Take Your Best Shot #3: The Searchers

This installment of the Take Your Best Shot series was written for the Close-up Blog-a-thon organized by Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door. Previous entries have focused on The Long Good Friday and Rebel without a Cause.


Any fan of Westerns can describe, probably in some detail, the shot that made John Wayne a star. His introduction as the Ringo Kid, nearly twenty minutes into Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), remains one of movie history’s most famous close-ups. Its strategy is fairly simple—cut to a medium-long shot of a tall man posed before a back-projected valley, then push quickly into close-up as he hoists a saddle and twirls his Winchester—but the energy is palpable. Behind him, the unsullied frontier (specifically Monument Valley) promises vitality and opportunity. The man, brawny and born in Iowa under the name Marion Michael Morrison, has spent a decade in Hollywood appearing mainly in cheapies at Republic. He knows that this picture, particularly Ringo’s entrance, will be his big chance, and he grabs hold of it with both hands.

Seventeen years later, in their ninth film together, Ford would once again dolly in to a striking close-up of Wayne. But this time, with the actor playing The Searchers’ racist Ethan Edwards, the iconography is far from heroic. Haggard and unshaven, dressed in a black hat and patched overcoat, Wayne glares and thrusts his shoulders in a portrait of merciless resolve.

Ethan has spent five years searching for his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), the sole survivor of a Comanche raid on his brother’s home. Although at first he wished to rescue Debbie, now he seeks to kill her for in his mind she has been contaminated by tribal assimilation (especially since reaching an age of sexual maturity). He and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a young man of part-Cherokee descent adopted by Ethan’s brother, inspect a small group of white women “rescued” from the Comanches by the U.S. Cavalry. Martin, who tags along in order to save Debbie from Ethan’s murderous idea of deliverance, tries to communicate with the women, but they appear to be in shock after the massacre. “They ain’t white,” Wayne's disgusted antihero declares, as if life among the Indians negated their humanity.


Then comes the close-up. Instead of a frontier setting, we have an interior location with visible ceiling and windows. It is wintertime, and Ethan wears a heavy coat and scarf. The sense of constriction affects the camera movement, which begins closer to Wayne than in Stagecoach and pushes forward to express menace rather than excitement. The camera no longer bounds and swoops toward him. Its focus is critical rather than celebratory. Yet the actor seems no less magnetic, drawing The Searchers’ frame nearer as if by sheer will. The viewer may stiffen upon being forced into such close proximity with Ethan, whose hatred pierces through the shadow that obscures his eyes.

The distance between these two images encapsulates not only the progression of Wayne’s career (toward the complicated men he played more often after 1949’s Red River [Howard Hawks]) but the evolution of the Western genre between 1939 and 1956. It’s not just a matter of Stagecoach’s white hat versus The Searchers’ black hat. The dominant actor has aged. Stagecoach’s halo effect has been replaced by Ethan’s five o’clock shadow. The righteous quest for vengeance (Ringo hunts the man who killed his brothers) gives way to Ethan’s savage desire. By the mid-1950s, the Western hero had internalized a range of postwar anxieties (mostly racial and sexual, as pertains to The Searchers) that were uncommon, if not unthinkable, for a protagonist in 1939.

If Stagecoach represents a mythic vision of America forged by heroism and sacrifice on the western frontier, then The Searchers offers a much more ambivalent look at violent impulses within the nation’s character. This is where Westerns were headed in the ’50s, not only in Ford’s pictures but also in the work of contemporaries such as Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann (not to mention their descendants from Sam Peckinpah to the team behind Deadwood). The open-faced Ringo Kid warms the prairie, his arrival enabling Stagecoach’s passengers to overlook their class differences and form an idealized microcosmic community. But Ethan Edwards chills the room. Ford’s repetition of the dollying close-up demonstrates that Ethan's barbarity and racism are every bit as fascinating as Ringo’s folksy gallantry, and no less central to our heritage.