1. You haven’t seen enough Ford films.
2. Accusing Ford of being formulaic is like accusing Shakespeare of being formulaic.
1. yes, i have
2. no, no it’s not.
“Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. " – Ford
I’ll go with THE SEARCHERS. I’ve seen it multiple times, including on the big screen. It’s a beautiful film, but it also offers multiple layers and a dark edge to it. I get different things out of it every time I see it. And I’ve read the book it’s based on, too.
Other great Ford films: THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.
I’d like to recommend some titles you may not have seen: PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, WEE WILLIE WINKIE, DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK.
i have a question about the searchers. i may be remembering this wrong, but isn’t there a scene where they take a look at some people that have been taken and raised by commanche? and they’re all drooling retards?
why would they be acting like that, just because they were raised by commanche?
@Kamran
“and he’s a total misogynist”
Tell that to Maureen O’ Hara or any one of her characters, particularily those of The Quiet Man or The Wings of Eagles.
@Johnny
If they appeared to you as ""drooling retards", you might not have been paying very much attention to the movie? They are white captives from the raid on the Commanche village just moments earlier, and are quite clearly emotionally scarred by it. For example, the moaning woman, the first captive we see, screams as soon as she spots the soldiers; quite obviously she is terrified of them because of the massacre that they have committed. Moments later, as Wayne and Hunter leave, the moaning woman spots the doll held by Hunter, which belonged to Debbie. She grabs it and cradles it like a child, clearly representing the baby that she has lost. Then, one of the greatest moments of one of the greatest films; the close-up of Wayne. Is this signifying Wayne’s superiority over the “tainted woman”? No. An image of racial hatred connected only to the view of Wayne’s character and disconnected from that of the audiences? No. An image of Wayne-Edwards, a kindred spirit to that of the woman who has lost her entire family? Yes.
I love almost all the Ford movies I have seen but “How Green was my Valley” is my favorite.
Ford is my favorite director, and I go back and fourth on which is my favorite, but my top ten are:
1. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance- To me, this is the flipside of Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, (in the same way Fort Apache is the flipside to Walsh’s They Died With Their Boots On). Mr. Smith is the myth of America, In Liberty Valance, Ford uses Mr. Smith himself to expose us the dark corners underneath the mythology of American idealism, while endorsing the cultural value of the myth itself. This film shakes me to the core every time I see it. I have spent hours upon hours pondering the wisdom contained within the deceptively simple story, and I still discover something new every time I watch it.
2. My Darling Clementine- Henry Fonda’s performance in this film is a revelation. Subtle, Understated, yet every gesture is loaded with character development. This is the film that battles Liberty Valance for my top slot constantly.
3. The Quiet Man- John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara offer one of the most complex and compelling relationships I have seen in a “romantic” film. A Beautiful film.
4. The Searchers- What more needs to be said? A theme ahead of it’s time, and the best use of technicolor ever.
5. The Grapes Of Wrath- In Fonda, Ford found an actor whose understatement perfectly matched his directorial subtlety. A masterpiece.
6. Young Mr. Lincoln
7. Stagecoach
8. “The Civil War”- Ford’s 22-minute segment from ‘How The West Was One’.
9. Prisoner Of Shark Island
10. The Long Gray Line
I would also like to mention a Ford-helmed TV episode, “Flashing Spikes”, starring James Stewart and filmed the same year as Liberty Valance. If you’re a Ford fan and you haven’t seen it. Track it down, you won’t regret it.
