Ron Hansen’s Masterful Outlaw Blues Novel About Jesse James and Robert Ford Faithfully Interpreted On Screen

One of my favorite films of the last decade is long and slow, inexorable and unrelenting, poetic and profound.  It is equally expressive in its visuals and sounds as it is in its verbal narrative storytelling and dramatized actions.  The film is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is about as literal a screen adaptation as you can find of a great novel, in this case the same titled book by Ron Hansen.  The following story for The Reader is based on interviews I did with Hansen, who worked closely with the film’s writer-director Andrew Dominik.

 

 

Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck as the title characters, Jesse James and Robert Ford, respectively

 

 

Ron Hansen’s Masterful Outlaw Blues Novel About Jesse James and Robert Ford Faithfully Interpreted On Screen

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader

 

Consider complete the much ballyhooed return of the Western with the new Warner Brothers film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck and a deep supporting cast. Opening everywhere October 5, it comes fast on the heels of 3:10 to Yuma and Shoot ‘Em Up and the multi-Emmy Award-winning TNT mini-series Broken Trail.

Like these other oaters, Assassination is a big-budget, star-laden picture. Unlike them, which slavishly conform to or outlandishly bend genre conventions with action-packed fictional stories that pose as fact, Assassination is a subdued, ruminative tone poem anchored in history. It owes much of its restrained authenticity and power to native Omahan Ron Hansen, the acclaimed author, whose much-admired 1983 novel of the same name the film closely adheres to.

Assassination is more a Western by proxy, its psychologically complex characters and events drawn from thoroughly researched figures and incidents that just happen to be of the Old West. Hansen, a Creighton Prep-Creighton University grad, steeped himself in the history, just as the film’s director, Andrew Dominik, studied Hansen’s book and did his own digging into the Jesse James-Bob Ford canon.

Prior to this project, Hansen, the Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, had less than satisfactory experiences with adaptations of his work. Atticus was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, Missing Pieces, that he thought missed the point of his novel. He adapted Mariette In Ecstacy for a feature film that ended up re-edited against his and the director’s wishes. It’s never been released. A writer’s adaptation of Isn’t It Romantic? so displeased Hansen he did everything in his power to stop the film being made. He succeeded. Assassination proved a pleasant change.

 

 

Ron Hansen

 

 

“Andrew Dominik has made a very faithful adaptation,” Hansen said simply. “Virtually every word in the script is mine.”

Unusual for Hollywood, Dominik (Chopper), whom Hansen described as “fairly reclusive,” consulted with the author from the completion of the first draft of his screenplay all the way through a second draft, the actual shoot and the final edit. Not only Dominik, but actors sounded out Hansen for advice. The author twice visited the set, was made an associate producer and even has a walk-on bit — as a reporter remarking to a photographer making a wet plate image of Jesse’s corpse.

“About 60 reporters hover around watching the process, and I’m in the shot at the extreme left, midway up the screen, wearing a fake mustache and a bowler hat, just watching. You only see it for a few seconds, but I nailed the part. Andrew gave me one line, ‘You’re going to make a lot of money from this, Alex,’ but the line didn’t make it into the final cut.”

He’s pleased with how rigorously accurate the film is.

From wooden knobs for hanging clothes to vintage children’s toys, he said, “the attention to detail is very impressive. The sets and the costumes are just tremendous. It’s not going to look like a typical Western because,” contrary to popular depictions of those times the film shows, “people didn’t wear cowboy clothes back then. Jesse James wore kind of a bowler hat, a businessman’s suit, a watch and a fob and all that. They wore boots and they rode horses and they packed guns, but they didn’t look like a lot of the portrayals of Jesse James.”

Hansen and Dominik take a dim view of previous screen renderings of James, feeling the gritty complexity and downright danger of the man and the times was ignored.

“The film’s costume-production designer, Patricia Norris, really knows her stuff, so she didn’t have to consult with me…In fact, she ended up teaching me,” Hansen said. “The last robbery of the James gang was the Blue Cut (Mo.) train robbery and she has this train interior unlike any you’ve seen before. It looks so totally different but obviously based on her own research. It’s just jam-packed with people and in the place where you would normally put luggage people are lying as if on palettes.”

It’s rare a writer gets carte blanche access to the making of a film based on his work, especially when the adaptation’s by someone else, in this case Dominik, a New Zealand-born Aussie.

 

 

 

 

Hansen’s involvement began with a phone call in early 2004. It wasn’t the first time someone showed interest in his James novel. But this time was different.

