The Searchers (39 page)

Later the Indians will chase the stagecoach for several thundering minutes until the passengers are rescued by the cavalry. “
One thing I can't understand
about it, Jack,” the film critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent once asked Ford. “In the chase, why didn't the Indians just shoot the horses pulling the stagecoach?”

“In actual fact that's probably what
did
happen, Frank,” Ford replied,
“but if they had, it would have been the end of the picture, wouldn't it?” Ford was never inclined to let reality interfere with a thrilling narrative.

Nugent, who later became Ford's trusted screenwriter, got the idea. “
Mr. Ford is not one of your subtle directors
,” he wrote in the
New York Times
when
Stagecoach
premiered. “When his Redskins bite the dust, he expects to hear the thud and see the dirt spurt up. Above all, he likes to have things happen out in the open, where his camera can keep them in view.”

EVEN AFTER
STAGECOACH
, John Wayne's ascendancy to stardom was bumpy. There were occasional hits such as
Dark Command
and
Reap the Wild Wind
, but also more B Westerns for Republic over the next year. Ford, meanwhile, made three of his very best films, including
The Long Voyage Home,
which costarred Wayne.

Then came the war. Ford, who was forty-seven on Pearl Harbor Day, first served in an informal capacity as a spy for U.S. naval intelligence monitoring Japanese infiltration along the Pacific coast south of the Mexican border, then became commander of the Field Photographic Branch. While officially a member of the navy, Ford was assigned to work for Wild Bill Donovan's office, which later became the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA. Ford personally filmed the B-24 bombers taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for Jimmy Doolittle's 1942 raid on Tokyo. A few weeks later
he got to Midway Island
in time to witness and film the war's most pivotal naval battle. When Japanese planes attacked the airfield he was visiting, he grabbed a camera, climbed atop an exposed water tower, and started shooting. At one point a fragmentation bomb exploded nearby, driving steel shards into Ford's arm. The camera jumps. Ford keeps filming.

Robert Parrish, a Hollywood film editor who served in the unit, described how Ford showed up at the Washington headquarters after the battle, unshaven, his left arm still bandaged, looking like he hadn't slept in a week. He was carrying eight cans of 16mm color film that he had managed to smuggle past the navy censors. He ordered Parrish to hand-deliver the film to Hollywood, entreated Dudley Nichols and James Kevin McGuinness to write a script, got Henry Fonda and actress Jane Darwell among others to do the narration, and put together a twenty-minute documentary within a few days. When Parrish asked Ford what he should do if navy officers demanded the film be returned, Ford replied,
“It's against the law for an enlisted man to even handle top-secret material … [Y]our best bet is to tell 'em to fuck off and not open the door.”

In effect, Ford had cast himself as his own Western hero: a lone wolf, fearless, dedicated, and defiant of authority yet committed to the cause. He was, in other words, playing the John Wayne role. He was never happier than during his time in the military. The war gave him a sense of purpose that Hollywood filmmaking never had.

When Ford showed the finished product at the White House a few weeks later, it made Eleanor Roosevelt cry. “I want every mother in America to see this picture,” her husband declared.
The Battle of Midway
won the navy an Oscar as best documentary short subject of 1942. The following year, the navy won another for
December 7th
, Ford's docudrama about Pearl Harbor.

While Ford was filming the real war, John Wayne was waging his own battles on the screen, becoming America's new cinematic war hero. Wayne, who was thirty-four when the war began, insisted that he wanted to serve in the military, but he had four kids and a troubled marriage and was keen to make money while his newfound stardom lasted. The hits kept coming:
Flying Tigers
(1942),
The Fighting Seabees
(1944), and
Back to Bataan
(1945) all cemented his status as a rising star and put him in the forefront of the celluloid war effort. Ford was unimpressed: he wanted Wayne to serve in the real thing. Ford sought to arrange for the OSS to take in Wayne. The office sent Wayne a letter saying they were running out of places and urging him to sign on without delay, but Wayne claimed that Josephine, his estranged first wife, hid it from him. “I never got it,” he later told Dan Ford. Wayne also blamed Herbert Yates, head of Republic pictures, who he said had threatened to sue him if he didn't fulfill his contractual obligations—although it's hard to imagine any Hollywood studio being foolish enough to sue a star for enlisting during World War Two. Wayne also claimed to be hindered by old football injuries to his back and shoulders.

