Searching for a First Post
Looking at two scenes from The Searchers and On the Waterfront and somehow writing about the history of the 20th century
My freshman year of college, I think it was a class literally called “Film 101,” the professor showed us a clip less than a minute long, introducing it as “The greatest scene in film history, and none of you can tell me otherwise.”
In an old bungalow somewhere out west, children run outside to tease their sister with boyfriend. An old man wearing a star on his vest smiles, and kicks the door shut. A soft harpsichord is plucking on the soundtrack as he walks back to the kitchen table with his coffee and donut, but something catches his eye on his left. We see through a doorway a woman caressing a coat, as if it still had her lover in it. The man chooses to ignore this and go back to his coffee as a tall, broad-shouldered cowboy comes up beside him. The woman meets the man in red and hands him his coat. They exchange a longing parting glance as the lawman stares off beside them. The cowboy gives the woman a kiss on the forehead, and her hands linger from wear his arms slipped out from hers. The lawman, too, dawns his hat and heads out the door. The woman is left standing on the threshold, looking off into the vast expanse of the West.
It was a scene from The Searchers, a film I stubbornly argued with the professor, for years to come. Where I had once thought the film a middling-at-best “classic” Western, in a sort of studently growth I’ve come to similar conclusions about the film and this scene in particular being some of the greatest and most important images ever put to screen.
Some two or three years later I was working as a paper grader for an “Artists on Film” course. A class that fulfilled a core requirement, its premise of watching and writing about movies was an easy draw for students of all colleges and departments. The assignments for the class were always the same: write a short response to the films we watched each week. To help with the prompt, the professor introduced us to a concept he called “privileged moments.” To explain it, he showed us a scene from On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando and Eve Marie Saint’s characters have a conversation walking through a park. There’s a brief moment where Saint drops her glove, and instead of simply picking it up and giving it back, Brando takes it on as something to fidget with, feel all the fingers and ends, try on, a whole new prop that feels born out of spontaneity not seen before figures like him and the film’s director, Elia Kazan, brought the new acting “method” from stage to screen in the early 50s. Truly improvised or no, it is quite a privileged moment, a beautiful display of new kind of naturalism coming to screen, and in so many ways a shift in how films were made.
Together these two moments passed down to me by teachers have kept rattling in my head over the years, bouncing off of each other and revealing new layers the more I’ve explored them. Out of these two, minuscule, seemingly near-inconsequential scenes comes a turning point in Hollywood film, in the history of the 20th century—these two moments juxtaposed contain the story of America.
The way I introduced the scene from The Searchers earlier was a bit deceptive. It kept to generalizations, archetypes, and maybe even a hint of mythic imagery, all of which are ostensibly Ford’s wheelhouse. However, as always is the case with Ford, the demon is in the details, every archetype is flipped on its head, and the myth he’s building is shown to be founded on all-too-real lies. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, the cowboy I mentioned, is really no such thing as the archetype. He’s been, apparently, wandering the west since the Confederate surrender, and has only now returned to his brother’s Texas homestead three years after the war with fresh-minted gold and dollars acquired in ambiguity. Martha is the wife of Ethan's brother. There have been hints throughout the first 13-minutes of the movie up to this point that there is something else between the two, and this scene solidifies it, as we can tell through the stare of Ward Bond’s the Reverend Captain Samuel Clayton. He sees what’s going on between Martha and Ethan, but he chooses not to say anything. Whole new dimensions to the film are revealed through this small interaction, most notably the drive behind Ethan’s genocidal fury and the politics of Clayton’s silence.
When the Edwards homestead is destroyed by Comanches in a murder raid, Ethan’s first instinct upon seeing the burning wreckage is not to go for his gold or look for his brother, it’s to clamber through the flames yelling “Martha!” He finds her tattered and torn dress on the ground outside the shed, a signifier for her physical body as much as his coat was to her. Ethan goes inside but we are not allowed to see, we don’t need to know what he does to understand him. He is driven by revenge, his hatred for the Comanches becomes even deeper than his love for Martha.