“I got word from my agent somebody was interested in doing this. It turned out to be Warner Brothers. And from the very first Andrew Dominik was going to write the screenplay. Maybe around June my agent said Andrew wanted to see some of my screenplays and earlier books, so I sent those on to him,” he said. “Then around September Andrew showed me his first draft of the screenplay, which I really liked.

“Every once in a while I’d have a quarrel with a word and then realize he’d taken it right out of the book. I talked to Andrew a good bit about that (first draft) and then he did another draft and sent that to me, and we talked about it, too. Then I met him in December at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Pasadena.

“We had conversations frequently after that and then the next thing I knew it was greenlighted and he was just about to head up to Canada.”

Dominik spent the first half of 2005 scouting locations in Edmonton and Calgary. Before cameras started rolling in late summer, the filmmaker wanted Hansen’s input on some casting decisions.

“He would consult with me about various actors…especially as they were interviewing people for the role of Robert Ford. ‘What do you think of this guy?’ ‘Have you seen anybody you like?’ And I would mention people I’d seen who looked like him. Andrew had two scenes for the auditions for Bob Ford. One was early on, when Bob first contacts Frank James about being his sidekick on this train robbery.

The other’s 10 years later, when Bob Ford’s alone in Creed, Colo. and has his own saloon and is about to hire a dance hall girl and she asks him what Jesse James is like. Some people could do the first, but not the second scene. Some could do the second, but not the first. Finally, Casey Affleck seemed to be the best choice.”

On his visits to the closed set Hansen was given free reign to “wander around” and to “watch scenes” unfold. “I visited the set in Edmonton September 12-15, when they were shooting scenes in Heritage Park of Jesse and the gang at his Kansas City (Mo.) home and of the aftermath of his killing in St. Joseph (Mo.). Then I went up to Calgary October 3-6 for scenes with Jesse and the Ford brothers in the house on ‘Confusion Hill’ in St. Joseph.”

He spoke to many of the principals, including Pitt and Affleck. More than making small talk, these exchanges allowed Hansen to “give them my ideas and maybe change some wording that was difficult for them.” This interaction actually began months earlier, before filming commenced.

Said Hansen, “An actor would call me up and want to know more about his character. Or about why a particular word was used. What did it mean. Would it be OK if they said this and not this. That kind of continued when I was on the set. The actors really liked having me around because they could come ask, ‘Is there something else I can say in this scene?’ Then I could just throw out a line and a minute later I’d be hearing the line said.

“Actors ad-libbed on occasion, otherwise the dialogue and voice over are straight from the book,” he said.

He’s impressed with the work of the two leads. He particularly feels Pitt’s malleable performance captures Jesse’s instability, which gave Dominik many options.

“You would see maybe seven takes of one speech he gives and he would do it in subtly different ways each time,” Hansen said. “He was really prepared for the various shadings of Jesse James’s character and to explore this guy who was really a psychopath, but a charming one who could be scary and funny and admirable within moments. And that’s true of several scenes Brad Pitt plays with Casey Affleck. He (Pitt) gets all the nuances and all the expressions. James kept people off-balance by constantly shifting his mood and Pitt does a great job of presenting that. James was a vital presence and that’s what Pitt brings. He’s constantly surprising you. You can’t anticipate what he’s going to do next.”

As in Hansen’s book, the film considers James in counterpoint to Ford, his antithetical alter ego and killer. Much has been written about each man and their relationship and motivations. Hansen finds both to be fascinating enigmas.

“Ford kind of hitched up along with the James gang because they were famous and because it seemed like easy money. He ingratiated himself with Jesse James,” Hansen said. The legend that grew in the aftermath of the two men’s fatal last meeting branded Ford a coward, but the book and the film “show that Robert Ford really wasn’t a coward, he was an opportunist,” Hansen said. “When he was threatened and felt like he was going to be killed himself, he turned on James, but it wasn’t as though James wasn’t going to turn on him either.”

 

 

Andrew Dominik conferring on location with Brad Pitt

 

 

“A lot of people still admire Jesse James,” the author noted, “and I wanted to impress on them he really was a psychopath. I wanted to do a kind of character-in-the-round the way Shakespeare does, where you see both his good and bad sides and get to appreciate what draws people to him. He was a star in a lot of ways, and he used it. If he entered a room all eyes would be on him.”

