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.

 

 

 

Searching Out Hard Truths in "The Searchers"

When I first saw The Searchers, I was baffled. I had sought it out because such tastemakers as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese were proclaiming it one of Hollywood’s greatest films. By the time I watched The Searchers, I had shaken off my parents’ disdain for Westerns. I admired John Ford as a filmmaker, and knew to appreciate the iconic power of John Wayne as a leading man. Still, the film left me perplexed. There was, for one thing, its wildly shifting tone: stark tragedy and raucous comedy danced cheek to cheek. The Searchers (1956) also felt somehow shapeless, lacking the tightly controlled forward momentum of Ford’s 1939 prizewinner, Stagecoach. And the John Wayne of Stagecoach – a man of rough-hewn but unmistakable nobility – is not exactly the John Wayne who appears in The Searchers. As a Civil War veteran who dedicates his life to finding the young niece abducted by Comanche marauders, he definitely merits admiration. Yet he’s got a mean streak a mile wide. What was I to make of that?

Unlike me, journalist Glenn Frankel has been a fan of The Searchers since childhood. He grew up to work for the Washington Post, earning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Middle East. Perhaps his years of observing the Arab-Israeli conflict gave him a special grasp of the tensions between Indians and settlers that lie at the heart of Ford’s film. In any case, he’s earned cheers from movie history buffs with his third book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Frankel knows everything worth knowing about the conditions under which the film was made. I loved the details about shooting in Monument Valley, a Navajo tribal reserve lacking pretty much everything but gorgeous scenery: no telephones, no public water system, no electrical grid. Most of the actors camped out in a tent city for months on end; food and ice were trucked in from Utah. Ford was happy to improve the lot of local Navajos by hiring them as extras, and used a local shaman to guarantee favorable weather.

What I didn’t expect from Frankel’s book was a foray into Texas history, and an introduction to the girl whose real-life abduction by Indians inspired the movie’s plot. Cynthia Ann Parker was nine years old when she was carried off by a Comanche war band that had massacred her parents. She later married and had three children by her Comanche husband, before being recaptured by Texas Rangers twenty-four years later. Though welcomed back by family members, she never re-adjusted to the white man’s ways and apparently died a tragic figure. Her uncle James’ obsessive search for her forms of the core of John Ford’s movie.   

In The Searchers, young Debbie is mostly absent. She’s the McGuffin of the film, the object of the search, without clear-cut desires of her own. As played by the young and lovely Natalie Wood, she’s almost opaque. In contrast, there’s John Wayne’s role as the tough, smart, angry, lonely Uncle Ethan. It’s part of Ford’s aesthetic to strip away most of the explanations behind Ethan’s behavior. But surely Ford is exploring the bold contradictions embedded within the frontier mentality. Says Frankel, “While The Searchers pays homage to the familiar themes of the classic Western, it also undermines them. Its central character possesses all of the manly virtues and dark charisma of the Western hero, yet is tainted by racism and crazed with revenge.” That’s what makes The Searchers so fascinating. It’s about square dances and family breakfasts and a murderous loner who’s still heroic in his own way.

Cowboys and Indians: What’s This “We,” White Man?

My spouse is addicted to that bad old joke about what Tonto says to the Lone Ranger when they see a band of Commanches galloping toward them in full battle dress.  “Looks like we're in trouble,” mutters the Lone Ranger to his pal. Tonto’s response: “What you mean 'we,' white man?” 

That joke has been in my head ever since Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer, and the Walt Disney company decided to do a big-screen version of The Lone Ranger that would put Tonto front and center. Personally, I’m not all that keen to see another film featuring Johnny Depp in weird makeup, but the release of an Indian-centric Lone Ranger has got me thinking about the way Hollywood over the years has portrayed the connection between Native American and paleface characters.

At first it was simple: cowboys good! Indians bad! But filmmaker John Ford, who had a close personal connection with Native Americans and was welcomed by local Navajos to film his western epics in Utah’s Monument Valley, had a more complex view. We can see it in The Searchers, his landmark 1956 tale of an Indian-hater (John Wayne) who goes in search of his abducted niece. A new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning acquaintance of mine, Glenn Frankel, studies this film in depth. It’s called The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, and I look forward to checking it out. Ford’s elegiac 1964 Cheyenne Autumn was definitely filmed from the Indians’ perspective, but it proved to be a box office bust. (Ford, by the way, continued the common practice of casting as Native American just about any non-WASP who looked suitably exotic, like Ricardo Montalban and Sal Mineo.)

In the late Sixties, when sympathy for the underdog perhaps reached its peak, all things Indian suddenly became trendy. Perhaps that’s why two big films released in 1970 both focus on Caucasians living among Native  Americans. I’m thinking about Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse, about a white British aristocrat who becomes a tribal leader, and Dustin Hoffman, not long after his days as Benjamin Braddock, being raised by Indians in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man. (Predictably, as in most of the era’s Hollywood movies about the civil rights movement – think To Kill a Mockingbird -- a white male drove the action of these films.)

 In 1990, along came a blockbuster, Dances With Wolves, winner of seven Oscars. I found this story of a Civil War veteran who casts his lot with the Sioux nation overlong and sentimental, but I can’t deny the power of its Great Plains cinematography. Happily, such Native American actors as Graham Greene and Rodney A. Grant played major roles. Though Indian activists like the late Russell Means griped about linguistic inaccuracies, the filmmakers did try hard to capture on film an authentic portrait of a vanished way of life.

The success of Dances With Wolves encouraged the ever-creative Roger Corman (always good at jumping on other people’s bandwagons) to come up with his own Native American story. We at Concorde-New Horizons worked hard to produce a script for Crazy Horse, which Roger planned to film mostly in Peru, but the cast-of-thousands demands of this story doomed our efforts. Instead we turned to Michael Druxman’s strong script for Cheyenne Warrior, an intimate love story between a Native American and a pioneer wife which ultimately appeared as a TV movie in 1994. Our handsome and talented leading man? Pato Hoffmann, a Bolivian-born actor with Spanish and German blood in his veins. Oh, well.