Finally, like any recalcitrant movie star, Wayne blamed the military itself for not offering him a big enough role. He later explained to Dan Ford that he was told he could enlist in the OSS but only as a private. “
Well Jesus, I'm forty years old
and of fair standing and I didn't feel I could go in as a private, I felt I could do more good going around on tours and things …” It was the young guys in the front lines, Wayne insisted, whom he was thinking of. “I was America to them. They had taken their sweethearts to that Saturday matinee and held hands over a
Wayne Western. So I wore a big hat and I thought it was better. And it was better than to take just any kind of position.”

Even General Douglas MacArthur agreed. “
You represent the American serviceman
better than the American serviceman himself,” he declared in a speech to an American Legion convention, suggesting that the mythic figure created by Wayne was more valid than the real thing. More than three decades later Congress would agree by authorizing a John Wayne Congressional Gold Medal, honoring this lifelong civilian as “the embodiment of American military virtue,” in the words of the cultural historian Richard Slotkin. Wayne effectively made the transition from the guy who didn't enlist in the war to the guy who won it.

The gap between reality and legend was too much even for John Ford, the ultimate legend maker. He was scathing about Wayne's dodging of the war effort and he took it out on his star on the set of
They Were Expendable
, the war film they teamed up to make in 1945. Ford berated Wayne at every turn. “
Duke, can't you manage a salute
that at least looks like you've been in the service?” Ford demanded. The abuse got so bad that costar Robert Montgomery, who had earned his hero's status during the war as a PT boat commander, walked over to the director's chair one day and rebuked Ford. “
Don't ever talk to Duke
like that,” he told Ford. “You ought to be ashamed.” Ford broke down in tears. But
Expendable
became one of Ford's greatest films—a melancholy meditation on victory, defeat, and personal sacrifice.

AFTER THEY RAN AGROUND with David O. Selznick over
Stagecoach
, John Ford and Merian C. Cooper decided to form their own independent production company in the hope they would no longer have to answer to anyone but themselves. They called it Argosy Pictures, with Cooper as president and Ford as chairman of the board. It became a forerunner of modern Hollywood, where anyone with stature seeks their own production company.

Argosy, which was partly bankrolled
by former OSS chief Donovan and friends, snagged a four-picture distribution deal with RKO in 1946 that gave the company full creative control and ownership of its films. Ford chose to start with
The Fugitive
(1947), a story of the betrayal of a Catholic priest, based on
The Power and the Glory
, one of Graham Greene's greatest novels. It was far too dark and idiosyncratic to do much at the box office. Chastened and chagrined, Ford turned to a sure thing: a John Wayne Western.

Wayne was already a box-office draw, but his true breakthrough years—both as an actor and as a star—were the late 1940s. They began with Howard Hawks's
Red River
(1948), in which Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, a Texas ranch owner and trail boss determined to get his cattle herd to market no matter the cost. Like Breck Coleman and the Ringo Kid, Dunson is a force of nature, but he's an older, more troubled, and more damaged version. Wayne looks weighed down and inert. As his character ages in the course of the film, Wayne slows down his tempo even more, magnifying his strength. For the first time with Wayne, the audience sees and hears the weight of experience, the voice of authority and of history. When Dunson's adopted son, Matt, played by Montgomery Clift, crosses him and takes away the herd for his own good, Dunson declares, “I'm gonna kill you.” Wayne delivers this line as a statement of fact more than a threat, all the more powerful because it is so low-key.

In
Red River
, Wayne is starting to become larger-than-life on the screen. He's a very dangerous man, one who doesn't fall even when shot, and he deals out his own personal brand of justice to other men, often unfairly. Yet he's not a villain but a figure of tragedy. In the final showdown, he storms across the screen, pushing his way through man and beast until he reaches the son he means to kill. The ending is silly: Dunson and Matt trade punches until the woman who cares for each of them pulls a gun and forces them to realize how much they love each other. But it doesn't detract from the Oedipus-in-reverse power of what precedes it.