As for the James-Ford dynamic, Hansen said, “I think they were oil and vinegar in some ways, but at the same time they were feeding off each other. Ford was really intrinsic to the last days of Jesse James. It was almost as if James knew death was necessary and he was looking for the person to kill him, and he decided on Ford.”

Expectations will be challenged by the moody film, he said, which eschews “bullets flying around” and “blood” for “a character study of this dance with death between Jesse James and Bob Ford.”

Hansen, his wife, writer Bo Caldwell (The Distant Land of My Father), and his step-children attended the film’s New York City premiere on September 18 at the Zeigfeld Theater.

“I thought the movie was superb,” Hansen said.

Reviews have been wildly enthusiastic.

All this means new life for Hansen’s 24-year-old novel. Harper Perennial has reissued a mass market paperback edition and a trade paperback version with an added postscript on the writing of the book and the making of the movie.

Meanwhile, Hansen’s other Western novel, Desperados, is under option with filmmakers. His new novel, Exiles, is slated for a May release by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of a 19th century shipwreck, the English poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins’ obsession with it and the famous poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, he wrote about it.

Related articles

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Through a Lens Darkly: A Western Masterpiece Looks Past the Fog of Myth to Find the Truth

Cover via Amazon

If I were forced to choose a Western  as the only one I could watch among the hundreds I cherish, I suppose I would select The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the classic directed by John Ford and sarring John Wayne, James Stewart, and Lee Marvin.  It is, for my tastes anyway, an enduring work that never fails to move me or to offer me ever deeper, resonant insights into human nature.  I wrote the following article for The Reader (www.thereader,com) in advance of a revival screening of the picture.  In the piece I was able to express my thoughts on some of the complex shades this film presents.  It reminds me in many ways of Wayne’s last film, the great Western The Shootist, which I could have easily chosen ahead of Liberty.  Both are dark films in the sense that they do not offer up easy or happy denouements.  The central characters in each are conflicted individuals making hard decisions that have unforeseen or unintended consequences.  Each film is set in a version of the dying West and their stories turn on the figure of a Westerner (Wayne) who has outlived his time, yet who has something invaluable to give before he fades away.  If you have never seen the film or if perhaps you have caught a snippet of it without sitting through the whole thing, then give it a chance.  It is well worth your time.  And just remember that the fake-looking sets and washed-out black and white images are intentional and wholly in keeping with the themes of the story. I promise, if you sit through the picture, you will not be able to shake it.

NOTE: This blog also contains my take on Ford’s and Wayne’s other late masterpiece, The Searchers, in a story I called, The Searchers, a John Ford-John Wayne Masterwork.  I also have many more film entries on the blog, including pieces on such other classic films as Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life and on filmmakers as diverse as John Landis, Joan Micklin Silver, John Jost, and Alexander Payne.

 

 

 

 

Through a Lens Darkly: A Western Masterpiece Looks Past the Fog of Myth to Find the Truth

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The famous line is uttered in the classic 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to decry the public-media inclination for myth over truth. The film is set in the dying Old West and its story is told almost entirely in flashback. The line refers to the unreliability of imagination and memory in sorting out the truth about the taming of the West. The implication is that getting at the truth about any history is problematical. If these spin-doctored times are any indication, then nothing much has changed. Just witness the hyperbole swirling around the War on Terror.

A revisionist Western starring the genre’s two most potent figures in John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and directed by the genre’s greatest interpreter, John Ford,  Valance both celebrates and debunks myths. Its theme of legend versus fact gains resonance from its two iconic stars subverting their Hollywood personas to play flawed characters who cover a lie that binds them to secrecy.

The way inconvenient truths get covered or distorted to further personal/national interests makes the film relevant today, which, in turn, makes impresario Bruce Crawford’s April 27 screening of Valance a must-see. The 7 p.m. event at Joslyn Art Museum’s Witherspoon Concert Hall commemorates the centennial of the Duke’s birth and benefits the Omaha Hearing School for Children Inc..

Special guest A.C. Lyles, going on 70 years with Paramount Pictures, knew Ford, Wayne and Stewart. Valance was shot on Paramount’s back lot and Lyles, then a producer of “B” Westerns, visited the set. He saw first hand the fear and respect commanded by Ford, the four-time Oscar winner as Best Director. “John Ford was not one of a kind, he was his own kind,” Lyles said. He also saw what made Wayne a thorough professional. “He was like John Ford — he believed in doing it and in doing it right. That’s why their pictures hold up to the test of time,” Lyles said.

