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. 

All The News We’d Want to Print: “News of the World”

Tom Hanks may be a national treasure, but it’s easy to get a bit blasé about his movie roles. He’s so readily identified as a decent man, a true Mister Rogers of the screen, that we tend to sell him short. Which is why, I suspect, few people rushed to watch News of the World under COVID conditions, especially those of us who had to pay serious money ($19.99) for an at-home Amazon Prime rental. Yes, this film is Hanks’ first western, but it’s natural to feel that we’ve seen it all before, though with Hanks now wearing a six-gun and appropriate clothing. And when we learn that much of the film is Hanks’ character, a Civil War captain, trying to communicate with a little girl who doesn’t understand English, we’re apt to see this as a repeat of Hanks in Cast Away, in conversation with a volleyball. In other words, the good but lonely man, struggling to get by under trying conditions.

 The latter is quite true, but the film still has a lot to recommend it. James Newton Howard’s musical score is evocative, and Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography makes the old west come alive. (New Mexico, a popular filming location in recent years, vividly stands in for Texas.) There’s a fascinating glimpse of the life of a news-reader, an educated but itinerant fellow who roams the countryside, charging ten cents to locals who enjoy hearing him read stories, colorfully embroidered, drawn from daily newspapers. And director Paul Greengrass, known for United 93 and several Jason Bourne films, has always been good at ramping up tension. After a year of pretty much being hidden away at home, I responded strongly to the lure of wide-open spaces.

 But the heart of  News of the World lies in the character played by Hanks. As portrayed, he’s something of a man of mystery. A Texan by birth, he fairly obviously fought on the southern side of the War Between the States, but it’s not at all clear where he stands on the great social issues that fostered the conflict. (This ambiguity is cagey on the filmmakers’ part: we don’t want to imagine a Tom Hanks character fighting for the side that supported slavery.) He wears a wedding ring, but his marital situation remains tantalizingly ambivalent, especially after a kindly innkeeper who seems to know him well points out that he should not keep skirting a return to his home turf. It’s not until late in the movie that the pieces all fall into place, allowing us to know what he’s about as he wends his way across the western landscape.

 Of course it’s that little blonde girl (played by 12-year-old German actress Helena Zengel) who makes all the difference. From the first time he spots her, Hanks’ Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd grasps something of her situation: she was abducted from her family home at a tender age and raised among the Kiowa. It is their buckskin clothing, their behavior, and their language she clings to, unwilling to accept any other family. Of course her relationship with Kidd will evolve, but her situation (not entirely uncommon in the old west, as history tells us) understandably makes us think of a similar plot strand in John Ford’s iconic The Searchers. In that 1956 classic, it’s Natalie Wood who’s been raised among the Indians who massacred her parents, with John Wayne trying to bring her back to “civilization.” Big difference: Wayne’s character is an Indian-hater incapable of empathy for a young girl’s cross-cultural plight. Tom Hanks is just not that kind of guy.

 

 

 

Selling Out the Indians at Fort Apache

November, they say, is Native American Heritage Month. So I guess it was appropriate that I chose to watch a John Ford movie from 1948, Fort Apache. This is first film of Ford’s long directing career that shows the hand of screenwriter Frank S. Nugent. Nugent also wrote a number of Ford’s other major films, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and (most delightfully) The Quiet Man. My friend Joseph McBride’s essay on Nugent, whom he calls “The Quiet Man Behind John Ford” made me eager to take a hard look at Fort Apache. It’s a film set in Indian territory, dramatically making use of Ford’s favorite Monument Valley vistas.

McBride’s essay (found in his Two Cheers for Hollywood collection) makes the point that Nugent was a skilled creator of characters. His habit—which I think all aspiring screenwriters would do well to follow—was to create for every major character in the film a very thorough biographical sketch. Not all of the details in this biography (someone’s childhood experiences, education, and so on) would show up in the script he was constructing, but the thoroughness of his understanding would wonderfully flesh out the personalities we saw on screen. Such is the case in Fort Apache, where Henry Fonda plays a man who has his admirable qualities, but is also deeply flawed.

Fonda, known at the time for such sympathetic roles as Young Mr. Lincoln and Tom Joad in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, plays in Fort Apache the role of Lt. Colonel Owen Thursday, who’s reporting for duty as the commander of a frontier outpost deep in the heart of a territory where Cochise and his Apaches lurk. He’s a stickler for spit and polish, and there are hints that a demotion during the Civil War has made him eager to prove himself. He’s soon butting heads with Captain Kirby York, the character played by a Ford favorite, John Wayne. York is a rugged Civil War veteran who knows the land and its inhabitants. But despite his leadership qualities, Thursday regards him with contempt.