The Quiet Man
The best Hollywood (American) director is either Ford or Hitchcock; most other great directors, like Hawks or Lubitsch or Capra, and a couple of othrs may have an impressive top tier but they don’t have the quality second tier that Ford or Hitchcock have. Funny in a way it should come down to those two, since they’re so different, stylistically, thematically, and as to subject matters. Here’s ten of my favorite Fords:
How Green Was My Valley
The Searchers
The Quiet Man
They Were Expendable
For Apache
Rio Grande
Young Mr. Lincoln
My Darling Clementine
The Grapes of Wrath
Two Rode Together
My Hitchcock ten:
The Lady Vanishes
Shadow of a Doubt
Foriegn Correspondent
Notorious
Vertigo
Rear Window
NBNW
Psycho
Rope
Strangers on a Train
—“and he’s a total misogynist”
Tell that to Maureen O’ Hara or any one of her characters, particularily those of The Quiet Man or The Wings of Eagles.—
Or watch Four Sons (1928) and Pilgramage (1933), which are anything but.
Or any other of a number of his films. The Whole Town’s Talking, Stagecoach is as much about Dallas as the Ringo Kid, and no woman in films is treated as sympathietically as she is. Colbert in Drums Along the Mohawk. O’Hara in the aforemention and in Rio Grande and How Green Was My Valley. Hell, the mother in HGWMYV. All the women in Fort Apache. Hannah in The Horse Soldiers. Call in Liberty Valence. The Seven Women. It’s a claim that doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny. If one can’t separate a man’s biography from his work, give it up. First, a long time ago, people accused Ford of being a racist. Now he’s a misogynist. Any accusation not to actually deal with what’s up there on the screen.
True, Ford made some of the most impressing bodies of work I ever saw. But what Ford film is my favorite? It changes with my mood.
From the 30s it is obviously his premature masterpiece PILGRIMAGE and YOUNG MR: LINCOLN. Though his craziest masterpiece might be STEAMBOAT ROUND THE BENT.
In the 40s my favorite is MY DARLING CLEMENTINE but also FORT APACHE:
In the 50s of course THE SEARCHERS but as well THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT and I have also a weak spot or THE LONG GRAY LINE.
And in the 60s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, TWO RODE TOGETHER, DONOVANS REEF and / WOMEN.
But Ford made at least 30 other films which are great.
By the way, I do agree with Ted Fontenot. I am just a bit tired that it is still neccesary to defend Ford against statements that he is a chauvinist, a racist, a reaktionary.
Fact is he is probably the only amarican male director with an extraordinary sensivity in women characters, defintely the very last director of the western hemisphere who seserves the etiket racist.
It is a fact that no american director gave such a complex image of the ethic variety of the amarican society than Ford.
Rudiger, can you share some details about Ford’s complex image of the ethic (I assume you mean ethnic) variety of American society?
Not a trap, not looking for a fight, just asking for information. Ford’s films seem pretty white to me.
@ Ted Fontenot- I would also add Donna Reed’s small, yet powerful, role in “They Were Expendable” to your list.
Of course I mean ethnic. Well, Internet fast writing spoilt my writing.
No problem, Rudiger, typos happen. Can you share some details?
Not to put words in Rudiger’s mouth, but I can see the point. The Irish is the most obvious but you also see Native Americans, Mexicans, Mestizos, Germans, Swedes in his films….
African Americans, of course, especially in Sergeant Rutledge
Although, not technically American in setting, Polynesians in Donovan’s Reef .
Have not seen a great deal of John Wayne because of a previously formed opinion. Therefore Ford’s films haven’t had much exposure either.
That being said I have just completed my 2nd viewing of ‘The Searchers’. The first with subtitles, the second with Bogdanovich’s commentary, + all the extras. I do this with all new (for me) films. The third viewing is about to start.
Aside from the gorgeous background and Ford’s presentation of it, I was truly surprised by John Wayne’s performance. While I was expecting bravado, arrogance and a picture of the world’s perfect man, what I saw was a character who has experienced life; determined, capable and compassionate. It was a fine performance.
Opinions on the extra features ventured that ‘The Searchers’ was not initially labelled a classic because of the undercurrent of racism that permeated the film. As the years have passed, acknowledgement came that Ford deliberately displayed racist talk and actions to bring them to the forefront. Viewers will notice that as the years passed onscreen a more lenient attitude was being exhibited by some. A slow process indeed!