In his present capacity as a goodwill ambassador for Paramount, a duty that finds him speaking at events like the upcoming one in Omaha, Lyles is a myth keeper who always polishes, never tarnishes, the patina of the Golden Age legends he knew. When it comes to Ford’s famous temper, for example, he prefers to couch it as “he had a job to do.” A.C.’s mantra could be, When the legend becomes fact, speak the legend. He’s also a consultant on HBO’s acclaimed Western series, Deadwood.

Any Wayne tribute must include at least one of the many films he made with Ford, under whose stern guidance he came to embody the male American ideal. Their collaboration was perhaps the most significant of any director-actor in Hollywood history. Together, they made at least a half-dozen Western masterpieces (Stagecoach, Rio Grande, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers and Valance). The last two Ford and Wayne teamed up for were darker in tone than the preceding ones. In The Searchers Wayne’s rugged individualist Ethan Edwards, a Civil War vet turned renegade, runs amok pursuing a racist brand of justice. Even as he reunites his family, he belongs to the wild and therefore remains isolated from his own people and community. In Valance his Tom Doniphon is once again a loner, but this time he is a bridge builder, not a destroyer, even enjoying a friendship with a black man. Then, Doniphon violates the Code of the West, sublimating himself for progress and the greater good.

Wayne’s Doniphon, a rancher handy with a gun, and Stewart’s Rance Stoddard, a greenhorn lawyer from the East, represent the wild and civilizing opposites of the West, respectively. Despite their differences they share a love for the same proverbial good woman, Hallie (Vera Miles), and a hatred for the same heinous villain, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Doniphon’s and Stoddard’s fates are sealed when one acts to save the other and, in the process, rid the territory of Valance.

The last great film Ford made, TMWSLV is replete with the theme of legend blurring truth and the consequences that result when lore obscures reality. The one who intervenes on behalf of the other is forgotten. His sacrifice costs him his sense of worth, his way of life and his woman. The sacrifice goes unrecognized and unrewarded. He dies penniless and alone. The one who owes his life to the other gains power and privilege and steals the woman right under his friend’s nose. The debt owed his friend never fully acknowledged. The fraud’s reputation is built on a lie the two men conspire to keep. What really happened is revealed in a flashback within a flashback, which shows how difficult and subjective the truth can be.

 

 

 

 

Even when the man credited with shooting Liberty Valance comes clean in an interview years later, a newspaperman dismisses it, telling him that when hype is accepted as fact, it trumps the truth.

It is a jaundiced take on American values and the costs associated with them.

“Liberty Valance is a masterpiece. It’s rich, it’s profound. It’s theme echoes something President John F. Kennedy said in a speech. ‘That the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie…but the myth. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought,’” Crawford said. “In this film Ford deconstructs the myths. It’s so moving. What a powerful, beautiful movie.”

As much as any artist, Ford promulgated such indelible images of the mythic West they became ingrained in the collective consciousness. The poetry and sentiment of his Westerns spoke so deeply and authentically to audiences that his movies were accepted by many as gospel. Whether or not he felt responsible to as Crawford suggests “set the record straight” is unknown, but late in his career he clearly did challenge some of the very precepts he advanced in his earlier work.

The philosophy behind the film’s great line — “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” — may express how Ford, the super patriot liberal Democrat who never discussed his work, felt popular conceptions of the West, including his own, or of any history, could not be trusted. It may have been as much a call for vigilance in the search for truth among disparate voices as it was an old man’s cynicism in the emerging media age of managed sound bites and headlines. God only knows what the old man would think of these politically correct-parsed times.

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‘The Searchers,’ a John Ford-John Wayne Masterwork

Image via Wikipedia

In keeping with my passion for classic cinema, here is an article I wrote in advance of a special screening of the great John Ford-John Wayne Western, The Searchers. Early in my cinephile life I have to admit I was not familiar with this film except for reading references to it in various history books and seeing an occasional clip from it in documentaries. These teases definitely whet my appetite to see the movie, but growing up Omaha , Neb. offered limited opportunities at best to see classic films in theaters and I do believe The Searchers was unavailable for television screenings for a long while due to rights issues, or even if it was available it would have not have been shown in letterbox format, and thus the film’s impact would have been severely diluted.  I seem to recall that a friend of mine, Gary Anderson, whom I worked for on a few occasions, first turned me onto the fact this was a film essential I absolutely had to see.  If memory serves, Gary named his first born son Ethan after the character Wayne plays in the picture.  I finally did see The Searchers in my 20s or 30s, and I was immediately struck by the sweep of its epic storytelling and the power of its uncompromising themes.  I have seen it several times since, always finding it a richly rewarding experience, and like the best Ford films, always discovering ever deeper currents in the images and the performances, in the music and the settings.  This article for The Reader (www.thereader.com) appeared in advance of a revival showing at the Indian Hills Theatre, which was one of the few remaining Cinerama theaters in the nation.  Watching The Searchers on the big screen, from the balcony, has to rank as one of my all-time filmgoing experiences.  As it turned out, it was one of the last films shown at the theater, which was torn down to make way for a parking lot.