As for Clayton, his chosen silence signals not just a political pragmatism, as Ethan is also probably a wanted criminal but in the current moment a very useful resource in his party, but also personal loyalty. The Reverend came to the Edwards estate that day to get the boys deputized into his patrol of Texas Rangers to go looking for some cattle that were rustled off. Seeing Ethan there, Clayton makes a remark about how he didn’t see him at the surrender. “Don’t believe in surrenders,” Ethan replies, another hint as to the sheer stubbornness of his resolve that’ll be so radioactive down the line. Ethan offers to join the party in the stead of his brother, so that he can stay back on the farm in case it is an Indian war party after all. But when Clayton goes to swear Ethan in:
ETHAN
No need to, wouldn’t be legal anyway.
CLAYTON
You wanted for a crime, Ethan?
ETHAN
You askin' as a Reverend or a Captain,
Sam?
CLAYTON
I'm askin' as a Ranger of the
sovereign state of Texas.
ETHAN
Got a warrant?
CLAYTON
You fit a lot of descriptions.
ETHAN
(levelly)
I figger a man's only good for one
oath at a time... I took mine to the
Confederate States of America…
(he pauses -- then)
So did you, Reverend...
It’s an embarrassing snide at Clayton’s stated loyalties, a sort of proof that he only believes in whatever institution is ready to give him power (the CSA, the Texas Rangers, the church, etc). He’s in it for himself. That’s what makes the Reverend’s silence so important in the next moments; maybe he would’ve told Ethan’s brother Aaron about it if Aaron had survived, maybe it would’ve been a convenient power-play against Ethan. But for now, as they’re departing on their hunt, it’s not his problem, it’s not worth mentioning, and, maybe, it’s even a small olive-branch to Ethan, a quiet gift of loyalty.
Ward Bond was notorious in the Ford crew for being something of a power tripper. Dobe Carey (better known by his screen-name given to him by Ford after his father’s death, Harry Carey Jr.) once remembered Ford saying “Let’s face it. Ward Bond is a shit, but he’s our favorite shit.” It wasn’t just his self-aggrandizing and pretentiousness that rubbed the crew the wrong way, it was his leading role in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, ultra-right wing, borderline fascist and white supremacist organization, that was created in the 1940s to help find and route out suspected communists within the film industry. Bond was a particularly bad actor in this organization, notoriously making those accused of communist activities or beliefs go to his house and try to grovel and absolve themselves while he sat on the toilet defecating. His game was one of humiliation.
Something that bothered Ford about the Red Scare of the McCarthy era was that humiliation, the making people grovel to someone that clearly hasn’t earned the respect. Him and Wayne would often pull pranks on Bond to try to bring him down a few notches. One time they paid an attractive younger woman to flatter him on set and tell him her husband was gone for just one more day so Bond should come visit her in her bungalow. She wasn’t there when Bond showed up, it was actually an ambush with Ford and Wayne lying in wait with blank-loaded pistols. They were friends, and Ford not only found it funny to knock Bond off his high horse, but also extremely necessary. Ford didn’t stand by his friend’s actions, but Bond was still his friend and he stood by him as a person.
Perhaps what makes Ford’s politics so contradictory is this loyalty, as he would put it, an Irish instinct to look out for his clan. He was a self-described liberal, and even in his younger days a liberal-socialist (whatever that means). Bond was his friend and he thought him too stupid to realize the damage he was doing to the industry by naming names, Ford knew that Bond was just in it to have the power of a petty king. He was just one of those McCarthyist patsies that was in it for the pleasure of power, not someone who’d sell their friends souls to save their own neck. No, there weren’t many of those, for the most part the strong unions that had been established decades earlier had stuck together in solidarity.
When Cecil B. DeMille tried to put together a “loyalty oath” for the Screen Director’s Guild, report all those who didn’t sign it to the government, and oust the Guild’s “pinko” president Joseph Mankiewicz, Ford stepped up. After four hours of debate at an all-SDG meeting, John Ford took the floor and gave his famous introduction, “My name is John Ford. I make Westerns.” He denounced the DeMille’s scare-mongering and got the meeting to adjourn after the whole board (including DeMille) resigned and they gave Mankiewicz a vote of confidence. Ford was quick and concise so they could, “all go home and get some sleep. We've got some pictures to make in the morning." It was a huge win for solidarity. But it's not the triumphs that are remembered from the era, it’s the moments when they did, in fact, turn on each other.
