The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Ford · a film · 1956 · about two hours · from a screenplay by Frank S. Nugent, after Alan Le May’s novel
Mode
Western turned on its own hero; captivity narrative, revenge quest and family chronicle in one
Mythos
The captivity narrative; the wanderer who restores the home and cannot enter it; the avenger and his double
Phase
About five years from 1868, from a door opening on the desert to the same kind of door closing, across the seasons of one search
Presentation
Feature film in Technicolor and VistaVision, about 119 minutes, mono sound, in English; exteriors in Monument Valley standing for Texas, some night and snow scenes on stages
Register
From a raid at dusk and a scalping to a wedding brawl played for laughs; the grand and the dreadful, separated by horseplay
Scale
Two families, a settlement, a lost war, two peoples and one man outside the door
Governing Proposition
A Confederate veteran rides in to his brother’s ranch in Texas three years after the war, and when a Comanche raid kills the family and carries off his two nieces, he searches about five years for the younger one, first to rescue her and then to kill her, because she has become Comanche. The wager of the film is that the Western’s hero and its hatred are one man, that the genre’s grammar of rescue and homecoming can be kept whole and turned to show what it carried, and that the settlement his violence makes safe will close its door on him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the dark. A door opens from inside a house onto the desert, and out of the distance a rider comes toward it. It is Texas, 1868, three years after the war. The woman in the doorway is Martha Edwards, played by Dorothy Jordan, and the rider is her husband’s brother, Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, a Confederate who has not accepted the surrender. The camera is inside, looking out, and the first shot holds the whole film in one figure: the home is a lit interior, the desert is the light beyond it, and the man riding in belongs to the light.
The household is Aaron, played by Walter Coy, and Martha, their son Ben, their daughters Lucy and Debbie, the younger played by Lana Wood, and Martin Pawley, played by Jeffrey Hunter, an orphan of part Cherokee blood whom the family took in and whom Ethan despises. The evening is made of small particular things: a sabre from the war, a medal given to a child, Martha’s hand on Ethan’s coat. The film says nothing of what lies between Ethan and his brother’s wife. It lets a few glances and the stroking of a coat stand, and seventy years of viewers have read a whole story in them.
Ford was in his early sixties, with Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946) and the cavalry films of 1948 to 1950 behind him. The film was produced by C. V. Whitney Pictures, with Merian C. Cooper as executive producer, and released by Warner Bros. in March 1956. Frank S. Nugent wrote the screenplay from Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers (1954). Winton C. Hoch photographed it in Technicolor and VistaVision, largely in Monument Valley on the Utah and Arizona border, which stands for Texas; Max Steiner wrote the music, Jack Murray cut it, and the title song, by Stan Jones, is sung by the Sons of the Pioneers. It runs about two hours.
Movement II
The Rangers come for the men. Their captain is also the settlement’s preacher, the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnston Clayton, played by Ward Bond, church and militia in one man. Cattle have been stolen, and Ethan and Martin ride out with the posse after them. The theft is a decoy. Back at the ranch, on the evening before the raid, the light goes red; the family puts out the lamp; Lucy understands, and screams. Debbie is at her grandmother’s grave, and the shadow of a man falls across her. It is Scar, played by Henry Brandon.
The film holds on Ethan’s face as he rides in to the burning ranch, and on what he finds: Aaron, Martha and Ben dead, Lucy and Debbie taken. At the burial the settlers sing a hymn over the graves, and Ethan cuts the rite short: “Put an amen to it.” The settlement’s order, its prayers and its mourning, is subordinated at once to his hunt. Clayton leads the Rangers out after the raiders, and the search begins as a posse and becomes one man’s.
On the trail they find a dead warrior, and Ethan shoots out his eyes. Asked why, he gives the reason in substance: by the Comanche belief, a dead man without eyes must wander forever between the winds. He has learned the enemy’s faith in order to use it against the dead, and the rule he invokes is the one he will live under. A fight at a river follows. After it the search narrows to Ethan, Martin and Brad Jorgensen, played by Harry Carey Jr.