NOTE:  This blog also contains my take on Ford’s and Wayne’s other late masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in a story I called, “Through a Lens Darkly.”  I also have many other film entries on the blog, including pieces on such other classic films as Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life and on filmmakers as diverse as John Landis, Joan Micklin Silver, John Jost, and Alexander Payne.

‘The Searchers,’ a John Ford-John Wayne Masterwork

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in the New Horizons

Legendary Hollywood director John Ford, that great visual poet of American cinema, cut his teeth on two-reeler horse operas in the silent era.  Bigger-than-life actor John Wayne, that symbol of virle patriotism, learned his craft toiling in cheap cowboy flicks.  Ford helped give Wayne his on-screen start when he hired the charming young prop man as a bit player in his 1929 picture Salute.

By the early 1930s their careers were heading in opposite directions.  Ford, already a top-flight director at Twentieth-Century Fox, achieved great acclaim outside Westerns while Wayne, who got a break starring in Raoul Walsh’s epic The Big Trail, discovered Hollywood fickleness when, after that pic failed, he was banished to quota-quickie shoot-em-ups.

The Duke despaired his second chance might never come.  Then, in 1939, Ford instinctively cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, a landmark film artfully shot in Monument Valley and dynamically edited for peak dramatic effect.  The smash hit proved the Western could be both a box office and aesthetic success and made Wayne a bankable screen presence.

In the post-war years Ford made a cycle of classic Westerns that ensured his status as the great populist interpreter of the American West while Wayne reigned as both a perennial superstar and American icon.  When Ford consistently chose Wayne to embody the hero in his films, the men were forever linked in cinema history.

Long into their fabled collaboration, the pair teamed-up for The Searchers, a 1956 Warner Bros. wide-screen Technicolor Western far darker in tone than Stagecoach yet every bit as riveting.  A favorite of film buffs, The Searchers displays Ford at the height of his creative powers and stars Wayne in one of his deepest performances.

On September 23, area film fans will join celebrities and surprise guests for a  special one-night only salute to John Wayne and The Searchers at Carmike Cinemas’ Indian Hills 4 Theater in Omaha.  The program, a benefit for the National Kidney Foundation of Nebraska, begins at 7:30 p.m. with a pre-show, followed by The Searchers projected on the theater’s 70-foot wide Cinerama screen, one of a handful still in existence.

The presentation is the latest event from Omaha film maven Bruce Crawford, who has organized classic movie programs since 1991. In typical Crawford fashion he is pulling-out all the stops for The Searchers.  He has secured a restored vault print from the Warner studio archives.  And in his usual showman-like way he has planned a gala evening complete with searchlights, paparazzi, red carpets, limos, Western reenactors and balladeers and a theater lobby display of Wayne memorabilia on loan from The Birthplace of John Wayne museum in Winterset, Iowa, where The Duke was born and raised.

Why all this fuss about an old Western?

“The Searchers has long been rated by film historians and aficionados among the Top 100 films of all time.  I think it and Stagecoach are the only Westerns in that select company,” said Crawford, a film historian.  “The Searchers is also a favorite among many of today’s leading filmmakers.  Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg all cite it as a major influence and have borrowed from it for films as diverse as Taxi Driver, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”  Indeed, the film’s anti-heroic themes resonated with the rebellious cinema and culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s  As Crawford said, “The picture is not so much about the West as it is about obsession.  It’s more of a psychological portrait and character study.  It just happens to take place in the West.”

To double for the Texas setting of The Searchers Ford selected evocative Monument Valley in Arizona, where he returned again and again for his Westerns, and this time captured its sweeping beauty in VistaVision, a wide-screen photographic process.