In the mid-1930s, Elia Kazan was a young stage actor in New York and a member of the Communist Party. In the arts and intellectual circles at the time, everyone was. I’m not pointing this out to make an accusation that some of those members were only involved for social reasons, but because before WWII there was a consensus in those circles that solidarity and socialism was right for them and the course of the world. Even the liberals, like John Ford (“I watched the Russian experiment with great interest”), flirted with socialism or sent money and aid to the Spanish Republicans or Irish rebels. It’s only natural to think that Elia Kazan, who emigrated with his poor Greek parents from Ottoman Constantinople at a young age, would find himself in such circles or holding such ideals. But that’s not what he’s remembered for politically, he’s remembered for selling his fellow actors out in the witch hunt of HUAC. He was ostracized by plenty of his peers, but he kept the favor of the studio bosses in doing so. Kazan developed a persecution complex in the process, and it didn’t take long for him to come out with a cinematic response to the whole ordeal.
Before Kazan had testified and named names, his friend Arthur Miller had penned a screenplay for him called The Hook. It concerned an investigation into a corrupt dockworkers union, which under threat of violence, demanded silence from its members. Miller later dropped out of the project when a studio-head demanded the union officials be made communists, and Miller’s strong anti-McCarthyist beliefs drew a rift between him and the project and also him and Kazan. A version of the script rewritten by Budd Schulberg would eventually be made into On the Waterfront. While it may have been one thing when Miller started work in 1951, it necessarily took on a new context after Kazan’s HUAC testimony in 1952. One can’t watch On the Waterfront knowing what Kazan did and not see himself believing that he is the man wronged by a corrupt organization that needed to be squealed on. The only problem was that was in no way what the Communist Party was in America in the 1950s. McCarthy was after a bogeyman, and he knew it. His Red Scare was a cudgel to be used to create an environment of fear and paranoia that could be used to oust rivals, build, and maintain power. On the Waterfront was an act of manipulation in the most dubious of ways.
Cinema studies was born in the Soviet Union. The world’s first film school was founded in Moscow in 1919. Lenin once said, “Film for us is the most important of the arts.” Its possibilities for propaganda and the dissemination of ideas seemed limitless. But because of a bloody civil war and a near-global embargo, the Soviets were without fresh film stock until the mid 1920s. So they studied. Seemingly by accident of material means, old film strips were re-edited to create new effects, and theories of montage were born. The same image juxtaposed with many others could create new meanings; a shot of a man's face projects different emotions if it's then cut together with a picture of a baby, a corpse, or a bowl of soup—we understand his face differently.
Futurist filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman presented a very specific possibility of montage in creating an un-specific city symphony in Man With a Movie Camera. Filming in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa in the 1920s, the brothers mash the cities up to create an abstract urban area and portrait of early 20th century industrialism at large. There are no specific stories here, no people we follow, except for the camera man, or camera men—really we are following the gaze of their machine, a machine capable of seeing beyond simple human narrative and painting in broad strokes about industrial life. Humans are important here insofar as they are the cogs in the machines. Vertov and Kaufman were revolutionary and they were loud, but their younger brother took a different course.
When Poland became newly independent, the Kaufman parents took their youngest born, Boris, with them back to their homeland, while the older boys stayed behind in the Petrograd Soviet making agitprop. Eventually, Boris would make his way to school in Paris, and began working as a cinematographer with some of the impressionist greats, most notably with the anarchist filmmaker Jean Vigo who died at a Keatsean young age for a movie director. When the war came, Boris Kaufman joined the French army, but under threat of Nazi occupation, the Polish Jew fled to Canada before later relocating in the states. He was down-and-out in the picture business until he was approached about shooting a picture on location in Hoboken, New Jersey about dockworkers.
On the Waterfront, like most of Columbia Pictures’ repertoire in the mid 50s, was filmed to play in multiple aspect ratios: 1.33:1, the standard for motion picture projection since the silent era; 1.66:1, a new wide frame that older theater’s could be pretty well retrofitted to play; and 1.85:1, what we’d now consider to be a standard widescreen. The reason for this was commercial competition: studios needed a new way to compete with the tiny box in people’s living rooms, and making the screen wider was about all there was left to do after color TVs started to become more affordable.
Shooting in such a way required a cinematographer to compose three images in one, and Kaufman’s careful frames are some of the best examples from the era. His tall, 1.33 compositions create an almost Neorealist sense of space, where the characters are made minuscule by the frigid winter streets of Hoboken, whereas his wide 1.85 images hone in on the character’s faces and the minutiae of their modern acting style. But these effects have to come at the cost of the other.