Movement III
Lucy is found dead, and the film keeps her death off the screen. Brad is killed soon after. Then there are two, the man who hates Indians and the orphan who is part Indian, and the search turns from a pursuit of days to a matter of years, about five of them before it ends. Clayton’s settlement goes on living without them, and the film keeps returning to it.
The years are carried partly by a letter Martin writes to Laurie Jorgensen, played by Vera Miles, and read in her voice at the settlement while the film shows what it describes. A trade leaves Martin with a Comanche wife, Look, played by Beulah Archuletta, and the film plays her as slapstick, with a cruelty it does not own. Then winter, the riders against the buttes and the snow; then the cavalry’s massacre of a village, and Look a corpse in the snow among its dead. The film turns from comedy to atrocity in a few minutes and does not say what it meant by the comedy.
At a fort the cavalry has gathered captives taken back from the Comanche. The settlers gaze at them with horror, and Ethan turns his face to them, and the camera holds on it. That face is the film’s statement of what he will do if he finds Debbie. Between the journeys, Mose Harper, played by Hank Worden, an old man the settlement treats as a fool, brings word of where she may be; what he asks in return is a rocking chair, the one rest that Ethan will never want.
Movement IV
In New Mexico, Figueroa brings them to Scar’s camp. In his tent Scar and Ethan speak each other’s language and measure each other, each of them avenging his own dead, Scar his sons. Between them sits Debbie, a young woman now, played by Natalie Wood. She has lived among the Comanche for years and has become one of them. The two men are mirrors. The tent holds the avenger, his shadow and the girl who stands for each man’s lost family.
Below the camp, in the dunes, Ethan tries to shoot her. This is what the search has been for since the fort, and the film shows the rescue and the killing as one obsession with one object. He is wounded, and he writes a will. It leaves what he has to Martin, the orphan he has despised. The heir the myth needs has been named by the man who refused him.
They go back to the Jorgensens. Laurie is about to marry Charlie McCorry, played by Ken Curtis, and Martin interrupts the wedding to fight him. The fight is long, comic and cheered by the wedding guests, and the stock company plays it broad. It is the settlement’s order shown alive, its rituals and its brawls, the order Ethan protects and cannot join. It is also the place where the film is least governed, the knockabout running in a register the search never touches. Then the Rangers ride against Scar’s village.
Movement V
The Rangers attack the village, and Martin kills Scar. Ethan finds the body and scalps it, the last of his trade with the enemy’s customs. Then Debbie runs, and Ethan rides after her across the hills, and everything in the film says that he will kill her. He catches her, and lifts her over his head, as he lifted her when she was a child, and brings her down into his arms. “Let’s go home, Debbie.” The hatred breaks in a single gesture, and the film offers no account of why.
They bring her back to the Jorgensens’ house. The Jorgensens take her in, across the threshold, into the lit interior. Ethan stands in the doorway, framed by it as Martha was at the start. He does not go in. He turns and walks back into the desert, and the door closes on him, and the screen goes dark. The man who shot out a dead man’s eyes so that he would wander forever has become that wanderer. The settlement he has made safe has no room inside for the violence that made it so.