“The wide-open terrain becomes as much a character as any of the actors because it’s so beautifully photographed in 70 millimeter,” Crawford said. Set against this grand backdrop is the struggle of a nomadic figure (Ethan Edwards) battling the harsh elements as well as his own fierce nature.  According to Crawford, Ethan Edwards is another in a long string of “non-conformists” populating Ford’s work.  “Ford established very clearly, particularly in his Westerns, the rugged individualist. How one man alone can make a difference.”

It is said John Wayne regarded his role in The Searchers as his favorite, which is surprising given how morally ambiguous the character is compared to the late actor’s typical screen persona as a rough-hewn but fair-minded man of action.

The Searchers came along at a time when the Western genre was starting to reflect the anxious new realities of the Cold War era and, with it, directors like Ford were taking a more mature, even revisionist view of the Old West, which had been depicted in overly simplistic and blatantly biased terms.  In keeping with these changes, Wayne interprets Ethan Edwards as an obsessed man with an almost psychotic racial hatred.  The character is more troubled than any previous Wayne screen incarnation (with the possible exception of the driven cowhand-turned-ruthless cattle baron he played in Howard Hawks’ 1948 Red River).

As Ethan Edwards, Wayne is a man adrift — a Confederate veteran estranged from society.  It is a demanding role and Wayne delivers the goods under Ford’s direction.  Ford liked using a core company of actors and Wayne became the marquee member of the stock players Ford repeatedly drew on for his films.  By the time the cameras started rolling on The Searchers, Ford and Wayne were as closely identified with each other as any director-actor combo before or since.  In Crawford’s view, Ford knew Wayne could project the very qualities his protagonists embodied and utilized Wayne’s “strong silent charisma” like no one else.

The Searchers memorably opens with a lone rider approaching the homestead of Aaron Edwards, wife Martha and daughters Lucy and Debbie.  The rider is framed in the doorway of the house amid the vast expanse of the desert.  As the rider approaches, a ballad about a man’s lonely wandering plays on the soundtrack:   “What makes a man to wander?  What makes a man to roam?   What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on home?  Ride away, ride away, ride away.”

Ethan Edwards is returning to the frontier Texas wilderness and the only family he knows after a separation of many years.  There is a tragic quality about Ethan, who during his long sojourn has lost his former sweetheart, Martha, to his brother.  Harboring a deep hatred for Indians, he cannot accept the part-Cherokee teen, Martin Pawley (whom Aaron and Martha adopted after Ethan rescued him during an Indian raid in which the boy’s parents were killed), as his nephew.

After living a nomadic bordering-on-outlaw life since the war, Ethan clearly longs for the domestication his kin enjoy, but events prevent his reintegration into civilization.  When an Indian raiding party, led by the Comanchee renegade Scar, attacks neighboring homesteads, Ethan and Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) join Texas Rangers in pursuit of the marauders.  In Ethan’s absence, the raiders attack Aaron’s place, killing Aaron and Martha and kidnapping Lucy and Debbie (Natalie Wood).

The killings and abductions set Ethan, Marty and others off on an epic avenging search across the desert.  It is a quest fueled more by Ethan’s blind rage than justice.  After Lucy is found dead and violated, Ethan leaves no doubt he means to kill both Scar and Debbie, whose virtue he deems irretrievable.

While Ethan is unrelenting in his pursuit, Marty, who abhors Ethan’s plan, is just as unbending in his will to prevent any harm coming to Debbie.  When, months later, the decimated search party is no closer to finding her, only Ethan and Marty remain to carry-on.  Beyond all reason, their search stretches over a decade, with Ethan growing more callous each year.

In the end, Scar is finally dealt with and, after chasing his niece into the mouth of a cave, Ethan spares her, uttering the famous line, “Let’s go home, Debbie.”  By sparing her, he reclaims part of himself.  The final scene, Debbie’s homecoming, is perhaps the most poignant ending in movie history.  As Debbie and Marty are embraced by the family he is marrying into everyone sweeps inside the house to celebrate except for Ethan, who stands awkwardly in the doorway — poised between redemption inside and oblivion outside.  It is the same framing device used for Ethan’s arrival at the film’s start. As the door closes behind him, he is cast adrift amid the wilderness.  An eternal wanderer searching for a home to call his own.

The ballad heard at the opening reprises the haunting lament of the wandering man:  “A man will search his heart and soul, go searchin’ way out there, his peace of mind he knows he’ll find, but where, O Lord, oh where?   Ride away, ride away.”