That scene in the park, that privileged moment with the glove, is almost invisible in the 1.85 projection of the movie. Brando’s hand may pop into frame from time to time, but you never get a chance to focus on it, the frame is too busy with faces. We get the idea that he picked up her glove, sure, but we’re not interested in it. While Kaufman does render Kazan’s mise-en-scene beautifully, the film was built to be overall less concerned with the smaller gestures, everything Kazan wants to tell us is right at the center of the screen.
Inarguably its most famous scene and the reason for its staying power in the collective consciousness of the moviegoing public is the speech Brando gives to his character’s brother, a lackey for corrupt union bosses, about how he “coulda been a contender.” Brando’s character Terry was a prize-fighter who threw everything to appease the betters. He lost his dream because some guy wanted to make a couple of bucks. The scene is rendered in heartbreaking close-ups, we can see every ounce of pain in Brando’s eyes, the rage, the sadness. It’s a classic for a reason, and we don’t have to care about anything outside that cab right then because all we know is Brando’s face. There are no cold streets, no frozen docks, no HUAC, no Director’s Guild—just the face of a man who had everything taken from him. At the end of the day, the subject of Kazan’s film is ironic considering that the hero’s story would better align with one of the victims of Kazan’s naming than of Kazan himself, whose ostracization was social rather than material—he still got to be the big Hollywood director, but many of his friends never got to work again.
The close-up decides for us what to look at. It segregates subjects from context. We can’t live with a character in close-up the way we can from a touch of distance. We’re looking at them through an inhuman eye, one as inhuman as Vertov’s when he pulled the camera so far back that 1000s of unique lives of Soviet urbanites became an ant-like blur in an unimaginably complex machine.
John Ford rarely used close-ups, and they always made a very specific point. His most famous is in Stagecoach, a fast push-in used to introduce John Wayne’s character and the world to a new star. In The Searchers, there are only three.
Before the murder raid begins that set off the the titular search for Debbie (who very quickly becomes the sole survivor), we are on the Edwards’ homestead as a blood-red dusk sets in. While there is a palpable tension in the air, Martha is trying to keep the family calm and go about dinner as usual. Her eldest, Lucy, doesn’t understand at first why she doesn’t want her to set a lamp on the table. But when she realizes, Ford pushes in on her and screams as she bites down on her clenched fist before falling into her mother’s arms crying. It is pure, unadulterated fear.
Next we are with Ethan and Martin at a cavalry outpost high up in the snowy mountains. The soldiers have just returned with prisoners and white captives after they had massacred a tribe’s village. Looking for Debbie, now many years older than when they last saw her, they try showing her doll to the white women the cavalry had recovered. None of them show any recognition, but hearing one of their screams the camera crashes in on Wayne’s face. It is not the starry-eyed young outlow of Stagecoach, he is a bitter, hate-filled old man. “Hard to believe they’re white,” the sergeant remarks. “They ain’t white,” Ethan responds, and by which he means, “they ain’t human.” It’s at that moment he decides if he finds Debbie he’s going to kill her—to him, he’s lost his kin and has to destroy whatever abomination is left. His hatred and violence is a product of ideology, and his emotion turns into the logic of genocide.
Finally, there is a close-up of Laurie. When Ethan and Martin return to the Jorgenson’s, they find that they’ve arrived just in time for Laurie, Martin’s childhood friend who he’d “been going steady” with since he was three years old. She got tired of waiting around for them and had to make a choice, even if it was just a convenient one and not one from the heart. Her fiance doesn’t take too kindly to Martin’s showing up, and they take it outside to duke it out. As the fight gets on its feet the whole wedding party, even the musicians, come out to attend, and, of course, the Reverend Samuel Clayton appoints himself as arbiter of the fight and lays down some rules, which are immediately broken. Ma Jorgenson is rooting them on before Ethan reminds her “Don’t forget you’re a lady,” and pushes her inside where the other women are cheering from a window. The camera pans over into a close-up of Laurie, she’s elated. She is finally having her affection fought for, quite literally. The violence of the film is once again being flipped on its head and shown from a new angle: here, instead of outright destruction, it is based around the act of creation and who has her as a right—it's about building a family. The men are fighting over the land yet again. But I think its important to note that this violence and Laurie’s engagement with it is not detached from that of the rest of the film, she understands wholeheartedly the murder it takes to get this land, and she spews out some of the most shockingly racist remarks about Debbie before Martin rides off one last time to find her. It's not lost on any of the characters what they’re doing, or the ideological framework needed in building this American project.