Is it my favourite? I’m glad I saw it. Thanks for the recommendation, Mubi and The Auteurs.
Not seeing a lot of compassion in Ethan Edwards, until the very very very end, gotta say. Not exactly a defining characteristic, is it?
Yea, I know.
A slow process indeed!
> @ SKG: Ted Fontenot- I would also add Donna Reed’s small, yet powerful, role in “They Were Expendable” to your list
She sure does. A small, but indispensable role that she performs with grace and delicacy. I think it adds to the movie that her fate is left unknown.
There is not a lot of compassion, but that sort of the point of the movie and of the performance. He’s a bitter, angry man who was on the losing side in a war, is in love with his brother’s wife (the tragic imlications of this when discussing the movie are grossly underapprecaited, I think, then loses her and the rest of the only family he has left. His quest seems to be to do God one better—get rid of all attachments. Except obviously it’s not him. This is slowly brought to the fore in his relationship with Martin. where through the course of the movie he exhibits a softer side.
Wayne is not my number one or two classic star/actor(that goes to Stewart and Grant), and he may be actually as low as fifth or sixth on my list if I truly got into ranking them (or as high as three), but even at that, that’s pretty good (it’s a hell of a generation), and his performance in The Searchers is a world class performance. You see that movie and you’re not likely to forget Ethan Edwards soon. His performance there and in Red River, SheWore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande (Pauline Kael, no fan or Wayne or Ford, said that he and O’Hara were so effective that they actually make you long for their reconciliation), and The Quiet Man are mainly what his status as a great actor rest on (with some other fine roles thrown in to round it out), but that ain’t too shabby. I don’t have to buy into his view of America or even likely him personally to appreciate his acievement.
While I think it would be a big mistake to go so far as to label Ford a racist or a misogynist, I also think the picture is a bit murkier than suggesting that he was a radical liberal or ahead of every other Hollywood director of his time. I think what sets Ford apart is that his films are semi-explicitly about the politics of his time, using sort of mythic or allegorical stories to bring attention to the way he felt the country and its citizens should behave. Doing this he wasn’t pushing the outermost boundaries of the possible but aiming his films at the heart of his audience and trying to move them in steps rather than leaps and bounds. Interestingly, the films that are often considered Ford’s most “racist” are the ones where Ford is focusing on bigotry. I think this suggests, at the very least, that Ford is allowing for a certain sense of caricature to smooth the way for a broader indictment.
If one looks at Steamboat ’Round the Bend for example, Ford uses Stepin Fetchit for comic relief in ways that seem offensive to some modern eyes, but he also uses Fetchit in a way that could be seen as an attack on the racist tendencies of the south, but in a way that would be acceptable for the time. When a lynch mob comes to destroy the boat and harm the theatrical troupe inside, due to their sinful ways and evil wax figures, Dr. John manages to convince the rubes that their purpose is purely educational. As a final piece of persuasion, he unveils a ratty looking figure of Robert E. Lee on his horse which strikes awe into the yokels. As this is going on, Stepin Fetchit is playing Dixie on the organ and singing along in the most unmelodious way. Now one could take that at face value and suggest that Ford is using Fetchit and the image of Lee in a standard racist way, but contextually, I think that would be mistaken as it clearly feels more liking a biting satire of a certain way of thinking than anything else.
I would also point out that making films about race with an acceptably “modern” point of view wasn’t as easy as it would seem, and quite probably wouldn’t have been as effective as a more subversive approach. For example, the great poet Langston Hughes and actor Clarence Muse, both black, wrote a film that came out in 1939 directed by Bernard Vorhaus called Way Down South which was set on a plantation during the days of slavery. The film showed a plantation with an owner that treated his slaves as being part of his family and providing them with respect and consideration, and his slaves loved him for that. When the master dies, the slaves are suddenly treated as brutally as we would more expect from a typical slaveowner, but the young son of the previous owner, with the help of the slaves and a considerate hotel keeper, manage to get rid of the person looking after the plantation and restore things to the way they used to be. To many of those pushing for civil rights in the sixties, this film was completely unacceptable. Showing blacks actually enjoying being slaves was so offensive that they refused to accept anything about the film, and felt Hughes and Muse were toadies or enablers to a racist society, and that is perfectly understandable in many ways, but one can also look at how the film from a different context and see how radical what they did was in the context of 1939, particularly since the film was intended as a musical comedy vehicle for child singing star Bobby Breen.