The ending is rife with resonance.  First, it is a suiting elegy for the dying-breed of Westerner Ethan epitomized: he must move on because his job is done and his time has passed.  The end is also a requiem for the Western itself, which was fast dying out due to changing cultural tastes and the glut of TV Western series.  Finally, the ending is a tribute to Harry Carey, Sr., one of the first great Hollywood Western stars.  When Wayne stands astride the doorway, he reenacts a trademark pose of Carey’s — clutching his right hand to his left elbow — before trekking off alone.

There was a strong connection between Carey and The Searchers’ director and leading man.  John Ford helmed many of Carey’s silent Westerns and John Wayne admired Carey as a kind of role model.  Additionally, Carey’s son, Harry Carey, Jr., has a supporting role in the film and was a regular stock player in Ford pics.

Related Articles

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• The Searchers (cinamericanwest.wordpress.com)
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The Celluloid West

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My love of film and writing about film finds me looking for opportunities to wax poetic, or my clumsy approximation of such, about cinema. An example is this story from a few years ago about a Turner Classic Movies Western film festival.  I am a big fan of the Western.  When I was a film programmer I organized two major Western film fests, and so when I caught wind of the TCM series, I finagled an assignment from my editor at The Reader (www.thereader.com) to write this preview piece.  Although the TCM fest long ago aired, the channel regularly screens many of the great Westerns I mention in the article.

This blog also contains articles about two of the best John Ford-John Wayne collaborations, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The blog also contains dozens of other stories about cinema classics, stars, and filmmakers.  Check them out.

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

On select nights in November Turner Classic Movies pays tribute to the Western with a lineup TCM bills as “ALL the greatest Westerns ever made, except for Shane,” — the omission of the George Stevens’ classic probably owing to a rights issue.

At first glance, the Western may seem a rather dry form, but to this film buff’s thinking, anyway, it may just be the richest of all genres. The best Westerns, like the best dramas, speak to universal passions. They explore the human quest for power, freedom, independence and wealth and they examine the conflicts that arise when these desires collide with the equally strong needs for home, family, community and civilization. They reveal the struggle of men and women at odds with not only the natural elements but their own human nature as well. Because of all that it encompasses — from the settling of the West to empire building to the genocide of native peoples — the Western covers a landscape that is at once epic, mythic, historical, political, sociological, psychological and geographic.

If there is one Western that is the nexus of the genre, it is John Ford’s cinematic tone poem, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a memory saga about how what is known about the past is a function of what is told us and what we wish to believe. Near the end of the film a sardonic newspaperman, upon hearing how a celebrated taming of the West episode came down very differently from the way stories purported it to be, utters an aphorism — “This is the West, sir — when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” — that neatly explains how the mechanisms of popular culture make even outlandish lore the gospel truth.

In this same way, Hollywood Westerns through the mid-1950s were like dime novels in their avoidance of historical accuracy for heroic depictions of a fabulous frontier where hard men delivered justice, vengeance and temperance. All the conventions of the Western were in place by the end of the silent era and the first three decades of the talkies only served to reinforce its constructs: the lone rider finding trouble in some town; the corrupt cattle baron protecting his interests with hired guns; the golden-hearted “saloon girl” aiding the Westerner; and Indians laying siege to homesteads and army outposts.

For most of us, our mental picture of the Old West is derived from the images Hollywood has provided of its epochal events — range wars, cattle drives, wagon trains, cavalry campaigns — and its infamous legends — Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Judge Roy Bean, Billy the Kid. All most of us know about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is what the movies tell us.

Early Westerns were simplistic, but occasionally a picture surfaced, like Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach, that both defined and transcended the genre or, as in the case of William Wyler’s 1940The Westerner, that took delight in sending it up. Some Westerns, including Howard Hawks’ Red River and Ford’s The Searchers (1956), are practically Shakespearean in the scale and scope of their conflict and intrigue.

The Western milieu often has been used as a forum for examining social issues, from William Wellman’s 1943 The Oxbow Incident, which condemned intolerance with its attack on lynching, to the Fred Zinneman directed and Carl Foreman scripted High Noon (1951), which championed integrity in a thinly veiled reference to the ‘50s’ witch hunts, blacklists and informants. Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar are a carnival of Freudian symbols writ large. Anthony Mann’s The Furies is a Greek Tragedy on the prairie.