York brings Thursday the news that Cochise is ready for a powwow to discuss peace. Characteristically, Thursday wants none of that. Determined to grab the glory of a military victory, he uses the planned meet-up with Cochise as an opportunity for a surprise attack by the full regiment. It’s the dirtiest of tricks, but it leads to a brilliantly staged battle sequence in which Thursday and many of his men meet death. There’s an ironic coda, but I don’t want to spoil ALL of the film’s twists.

Clearly, this is not exactly a film about Native Americans. Still, their presence looms large. In Fort Apache, the American military is invading the territory sacred to Cochise and his men. The Cochise we see in the film is the noblest of savages, ready to co-exist peaceably with his American neighbors. Part of the attractiveness of John Wayne’s character is that he respects the Indian point of view.

Typically, Ford has cast such familiar faces as Ward Bond, Guy Kibbee, and Victor McLaglen, who plays a comical Irish character. One odd element is the presence of Shirley Temple, then 20, playing Fonda’s perky young daughter. She’s part of the film’s subplot, opposite her real-life husband, John Agar. Temple is charming in a grown-up part, but Agar (in his first film role) has a stiff screen presence, and makes for a dull romantic lead.  So I’d prefer to forget about their soppy romance and focus on the powerful Fonda/Wayne scenes that help this drama come alive.

In Memory of a Green Beret: The Life and Hard Times of Sgt. Barry Sadler

With Memorial Day fast approaching, it seems timely to eulogize a pop culture hero whose life was profoundly shaped by my generation’s war, the conflict in Vietnam. Back in 1966, Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Beret” was everywhere. You heard its rat-a-tat cadences on the airwaves; you saw its square-jawed composer perform it on the Ed Sullivan Show. John Wayne’s flag-waving 1968 film, The Greet Berets, used it as an anthem. (The film may have been scorned by critics—and by many vets who considered it a fairytale—but it earned a then- impressive $21 million at the box office.)

The lyrics of “The Ballad of the Green Beret” salute what it deems the  U.S. Army’s most valued assets: “Silver wings upon their chest/ These are men, America's best.” They are, in Sadler’s words, “Men who mean just what they say/ The brave men of the Green Beret.” It has fallen to my friend and colleague Marc Leepson to explore the soldier behind the song.

Leepson’s new biography is titled The Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler From The VietnamWar and Pop Stardom to Murder and an Unsolved, Violent Death. At the start of the book, Leepson explains his own bona fides via a dedication “to my fellow Vietnam War veterans and in memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in that war.”  It’s his challenge to explain the era to those who think of Vietnam as ancient history. As a former soldier himself, he understands the Army’s reverence for machismo, and for the kind of heroics that show up in John Wayne movies.

Barry Sadler, who’d survived a rough upbringing, found purpose in his life when he joined the Army’s Special Forces and trained as a combat medic. Self-taught on the guitar, he wrote a number of songs that he enjoyed performing for his fellow Green Berets once he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. One of those songs, “The Ballad of The Green Beret,” caught on, to the extent that Sadler was eventually signed to a major recording contract stateside. His album came out in January 1966, and the military was happy to use the handsome soldier as what Leepson calls “a human recruiting poster.”

But once Sadler left the Army, he did not fit in well with civilian life. He spent much of his time drinking, womanizing, squandering money, and getting into heated political arguments. He briefly considered becoming an actor, but could drum up only limited roles in middle-brow TV series like Death Valley Days. There was an attempt to write a Vietnam-themed screenplay, which came to nothing. The surprise was that he eventually found a lucrative niche writing pulp novels full of history and gore. His private life, though, remained messy in the extreme. It was a life in which violence was never very far away.

Marc Leepson speculates that Barry Sadler was victimized by his own success. It was a success that likely would not have come to him if his patriotic song had been released a year or two later, once the nation had begun to turn against the Vietnam War. “Simply put,” says Leepson, “his tough guy brand did not sell as the nation went through the political, social, and cultural upheaval of the Sixties.” Leepson views Sadler, born in 1940, as not a Baby Boomer but a throwback to World War II’s Greatest Generation. His sad life and mysterious death suggest a man out of place and out of time. May he rest in peace.