I mention all of that to say that there isn’t a simple way to look at the way race was handled prior to the civil rights movement. I don’t think one can question those that are offended by characters or situations that treat minorities with any less respect than the white characters or that use them in even worse ways, but I also think that trying to understand the context in which these characters and events are shown can be revealing and fight against too easy generalization based on modern ways of seeing and thinking.
To my mind, Ford was clearly “liberal” for his time, but it is a sort of middle road liberalism that maintains patriotism as a core value as well as a belief in the basic goodness of people at the communal level and that government can work for peoples interests. He wouldn’t push too far towards any extreme where the stability of the country might be threatened, but he did push for changes on the level of the personal, which would lead to the societal. Compared to someone like Hawks who has a far more libertarian viewpoint in his films, this is a solidly progressive agenda, but compared to more radical directors like Tourneur Ford lags behind.
I would also point out that pre-sixties films in general had a much wider range of ethnic representation than we would see from that point on. The films of the thirties were filled with all sorts of accents and “types” which slowly died away after the war, although war films themselves almost always have a cross section of ethnicities, There are some reasons for this I could make a good guess at, but the point is that Ford didn’t stand out exceptionally in this, other than his constant use of the Irish, although he did do it more than the norm.
As for women, I don’t see Ford as anything out of the ordinary for his time at all. There were a lot of directors through the fifties that were devoted to making films about women and had more complex female characters. Ford is better at all areas of his craft than many of his contemporaries, so some of his women may seem more vividly realized for that, but to suggest he had anything on say Wyler or Cukor or any number of other directors in this regard doesn’t hold up at all.
As usual, Greg, you have cleared a lot of air with your knowledgeable and thoughtful post here.
Incidently, at least two well-known African American writers, Stanley Crouch and Armond White, have cited How Green Was My Valley as one of their favorite films.
Sure, Greg, Ford realization of his attempt to portray a variety of ethnicities can be critiqued, but this is largely due to the fact that he attempted a lot more than did many contemporaries, who remained utterly mute in this regard. Even something as early as the Iron Horse makes a serious effort to honor not just the Irish, but also the Italian and Chinese immigrants who worked on the railroads (the actors who play Chinese workmen in the film are actually Paiute Indians from a Nevada reservation, but Ford, according to Joseph McBride, consulted with actually Chinese immigrants who had worked on the rail construction). For me it’s less about whether anybody else was doing this sort of thing at any particular time than it is that Ford was engaged with issues of how people of various races and ethnicities fit into this notion of being/making America(n) for a very long time.
Regarding the feminism question, yes, other directors portrayed strong female characters (particularly, as you say, by the ‘50s), but that should mean that Ford = “ordinary” in this regard. Not many directors in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and especially not many Hollywood directors, were spending their earned professional capital to do personal projects like adapting works by proto-feminist writers like Wylie (Four Sons and Pilgramage) . At any rate, if the standard for feminist has not been met, I hope we’ve at least effectively countered the notion that Ford’s work is misogynistic.