The film’s standing has risen across seventy years. It was raised by the auteurist critics of the 1960s and 1970s to a central place in American cinema, and the New Hollywood treated it as a source: Taxi Driver (1976) rebuilds its rescue, Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) its plot. It entered the National Film Registry in the Registry’s first year, 1989, and the American Film Institute named it the greatest American Western in 2008. The arguments over it have not closed: whether it is a racist film or a film about racism, whether it is about Ethan’s love for Martha, whether it celebrates the nation’s founding or buries it. What has lasted is a shape: a door opening on a desert and a door closing, and between them a search that is also a hunt.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. Run the subtractive test and the search resists it: the raid, the funeral, the eyes, Lucy’s death, the years, the captives at the fort, Scar’s tent, the will and the lift each carry a stage of Ethan’s descent and return. Mose Harper, who looks like comic furniture, is required: he brings word of Debbie, and his wish for a rocking chair answers Ethan’s wandering. What holds the axis lowest is the settlement’s comedy. Charlie McCorry’s courtship and the long wedding brawl do one job, the ordinary life of the place, several times over; the slapstick around Look runs long before her death turns it; some of Laurie’s scenes are delay. These are Ford’s habits as much as the story’s needs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: the frontier’s hero and its hatred are one man, and the settlement that needs his violence cannot let him in. Ethan’s racism is not laid over his courage; it is its engine. He hunts Debbie to rescue her and then to kill her, because she has become Comanche, and the film shows the two aims as one obsession. Scar, avenging his own dead sons, is his mirror, and the closing door states what no line of dialogue does. Held below the top because the film half shares what it exposes: the Comanche are seen almost wholly from outside, Look’s treatment is cruel in a way the film does not own, and the homecoming softens the statement.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds, grand and dreadful. A door swings open from darkness onto the desert and a rider comes out of it. On the evening before the raid the light goes red, the family puts out the lamp, Lucy screams as she understands, and Scar’s shadow falls across Debbie at her grandmother’s grave. Ethan rides in to the burning ranch; he shoots out a dead man’s eyes; riders cross the buttes through the seasons and the snow; his face turns to the captives at the fort. Then the lift, and the last door. Held below the top by frequency: the summits are separated by long stretches of horseplay. When the height is reached, it is among the highest the Western has.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is built and bears load. The captivity narrative, America’s oldest literary form, is the plot’s own sequence: abduction, years of search, redemption. Under it lies the wanderer who restores the home and cannot enter it, given a rule inside the film. A dead man without eyes, Ethan says in effect, must wander forever; he shoots out the eyes, and at the close he is that wanderer himself. The doorways carry the threshold as structure, opening and closing the film. Scar and Ethan are doubles, each the other’s lost family, and Martin, the part-Cherokee orphan Ethan despises, becomes the son the myth substitutes. The particular stays particular: a hand on a coat, a sabre, a medal given to a child. Only the comedy dilutes the frame.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance was the classical Western, much of it Ford’s own: the community as moral centre, the hero who serves it, Monument Valley as the American scene. The departure is real. The star of that tradition plays an unreconstructed Confederate and a racist bent on killing the girl he seeks, and the genre’s grammar of rescue and homecoming is kept intact and turned to show what it carried. The stake was a studio picture resting on Wayne’s persona. Held below the bar by precedent and by form: Anthony Mann’s Westerns with James Stewart, Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Ford’s own Fort Apache (1948) had darkened the hero before 1956, and the film’s means are classical. The turn is of the hero, not of the medium.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that Ethan belongs to the space outside the frame of home. The form is the threshold. The camera opens inside a dark doorway looking out and closes there as the door shuts on him; the home is a lit interior seen from the desert, the desert a light seen from inside. The VistaVision landscape dwarfs the riders and makes the years a matter of space. The ellipses across seasons, carried by Martin’s letter in Laurie’s voice, keep time at the settlement’s pace, so the obsession is measured against lives going on. The cost: the letter and the comic interludes are containers rather than instruments, and the form slackens at the settlement.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Seventy years of return are evidence. The auteurist critics of the 1960s and 1970s raised it from a respected Western to a central American film, the New Hollywood made it a text, and Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (2013) stands in a large literature. The readings remain incompatible: a racist film; an indictment of racism; a film about Ethan’s love for his brother’s wife, read from a few glances and a hand on a coat; a myth of the nation that celebrates and buries itself. It yields on return: a first viewing follows the search, later ones find Martha and Ethan, the doubling with Scar, the Rangers as a church militant. Held below the top by span, short beside the oldest works on the desk.