By the time Ford, the great interpreter of the Western, completed his early cavalry cycle (Rio Grande, Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon) and got around to The Searchers, filmmakers were reinterpreting their vision of the West. In The Searchers the Western protagonist — John Wayne as Confederate veteran and Indian killer Ethan Edwards — is presented as an anti–hero whose society-building impulses have been usurped by baser instincts and blinded by racist feelings.

In Wayne, Ford found the icon for the latter-day Westerner. Estranged from society, but not averse to aiding it — for a price — he is a stabilizing force who adheres to a personal code of conduct that allows him to straddle either side of the law when it suits him. At the end of the trail, the Westerner dies or rides off alone, unwilling or unable to bend to community strictures. He is the original American rebel.

This same anti-heroic thread runs through two key series of Westerns in the ‘50s, each pairing an inspired director with a perfectly matched star. Much like Alfred Hitchcock did in his suspense films with Jimmy Stewart, Anthony Mann explored the darker more cynical side of Stewart in Winchester 73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie.

Similarly, Budd Boetticher found, in Randolph Scott, the embodiment of the laconic drifter in The Tall T, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. By the 1960s, the Westerner was forever recast as an enigmatic, alienated and even anachronistic figure — a man of fierce independence and great competence whose temper and skill have been forged by years as a mercenary in the service of top dollar.

Not surprisingly, the Westerner is the precursor of today’s action hero — a rough-hewn rogue possessing extraordinary skills of horsemanship, gunplay and physical combat. He is strong, smart, brave and over-the-edge. The Westerns of Howard Hawks made a great point of portraying the Westerner as a professional called on by ordinary citizens to help rid them of some menace. The role of the professional is the theme of his late trilogy – Rio Bravo, El Dorado and Rio Lobo. Taking this theme even farther was director John Sturges, who transposed the samurai warrior philosophy to the professional gunslinger code by drawing on Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai as the inspiration for his hugely popular Western The Magnificent Seven.

The great purveyors of the newer, harsher, de-romanticized Western were neoclassical filmmakers Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West).

Peckinpah, who despite the later violence in his films was a storyteller from the old school, seemed to invest the anxiety, anger and alienation of the ‘60s into his work. He developed a lyrical, folkloric, yet ironic approach that subverted many old conventions and exposed the hypocritical forces operating in the West. Leone was also a visual poet, but on a grander, more stylized scale. He staged the Western as if it were an opera, building elaborate sets, scenes and sequences that heightened the Western motifs and then undercut those very same motifs through such obvious but gorgeous artifice that his gaze on the Western landscape became at once reverential and winking.

Leone gave birth to a character, The Man with No Name, and to the actor who portrayed him, Clint Eastwood, that became identified with the revisionist Westerns of the late ‘60s through today. Eastwood’s Westerner is a remote and bitter figure who casts a jaundiced eye on everyone and everything around him. In much the same way John Wayne’s later characterizations were informed by his five-decade body of work and revealed the nuances of an older, grizzled, embittered and, finally in The Shootist, dying gunman unable to escape his past, Eastwood draws on his cinema legacy to create, in Unforgiven, a figure haunted by his violent legacy.

To fully appreciate the richness of the Western, one must be steeped in a wide range of examples of the genre from different eras. For what it’s worth, here is one film buff’s partial must-see inventory, listed roughly chronologically, of  essential Westerns:

Stagecoach (Ford’s 1939 version, not the dreadful 1966 remake); The Oxbow Incident; My Darling Clementine; Red River; The Gunfighter; High Noon; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon;Wagonmaster; Winchester 73; The Naked Spur; Shane; The Searchers; Forty Guns; The Tin Star; The Unforgiven (the 1960 John Huston classic, not the Eastwood film); Rio Bravo; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Lonely are the Brave; Ride the High Country; One-Eyed Jacks; The Wild Bunch; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Ballad of Cable Hogue; Will Penny; The Cheyenne Social Club; The Stalking Moon; McCabe and Mrs Miller; Ulzana’s Raid; The Cowboys; The Shootist; Barbarosa; and The Grey Fox.

Enjoy ‘em, pardners.

Related Articles

• John Wayne: one last shot before the final farewell (telegraph.co.uk)
• What’s the Big Deal?: Stagecoach (1939) (seattlepi.com)
• The relevance of Westerns within today’s society. (smiffy1994.wordpress.com)
• “Sam Peckinpah’s Long-Lost Script for ‘The Texans’ Unearthed” (gointothestory.com)
• Classic Review: Once Upon A Time In The West (thesilvermirror.wordpress.com)