Matt, I think you misunderstood me, what I was trying to do was suggest that in quantity, Ford wasn’t radically different than many of his contemporaries in the use of ethnic characters since the thirties were fairly awash in “types”, but Ford certainly had a different qualitative way of handling them which i attribute to his, in my eyes, overriding concern with community. Where someone like Walsh would put in ethnic types and use them fairly brutally representing the “way it is” in a sense, Ford had an active concern regarding their place in society and his films reflect that. I think there is some issue for many people due to Ford’s thinking on a bigger scale than the individual which can leave a sense of not being progressive enough especially as the century moved past the half way mark. I see Ford as being somewhere between Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in his films in that the concern for all people fitting into a larger whole is balanced against a desire for order and a strong sense of obligation to the group that seems a little archaic now after the Vietnam war years. I think this tension is quite strong in The Searchers which is why it continues to be troublesome and provocative after all these years. Other directors, although not many, may have been more progressive by today’s standards and should be salutedd for that, Ford is clearly an artist that can’t be labeled with any sort dismissive epithet that easily.
Regarding women in his films, I have to say that Ford doesn’t really stand out in this regard other than in the artistry that surrounds most aspects of his films. There are far too many films with interesting, dynamic, strong and sensitively handled female characters in the films of his contemporaries, even if they generally don’t have the high quality films to support them as Ford’s characters did. I don’t mean that as a dismissal or slight against his use of female characters, rather that it was such a strong suit for so many films of the era and a relatively lesser concern for Ford when it came to anything beyond the social fabric, that he really doesn’t stand out in this area.You’re right in that Ford was by no means “ordinary” in any sense of the word, and I wouldn’t slight the way his films do deal with women since the characters he does have are memorable and maintain a sense of self that would be admirable for any era, but the pre-fifties era was sort of a Hollywood golden age for women in film and Ford was just one small part of that.
With opponents like Greg , who needs allies?
Tag Gallagher on Ford and racism:
Are Ford’s Indians authentic?
Authenticity as a moral imperative is a recent obsession. It was accorded
relatively little importance, during most of the last hundred thousand years,
even (and especially) by historians. Authenticity was thought
unachievable. And for good reason. The past, after all, does not exist,
except in our individual imaginations, and no two of us can imagine even
yesterday in the same way. Thus what we call “history” is what we ourselves
create, our story. History is not written by the hand of God, nor by Nature
(and dialectical materialism has no hand). The past’s only relevance is what
it means to us today. This is why Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion or
Nativity set biblical events in contemporary contexts, with medieval villages
in the background, and angels gamboling where they will.
History — in prose, verse, picture or object — once had no illusion that it
was anything but myth. Nor did it aspire to be. Only recently has it been
primping itself as a science; always before, myth was its highest aspiration.
To people offended by Ford’s Indians or blacks or Chinese (7 Women),
however, such arguments are confirmation of Ford’s racism, his cultural
egocentrism. Ford is therefore not the myth we want today. And do we not
have every right to choose our myths? By such choice human reality is
created.
Yes. Yet the question now comes: Is not racism or egocentrism inherent
in any profoundly human utterance? Who of us can claim to be pure? Is it
not impossible, no matter how hard we try to speak for the whole human
race, to shed our family, tribe, language, religion and cultural tastes? Is it
not impossible to shed our self? And if what we speak will have any truth at
all, do we not first of all have to speak the truth we know most intimately:
the truth of our self?
Isn’t great art always conscious of the limits of understanding? If art is so
often (or always?) religious, is it not because it stares at what it cannot see?
There is a moment in 7 Women when a white missionary preaches to
Chinese children. We see their faces staring back with total
incomprehension. The movie’s theme is people — white and yellow, white
and white, yellow and yellow — staring at each other uncomprehendingly. In
rare instants, an I-thou moment breaks through. And much the same
situation prevails with Indians.
We can trace a similar theme through the highpoints of most of Ford’s
hundred-and-more films: characters staring into space, after people who
have gone, or are leaving, or are right in front of them. They are beautiful
images, compelling. Always there is alternation of community and privacy —
and the intolerance, the racism, the non-recognition of our neighbor.
In this sense, Ford’s treatment of Indians is profoundly racist. His
storyworld is the white man’s. He is not telling the Indians’ story, he is
looking at them from the sensibility of his whiteness, they are his symbols.
