Improving The Searchers

With Apologies to Jeffrey Hunter

The Searchers is a movie I think about a lot. I wrote about it once, a long time ago.

Whether I imagined it would, or not (I can’t remember), writing that essay didn’t discharge my complicated relationship with the thing. In the decades since, I’ve continued to give an outlandish amount of my time to The Searchers.

Last night I showed it to a few people. I had access to a small movie theater, so the movie was able to cast its sensory spell, and draw us into its despairing, uncomfortable depths. One of the people I showed it to was my sixteen-year-old son. He made me think about it a way I never had before.

There are a lot of characters in The Searchers. A whole sprawling, cod-Shakespearean cast of types, including the low humorous ones meant to entertain the groundlings.

But there are four in the system of obsession that gives the film its distinction. Debby, the kidnapped white girl (played by Natalie Wood); Scar, the Native American nemesis who kidnaps her (played in cringe-inducing Indian drag by German-born Henry Brandon); and the two searchers who give the film its title: Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), and Martin Pauly (Jeffrey Hunter).

Really, though, there are only two — Ethan and Martin. Debby and Scar are symbolic emblems, supercharged symbols. They get just a handful of lines. Mostly they exist as a structural occasion for the obsessive search, the mission of rescue that conceals a mission of murderous revenge.

Two characters, two title characters, two at the center. Interdependent, opposed, ambiguous, their fates braided. So why, for forty years, had I only thought about one of them?

Well, to be fair to myself, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is a kind of psychopathic sun blotting out the sky. His obsessiveness, his racism, his charisma, his manipulations, his tormented backstory — and Wayne’s embodiment of these, even as one is forced to wonder whether the actor understood that he was playing a wounded monster — these are what have etched the film into the annals, and my own semi-willing brain.

John Wayne/Ethan Edwards is what everyone thinks about and remembers.But the movie needs Jeffrey Hunter/Martin Pauly to oppose him, and bring him into relief.

I pointed out to my son one of my favorite (unprovable) theories about the film: that Martin Pauley might actually be Ethan Edwards disclaimed child. What Edwards claims is that he found a baby, the sole survivor of an Indian slaughter. He brought Martin to his brother’s family and allowed them to raise the boy. At the same time, Edwards seems suspicious, even contemptuous of the grown man Martin has become. He seems to bear some grudge against him — something to do with his parentage. “A man could mistake you for a half-breed,” he tells him, exhibiting his anti-Indian obsession.

Martin admits to having some Native lineage, an eighth-share — yet, by the logic of the film, any knowledge he has of his origins comes through Edwards, who demonstrates his willingness to obfuscate, conceal, and manipulate time and time again.

Perhaps because he was a son talking with a father, my kid analyzed Martin’s perspective within the film with unusual sensitivity. “He’s like Edwards, a man with no home in the world. He’s torn between two realities: the possibility of joining the domestic world of the homestead, and the pull of searching for the only remaining member of the only family he’s ever known. He’s caught up in what Edwards tells him matters about the world, but he also seems to be the only one who sees into Edwards tortured heart. And the man he’s following keeps telling him he’s no one at all.”

(I didn’t write down my son’s words, but this was their spirit.)

What a remarkable character Martin Pauly is, when you look at him this way. Why hadn’t I meditated on those depths? I believe I was up against the limits of Jeffrey Hunter’s performance.

Hunter’s no deficit to the film. A good physical actor, Hunter is easy on the eyes, as they say. Or used to say. He captures aspects of Martin’s character beautifully: his courage and confusion, his bewildered sexual innocence, his utter helpless honesty.

Yet (unlike Wayne, no matter what you think of him), Hunter simply isn’t actor enough to give a glimpse into a vortex of existential questions, like those attaching to his character. He hits his marks, stands up to Wayne as well as he can, and the movie isn’t damaged. But it isn’t expanded, either.

Though on the one hand I’ve always experienced The Searchers as a kind of edifice, an unquestionable object, I’ve never believed it was in any way perfect. The musical score, for one thing. Nearly anyone would quibble with certain broad humorous sequences — even if they contribute, in their way, to the portrait of a world to which Edwards will be refused entry.

Until last night, though, I’d never wondered what it might be like if a better actor played Martin Pauly.

Here’s what Paul Newman looked like in 1956:

And here’s Marlon Brando:

And John Cassavetes:

These actors were all available, at least in principle.

On the other hand, if you want to fantasize about James Dean taking the part, you have to project a world in which a phone call from the casting agent, telling him he’s been offered a part opposite John Wayne, somehow alters the life-trajectory which would lead to Dean dying in a car crash in late 1955.

We even have a point of reference for my little fantasy, in Howard Hawks’ Red River, where John Wayne’s performance was pushed by the presence of Mongomery Clift. The Clift/Wayne dynamic might be a glimpse of what I’m dreaming of for The Searchers. In many ways this was already the prototype for Wayne’s role as Edwards —a first glimpse of Wayne’s capacity to play anything nuanced at all. (After watching Red River, John Ford was reputed to have said, “I never knew the big sonuvabitch could act.”)

Unfortunately, even if Wayne and Ford had been tempted to go back to Clift — unlikely — 1956 was the year Clift was mutilated in a car crash of his own. He survived, barely, but his youthful beauty was wrecked, and his life slid toward tragedy and early death.

My vote goes to Newman.

Where Jeffrey Hunter was only capable of standing up to Wayne in the most literal terms — a physical obstacle to murderous intent — Newman would have pushed him on emotional terms. Sure, it’s hard to think that Wayne could have gone deeper than he managed; he goes deep. The mystery of where the power in this performance comes from, given what we know of Wayne’s political idiocy, and anti-intellectual bias, is an example of the authentic mystery of art. (cf. James Brown.)

But imagine how the meanings generated between the two searchers in The Searchers might have expanded, in the reciprocal space between the two performers, had another, more complex actor been allowed to explore the existential depth implicit in Martin Pauly’s situation?