned.

Reportedly the film was butchered in the editing, so we will have to wait for a restoration to see if there are more deliriously improbable scenes like Lillian Gish playing Mozart on the grand piano to drown out the Indians’ war drums.

Did these films and others like them help to combat the bigotry and racism of their audiences? Almost certainly. Ford, Huston, Nugent, Maddow and Le May never demonise their bigots, they allow us to understand them. No mean achievement for any artists.