Perhaps Ford could not have done otherwise; apparently he chose
deliberately not to try. For that matter, it is difficult to think of any white
person’s film that has not made the same choice.
Thus art and history have preferred myth and fantasy.
Ford sacrificed accuracy willingly. His Apaches smoke pipes, not cigars,
and his Comanche don feather bonnets to ride into battle. Were I to learn
that his Comanche chief’s make up and costume correspond to no actual
Comanche’s, I should not be surprised. Probably the actors are from some
other tribe, or even white. And even when Ford made The Quiet Man,
about Ireland which he knew intimately and by blood, he preferred myth.
And some Irish were indignant. “I cannot for the life of me see that [Ford’s
Ireland] has any relation to the Ireland I or anyone else can have seen or
known,” one critic complained.485 So naturally Ford’s Indians are equally
mythic, inspired less by the reality of the Indians he knew or the scholarly
books he read, than by the reality of Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington,
Charles Schreyvogel and Charles Russell, of the dime novel and hundreds
and hundreds of movies, and before them of the Puritans, Rousseau,
Chateaubriand and Cooper, and the thousands of imitators they spawned.
It is awesome to contemplate the sheer quantity of European and white-
American images of the Indians, to consider the constant fascination and
inspiration these images have held for five hundred years, and to recognize
how terrifyingly irrelevant this overwhelming hoard of images has been to
what individual Indians actually were, and therefore how relevant these
fantasies became to forming white attitudes toward those individuals, to
forming the prisms, the icons, through which we perceive Indians — and how
responsible these fantasies are for what was done to those individuals. This
is what John Ford is about.
Ford’s most extensive essay in this vein, on Indians, is The Searchers.
Here the Indians are mythic apparitions, appearing repeatedly and always
suddenly out of nowhere, icons of savage violent beauty dread, and so
entirely projections of white fantasy, that Ford himself termed The Searchers
“a psychological epic.” For the white Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the
Comanche Scar is the “Other” that he can stare at but cannot see, worse, he
is Ethan’s Doppelgänger, everything in himself that he despises. Specifically,
Scar has raped Ethan’s brother’s wife, for whom Ethan himself nursed desire
so obsessive that, before the picture begins, he has been wandering for
seven years in order to escape her allure. Thus Ethan must kill Scar in order
to destroy the complex of violence within himself, and will spend the picture’s
storytime — a second seven years — searching to do so. “A man will search
his heart and soul, go searching way out there,” goes the movie’s title song,
alerting us that Ethan’s physical search is only a search for himself, to come
to terms with his own solitude. And the search will resolve not with the
death of Scar (whom Ethan finds dead and thus cannot kill), but with a
transmutation of Ethan’s violence, solitude and racism into love, community
and (the antonym of racism?) fraternity.
For this drama the Indians are basically props, so much so that the fact
that Scar is played by a white actor (Harry Brandon), rather than a red actor,
seems entirely appropriate. Ford’s “psychological epic” makes no claims to
realism. Quite the contrary: it identifies the myth-evoking landscapes of
Arizona’s Monument Valley in 1955 as “Texas 1868” in an opening title card,
and then goes on from there to a series of Charles Russell imitations and
paintery compositions bathed in expressionist light. This movie is a myth
based on other myths based themselves on still other myths, without
beginning. It is an attempt to write “history” to serve to clarify the
subjectivity of the historian, the myth maker — who, from colonial times, has
sown the ideologies that have prescribed how Indians would, in actuality, be
treated by American authorities.
