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. 

Love with an Ethnic Stranger

In 1963, the same year that Steve McQueen became America’s favorite action hero via his role in The Great Escape, he also starred in a modest romantic drama opposite Natalie Wood. Its name was Love with The Proper Stranger. It was a black-&-white indie (though released through Paramount Pictures), shot on and around the streets of New York, by director Robert Mulligan and his longtime producing partner, Alan J. Pakula. The two men, both early television veterans, specialized in small, tough, relatively low-budget films that appealed to audiences tired of Hollywood glitz and glamour. The duo triumphed in 1962 with their film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was to win three Oscars, including a Best Actor statuette for Gregory Peck. Today it seems obvious that a strong film based on Harper Lee’s classic novel would reap generous rewards at the box office. But such was not the thinking in the early Sixties, when studio films played to audiences looking for romance and fancy clothes.

 One year after To Kill a Mockingbird, Pakula and Mulligan were back with a film that was in fact a romance, though hardly a conventional one. Steve McQueen plays an out-of-work jazz musician, first seen trolling for gigs at the local union hall. There he’s confronted by Natalie Wood, a pretty young clerk at Macy’s. He has no recollection of going out on the town with her, but apparently he’s left her something to remember him by. Yes, she’s pregnant. Though she’s hardly the weepy type, he’s by no means a heel eager to escape responsibility. Calling in favors from his live-in girlfriend (Edie Adams), he locates an abortionist who’ll take care of matters in an empty apartment for a substantial fee. (It’s a plot detail that’s starting to feel all too modern, now that Roe v. Wade is history.)

 In a film that makes much of ethnic identity, both Wood’s and McQueen’s characters are the products of close-knit Italian families (Yup, we’re supposed to buy McQueen’s Rocky as Italian.) Wood’s character, Angie Rossini, lives at home with a domineering brother (Herschel Bernardi), as well as an old-world mama who wants her to stay on the straight and narrow. When she can’t bring herself to go through with the back-alley abortion arranged by McQueen, she tries dating a klutzy middle-aged gent who adores her and is willing to claim the baby as his own. (He’s played by none other than Tom Bosley in his first film role, long before he became the beloved paterfamilias on TV’s Happy Days.)  Alas, the match doesn’t take.

 Meanwhile, Angie’s indomitable spunk is starting to endear her to McQueen. (Given the strong ethnic vibe in this film, it’s easy to see her as a close cousin to Cher’s Oscar-winning Loretta Castorini from 1987’s Moonstruck.) I suspect you can guess what happens at the end, though in the case of these two firebrand lovers, nothing is going to come easy.

 Mulligan and Pakula must have liked working with both McQueen and Wood. In 1965, the two actors starred in separate Pakula-Mulligan projects. McQueen took the lead in another raw romance, Baby the Rain Must Fall, while Wood played the title role in the downbeat story of a Hollywood star-in-the-making, Inside Daisy Clover. Though they made a rather gorgeous couple, they never shared the screen again.The gritty but ultimately hopeful Love with the Proper Stranger is well worth seeing, both for its atmospheric look at ethnic New York and for the pairing of two stars on the rise. (It’s fun to imagine what a McQueen/Wood baby might look like!)