Searching for . . . (“The Searchers”)

I admit it: westerns aren’t my favorite genre. And it’s taken me quite a while to like one of John Ford’s most admired westerns, The Searchers. But I could always see why the film was popular. Shot in 1956, it takes full advantage of color cinematography in showing off Ford’s all-time favorite locale, Monument Valley, with its stark red buttes pointing toward the bright blue sky. 

Anyone wanting to know more about The Searchers should seek out my colleague Glenn Frankel’s 2014 book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Suffice it to say here that this film has had a huge influence on other major filmmakers, including David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas, who applied some of Ford’s shooting techniques to his Star Wars films. As for me, I returned to The Searchers after many years because it was referenced in a new biography of the actress Vera Miles. Who knew she was credited as the film’s third lead, after John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter?  All I remembered was Natalie Wood as Debbie, the young white woman who’d spent nine long years as a Comanche captive: after all, she was what the search of the title was all about.

Vera Miles, I should explain, plays a major role in what Roger Ebert once called the film’s “silly romantic subplot.” The feisty daughter of settlers, Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen is in love with Martin Pawley, the earnest young man whom Wayne’s Ethan Edwards reluctantly allows to accompany him on his quest for the missing girl. What stands out about Wayne’s character is how thoroughly he detests anything to do with Native American life. His intrinsic racism extends particularly to captive women whom he views as defiled by Indian “bucks.” Given that Wayne is generally seen on film –by Ford and others—in a heroic light, it’s uncomfortable accepting him as a bigot who goes out of his way to be cruel. But there’s a tiny moment at film’s end that shows us a sliver of good will in his character, before he leaves the reunited family to enjoy some happy domesticity and heads out solo into the unknown.

Watching The Searchers again reminded me of how many films are structured around a quest for a missing person, usually a family member. Some examples include Missing (1982), Searching (2018) and what seem like a raft of Liam Neeson flicks, including Taken (2008). But  I was reminded of a very different search in an extremely arty 1999 movie called Three Seasons, the first film shot in Vietnam after President Clinton lifted a longtime embargo. Set in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it contains several plot lines that explore the changes in Vietnam since the infamous war of the Sixties and Seventies. In one  key subplot, Harvey Keitel plays a former American G.I.  who has returned to the country to find a daughter he’s never seen. 

I saw this film for a funny reason. At a favorite L.A. restaurant I got to know a waitress who was friendly and capable, with a faintly exotic look. It turns out she was Amerasian, and had just been cast as Keitel’s elusive daughter. I watched the film with excitement, waiting for Lola to come on screen. And at long last she did. At the very end of the film, we saw—through a window—the two sitting in a cafe, deep in conversation. What did father and daughter talk about? I have no idea. The movie ended there, leaving the viewer outside looking in. 

"Midnight Cowboy”: Some Sweetness Amid the Rot of the Big Apple

Once upon a time, Glenn Frankel was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Middle East. Then, seeking out a slightly quieter life, he began writing books about Hollywood classics. It’s easy to see that he was a fan of movie westerns in his youth. His first Hollywood book, The Searchers: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, explored in depth the John Ford drama that was perhaps John Wayne’s finest hour. He followed up with High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. His latest take on celluloid cowboys is a wee bit different. This year he has brought forth Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art,Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic. In this Oscar-winning 1969 drama, the “cowboy” is something of a phony, and he soon leaves his home on the range for a scruffy life on the mean streets of New York City. That’s where he plans to earn his keep as a male hustler, servicing sex-starved big city housewives. Except that things don’t exactly go as planned.

 Frankel’s intensive research unearths the contradictions that went into the making of this landmark film. At its core – working against the sleaziness of urban life in the late Sixties – is the unlikely friendship of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. Joe, played by apple-cheeked newcomer Jon Voigt, is naïve and unlucky, proud of his sexual prowess but repeatedly victimized by savvy New Yorkers of all persuasions. Ratso (Dustin Hoffman, coming off a very different role in The Graduate), is a down-and-out street bum from the Bronx. In a film wherein sex has nothing to do with love, the two discover a non-physical bond that is fragile but real. Emphatically, this is not intended as a film about a gay relationship. But the author of the novel on which the film is based, James Leo Herlihy, was a young closeted male. And its director, John Schlesinger, was a Londoner who played down his own homosexuality while beginning to make his mark as one of the rising British neo-realist directors of the era, along with Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Karel Reisz.

 Frankel devotes time and care to the place of this film within the annals of gay cinema. He decodes Joe Buck’s prized cowboy get-up, explaining why his John-Wayne-style hyper-masculinity proves so irresistible to the sad gay men he unwittingly attracts. He also delves into gay viewers’ response to Midnight Cowboy, comparing it tellingly to Schlesinger’s next film, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which deals forthrightly with a bisexual man in the center of a love triangle that shows characters of both genders aching for love.

 But Frankel is also terrific at dredging up production stories.. He explodes the legend that the car that almost hits Ratso on a busy New York street (leading to Hoffman’s “I’m walking here!” ad lib) was pure serendipity. And he explains the film’s famous X-rating as having been imposed not by a prudish MPAA ratings board but by the studio, United Artists, that made it. Who knew?

 Midnight Cowboy -- convincingly acted, beautifully shot—is an easy film to admire. But perhaps it’s less easy to love. I’ve heard someone say, after watching, “It made me feel unclean.” A similar reaction came from Mike Nichols, shocked to learn his protégé Dustin Hoffman coveted the Ratso role. Nichols allegedly griped, “I made you a star, and you’re going to throw it all away? You’re a leading man and now you’re going to play this? The Graduate was so clean, and this is so dirty.”