It is because of Ford’s evident consciousness of this fact that his
treatment of the Indians is “profoundly racist,” that is to say, confessional: a
confrontation with the limits of understanding, the sin of solitude, the
intolerable violence wreaked by our callous adhesion to ideology (myth: ideas
of what other people are, rather than I-thou contact): evil in Ford is always
good intention gone astray; and tradition, which sustains us, is always the
humus where evil has its roots. Thus to the whites, in The Searchers, the
violence done by Indians is too terrifying even to be imagined, but also it has
the allure of archetypal fire, of the raw reality that ideology expels from our
consciousness. In contrast, violence perpetrated by whites is a Biblical
romp: “O Lord, we thank You for what we are about to receive,” prays Ford’s
Shakespearean fool, as he aims his rifle to start slaughtering Indians. And
although the violence and ideological myopia in Ethan are transmuted
eventually, they are not recognized by Ethan, still less so by his white
community, who would exterminate an ant colony with more moral inhibition
and much less jubilation.
Myths sustain societies in Ford, but poison them as well. They define the
limits of understandings, but are seldom perceived. They rule and regulate
our lives.
The tragedy of the American Indians for Ford is not only that they
themselves were virtually exterminated; it is also that their story is lost, or
rather, that their story stays with them. Their story has not become part of
our story. It is a story that, as the images of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
capture so movingly, passes momentarily across the horizon, like yesterday’s
herds of buffalo and virgin forests. Hence it is nature that destroys the
Custer-like cavalry regiment in Fort Apache, rather than merely the Indians,
who are at one with land, rocks and dust, which like Greek gods are images
of own conflicts. Battles with Indians are part of the scenery. In both
pictures, the dramatis personae are white, never red, and Ford’s interest is,
as in The Searchers, with the traditions and community values that render
otherwise decent individuals into willing agents of imperialism and genocide.
An Indian story in the middle of The Searchers depicts the limits of
understanding. It is about an Indian named “Look” whom none of the whites
can see, whose story is smothered by white stories.
It begins beside the fireplace of a white home, when a girl gets a letter
from her fiancé, whom she has not heard from in two years. There is much
play between her agony, the opportunism of a rival courter, her father’s
insensitivity, her mother’s distress. The boyfriend writes he has gotten a
squaw, and then in flashback we see that Ethan and the boyfriend
inadvertently purchased Look, a plain, chubby girl, when they thought they
were just buying a blanket. Ethan makes fun of her and the boyfriend kicks
her out of his bed. Both the flashback and the letter-reading are played as
comedies, dependent on indifference to the suffering of the two girls.
Audiences, identifying with Ethan’s humor because he is John Wayne and
because Ford has done his best to make us feel empathetic and
compassionate toward him, audiences identify unthinkingly with his racism
too. Then Look is found dead, a victim in a cavalry massacre, and we are
jerked into consciousness of Wayne’s morality — and our own morality.
Look’s story, scarcely perceived by the six whites from whose perspective it
is told, has been only a joke for them, a foil in the drama of their insensitivity
toward each other. No one sees Look.
Since the Indian story cannot be told, no individual Indian can emerge as
a rounded character. Ford’s strongest, most communicative, images of
Indians are iconic, which is why they stir us: they are images constructed by
the myths that we, the whites, have constructed.
I know of no white film that has tried to assume an Indian’s point of view.
Perhaps the effort has always looked doomed to failure — and indecent. As
Ford observes in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), it is white words, white
language, that have been our most potent weapon against Indians. Are we,
the descendants of their destroyers, now to presume to tell their stories in
the language that destroyed them? Is it time, yet, to acknowledge the
responsibility to make their stories part of our common heritage?
Ford was neither feminist nor anti-feminist; that’s not how he looked at things. He wasn’t into the times’ cryptic proto-feminist film-making, nor did his films have leading roles for proto-feminists characters, unlike, say, many of the films of Leisen, Cukor, Stevens, Wyler, Sturges, Hawks—to name but a few. Ford worked in a more traditional, even conventional, perspective, but within that context, I would emphasize, he examined and questioned the particulars of that context in relation to the contradictions that manifested within and between the roles arising from the context. And his scrutiny wasn’t pro-forma and his resolutions weren’t merely facile. They were hard-fought, hard-won, and precariously balanced, as all negotiations of conflicts between parties must necessarily be. We constantly jockey for place in this world in flux. Myths and other fictions, mutually agreed upon, help. The only alternative is a process approximating war in some form where there are only victors, victims, and vanquished.