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1956, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The force: the film reorganised the Western from within, showing that the genre’s central figure could be its indictment without the genre being abandoned. Its formal means were not new, which holds the force below the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed and then overwhelming, among the widest of any American film. Taxi Driver (1976) rebuilds its rescue of a girl from her captor, and Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) its plot; the burned homestead of Star Wars (1977) and Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) answer it; the revisionist Western after 1960 is in its debt. The reach was not immediate, and the delay is discounted.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole as released, and its restorations for home video and exhibition repair it without altering it. Presence across seventy years is wide: exhibition, television and home release, a standing that has risen throughout, and a place in teaching and argument. The surface is charged. The Comanche are played largely by Navajo extras and Scar by a white actor; the stock company’s broad comedy and the slapstick around Look have dated. Part of that surface is the subject, since the film is about racism, and survives as such; part is plainly the fashion of its year. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With the dated surface charged, seventy years of so wide a presence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing in the composition: Ford’s riders framed against the buttes, the doorways, the family placed at the evening meal, Winton C. Hoch’s VistaVision colour, the light before the raid. Wayne’s Ethan, hatred and tenderness in one face, is his most complex performance. The cutting is economical and exact at the raid, the river fight and the fort. The costs are real. Max Steiner’s score is heavy and presses where the images are clear; several night and snow scenes are visibly shot on stages against painted backings; Jeffrey Hunter is uneven, and the stock company’s comic playing, Ken Curtis’s accent above all, is broad. A command at the summit in the exteriors and in Wayne, partial in the settlement and the score.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding brawl between Martin and Charlie, played as knockabout with the guests cheering, and Ethan’s attempt to shoot Debbie in the dunes below Scar’s camp. Ford’s law is meant to hold both: the community’s rituals, its dances, funerals and fights, are the order Ethan protects and cannot join, and the comedy shows that order alive. In large part it holds: the funeral hymn and the dance belong to the world of the massacre. But the comedy is not always governed by it. The Look scenes turn from slapstick to a corpse in the snow without the film deciding what it meant by the slapstick, and Charlie’s courtship plays in a register the search never touches.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held in one structure are many: the family, in two households, marriage, adoption and inheritance; the settlement as a society, its church and its Rangers in one man, Clayton, preacher and captain; the state and history, in the war lost and unaccepted, the cavalry and its massacre, the frontier as conquest; race and blood, the central order, with the terror of mixed blood driving the plot; the sacred, in Christian burial and the Comanche belief Ethan turns against the dead; the land and the seasons. The search integrates them. What holds the axis is three limits. The Comanche world is entered only as Ethan’s enemy, so one of the film’s two societies is held in part; Ethan’s consciousness is shown, never entered; labour is sketched.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, then The Sublime, The Living Form, The Made and The Imperishable at 8.8. A captivity myth that is the plot’s own sequence, with a wanderer’s fate given its rule inside the film; seventy years of incompatible readings; a reach through the New Hollywood among the widest of any American film; elevation as high as the Western goes; a form built on the threshold between home and desert; a making at the summit in its exteriors and in Wayne; and a wide presence across seventy years.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: the search resists subtraction, but Charlie’s courtship, the wedding brawl, the slapstick around Look and some of Laurie’s scenes do one job several times over. Beside it, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.3: a law of community that does not govern the turn from slapstick to a corpse in the snow, and many orders held, with the Comanche world entered only as the enemy’s and Ethan’s mind shown, never entered. Then The Swerve at 8.4, a turn of the hero that Mann, Hawks and Ford’s own cavalry film had prepared, made with classical means.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is closed twice: by The Swerve, and by the aggregate, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Searchers as released by Warner Bros. in March 1956, in Technicolor and VistaVision, about 119 minutes, mono sound, in English, as it survives in the restorations made for home video and exhibition, from the door opening on the desert to the door closing: directed by John Ford for C. V. Whitney Pictures, with Merian C. Cooper as executive producer, from a screenplay by Frank S. Nugent after Alan Le May’s novel, photographed by Winton C. Hoch, edited by Jack Murray, with music by Max Steiner. There is no rival cut of consequence, and the release is the object. Le May’s novel is not part of the work. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only in two short lines whose words are certain; Ethan’s account of the dead man’s eyes is given in substance, and the title song is named by its writer and singers alone. Facts that could not be verified, among them the day of release, the historical source of the novel, the film’s first returns and reviews and its awards on release, its place in later critics’ polls, which later directors have spoken of it, the origin of a later song’s title, the quality of the restorations, the count of scenes and shots and the average shot length, are not given.