If
Stagecoach
established Wayne as a star,
Red River
established him as an actor. Even John Ford was amazed. “
I never knew the big son of a bitch could act
,” he told Hawks.

“
I don't think he ever really had any kind of respect
for me as an actor until I made
Red River
,” Wayne once observed. “… Even then, I was never quite sure.”

Inspired in part by what Hawks had captured on film, Ford proceeded to challenge his star with a more complex and nuanced role than any he had offered Wayne before.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
was one of three Westerns filmed by Ford in the late 1940s and early '50s, all starring Wayne and all focusing on the U.S. Cavalry in the Indian-fighting days after the Civil War. Although set in the past, they were Ford's monument to his experiences in World War Two, as well as a parable for the Cold War struggle against communism that many Americans were processing through the same defenders-of-civilization-versus-barbarians prism through which they viewed the Indian wars. The films became known as the Cavalry Trilogy, and each of the three has a Kiplingesque
sense of love for duty, honor, and empire and Ford's trademark fondness for the imagined community of officers, enlisted men, and their families.

Wayne plays Captain Nathan Brittles, a veteran commander pushing sixty and on the brink of retirement. Brittles is a fount of wisdom and experience who cares deeply for his men and tries to forestall a new Indian war, first by seeking a rapprochement with an old Indian ally and later by a ruse that allows him and his men to capture the warriors' pony herd and force them to return to the reservation. Brittles's men love him and yet he is alone—a widower with no children and no home except the cavalry he is being compelled to leave. It was one of Wayne's favorite roles, the one that he believed finally proved to Pappy and anyone else who mattered that he truly could give a great performance.

One of Wayne's most memorable scenes comes toward the end at Brittles's retirement ceremony, when his troopers give him a silver watch and chain. The awkward, moving speech he gives was not in the original screenplay but was improvised on the spot. “
It was an emotional reaction
rather than a studied response,” Wayne would recall. “Pappy was very conscious of each actor that he had, their sensitivity, he knew the paint he was using when he put me in that scene. So he knew my reaction would be simplistic and deeply moving, which I think it was.”

Finally, there was
Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949), directed by Allan Dwan, in which Wayne plays Sergeant John Stryker, a tough-as-nails marine officer who gets the best out of his men even while humiliating and angering them. Stryker trains them with his superior know-how and his fists, leads them into battle, and wins their loyalty and admiration. He is a warrior of personal charisma and almost superhuman powers. He is also the moral compass that men heed and measure themselves against. His kind is necessary to win the war, but there is no place for him in the postwar world. In the end he is killed by a Japanese sniper just as victory is at hand. Wayne is hard to kill in movies, even when a storyline seems to proceed logically toward his death. He is simply too strong to perish.
Sands of Iwo Jima
is the exception that proves the rule.

In
Red River
,
Yellow Ribbon
, and
Sands
, Wayne gives three contrasting performances. Sometimes he plays an older man, sometimes a younger one. In each he uses his body and voice differently. Yet he is always John Wayne,
the melancholy authority figure
—not the existential rebel like Bogart, Cagney, Gable, or Brando. No longer the outsider, he is now the charismatic leader of men, and yet somehow still solitary.

As Wayne's character grows into middle age, he becomes burdened with responsibilities and command. He has lost his wife or fiancé to
death, divorce, or estrangement. The American West was a man's world, in the view of the Wayne persona, with no time or psychic space for women. The John Wayne hero walks alone.

John Ford's Westerns are also male-dominated, yet there are subtle differences. Even in a male genre, Ford always seems to find room for strong women characters: Dallas in
Stagecoach
, Mrs. McKlennar in
Drums Along the Mohawk
, Mrs. Allshard in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, and Kathleen Yorke in
Rio Grande
. In retrospect, these characters are setting the stage for the women who are essential to the drama and meaning of
The Searchers
.