Ford acknowledged the importance of women, and the role of women, in his scheme. Those concerns were of a high order, and he took both of them seriously. The Quiet Man is as much about Kate as about Sean. Although no feminist she, it’s nevertheless about what she sees as her rights. What she has coming. She will not be denied. It’s a matter of respect to her as a woman that is owed her, and she cannot give herself to a man who does not respect her enough to be her champion whether he agrees or understands. It’s a matter of loyalty. She can understand and appreciate that the world he comes from makes it impossible for him to respect some of her world’s customs, but he must anyway defer to them for her sake—if he is to have her. That’s very real, eternally so. Agree or not agree, saith the woman, you must respect me. That’s a heartier theme than it might first appear to be, and one worth taking on since it has only prevailed since biology first created sociobiological precepts. And it isn’t like so many people were taking it on—certainly not in the full, mature and complex way he was. He may not see life as soap opera, like a Douglas Sirk, but he knows, and gives great weight to, women’s place and right of place in the scheme of things. This may seem superficially antiquated, even quaint, in this modern world where we are schooled to pretend everything should be, and can be made, equal, the same. That’s the dogma anyway.
Now, in movies like The Quiet Man, this is in the context of conventions like courtship and marriage, and in Rio Grande it’s in the context of how you repair a broken marriage and make it endure, but it still is feminine and it still is taking the female’s place in the scheme of things very seriously. It’s about mutual respect. Equality in sex relationships are not necessarily simply about unilateral independence—about getting “the man’s” boot off your neck. It’s about give and take. About getting what’s yours by right but recognizing that that can only be achieved in an inter-dependent way. It’s about setting that fulcrum on the teeter-totter power arrangement in man-woman relationship. And it’s about acknowledging the conventional, even deferring to it, while having to go through and beyond it.
In Ford, you reject the traditional and customary at your peril. There’s a reason for that. Community is safety and safety has its price. We in the USA have become so safe and fat, and have been for so long, we think that it is ours by some sort of right. That it didn’t cost anything, and that we don’t have to pay to keep safe. The spoiled and selfish meeting the myopically doctrinaire. Ethan Edwards clearly rejects the invitation to rejoin the community at the end of The Searchers. He turns from that open door, and only then does the door close as he almost stumbles off to wander in the wind. He placed himself between the rock and the hard place. Now, he doesn’t room to maneuver; he can only turn around and go back. The ending of The Searchers recognizes the legitimacy of both the collective and the individual, and the one will honor the other only if it acts in service to it. That’s the price. The community requires you bend your knee to it, and if you won’t then you and it are at irreconcilable loggerhead. Something has to give, or something has to go.
Ford is not one to, and did not, make Dallas a heroic feminist figure based on her being a prostitute. He acknowledges her sad predicament humanely, as a tragedy, but not in the terms a social critic with an ideological ax to grind might A feminist would seek to blame patriarchal society (funny, it’s the women of the town who are casting her out), or see victory in her affirming her prostitution as freedom and victory. That’s not Ford. Ford takes her predicament as given, and its social cause as irrelevant, to say something else about human relationships, something about how you play your hand when the cards are dealt. Stagecoach isn’t I Was a Fugitive From A Chain Gang or Dead End—or The Women. Her environment may have had a lot to do with her fate, but that’s not what he’s concerned with. He’s interested in how you transcend your milieu, whatever it is and whatever your place in it is. Whatever the context, you must come to terms with it, and you must divorce yourself from it. At your peril. This usually means people have to either succumb or transcend or opt out. Those who can do none are destroyed. There is no Edenic state that would make this moot—or if seems there is (The Quiet Man) it too will show itself to have a serpent.
w:i:l:b:e:r:t:o: :i:r:a:h:e:t:a:
The Sun Shines Bright is my favorite with My Darling Clementine a close second.