In repetition, the close-ups in The Searchers stand to continually add complexity to the film’s theme of violence through simple emotion. Ford never employs a close-up in The Searchers as someone gives a speech or proselytizes their ideas, he just gives us a face with a second of emotion. He uses one of cinema’s most manipulative tricks to distill his images into something very simple for a brief moment.
By the time The Searchers had reached theaters, Ford’s style was considered old fashioned. And in many ways, it was ornate for the time. Even shooting on the 1.85 widescreen VistaVision format, he left many of his compositions loose, allowing almost entire bodies to be on screen, and populating all edges with characters and artifacts. Just before the great departure scene that set this whole essay into motion, the Texas Rangers arrive at the Edwards house like a can of worms in a glass case, bouncing off every-which wall, filling the room with noise and motion. It is that beautiful, Fordian ballet of mise-en-scene. They simply do not make movies like it anymore.
In some ways, filming wide had become associated with television because of its efficiency. That’s where you get the signature “sitcom look” of people crowded around a couch in a room, all looking off at that invisible fourth wall. But Ford’s wides could never truly be seen in a box in the corner of your living room. His pictures were too big, his parade of people too many—you just wouldn’t be able to see anything. That is why mediums and bust shots also became the stuff of television, it was easy enough to frame and give you the idea of who you were looking at, but they also lack context. Obviously, there is still a backdrop, but it would be lost to the low-resolution anyways.
The retrospective irony of On the Waterfont’s 1.85 version is that it looks more like TV now than it would have then. That decontextualization that comes from losing the gorgeously realized extra space on the top and bottom of the frame leaves us mostly with just characters and a bit of set dressing in what would’ve felt like the space of the world in the 1.33 version. With widescreen aspect ratios becoming the standard of television in the last decade, this effect is exaggerated. It’s once grandiose widescreen mandated by studio bosses feels cheap and uncinematic, except in the most sophomoric sense.
It is unfortunate that what is lost is, at the end of the day, Kazan’s true artistry—his ability to realize the worlds through actors of a new school matching the liveliness of the environments they’re in. They felt like characters from the streets, not people from the stage. That gets lost the moment you cut Brando’s hand playing with Saint’s glove out of the frame, and all you’re left with is a story about a guy who's been wronged by bad people made by a guy who went and wronged for bad people. In my eyes, that is the biggest tragedy of On the Waterfront.
No thing in The Searchers is just one thing, every thing has a double. Ethan is doubled by the blue-eyed Comanche war chief Scar, Lucy and Brad’s young love cut short by violent death is doubled in Laurie and Martin’s coming together in spite of it, the Jorgenson’s homestead is a double to the Edwards’, etc., etc. Ford refuses to have an image without a mirror. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that every character is more than just a direct foil, but a complex series of mirrors all bouncing off of each other. Almost everything we understand about each of the main player’s is about how they contrast to those around them. We understand Ethan’s hatred through not just by his action, but by Martin’s reaction. When they first find Debbie, Ethan’s instinct is to pull a gun and Martin’s is to wrap his adoptive arms around his sister.
An extratextual mirroring happens when looking at Ford and Kazan themselves, in how they reacted to the same moment. One a child of immigrants, the other came over on the boat at a young age himself. They both integrated and helped build the 20th century American culture, one in the rapidly changing world of the New York stage, the other in the burgeoning motion picture business in Hollywood. By the 1950s, their paths were criss-crossing and while one was looking at building a new kind of Hollywood, the other was defending something old that he thought to be important, that something was being lost. That new world that Kazan was a part of came with collaborating in a rigged game, telling the bosses what they wanted to hear to keep ahead—his solidarity extended only as far as it protected him, personally. Ford was behind the times in this age of individualism, ironic considering that is what most people think these silly cowboy movies are about: rugged individualists making their own way in the world. Ford always knew better, he always knew that the individual always exists in relation to the community. For him the sad part was there not being a place for some, and even those who wished they could be like the others were still tarnished or blood-stained in ways they’d never be able to recover from. The cowboy was a tragic figure, and later in life he started to look more like the lone wanderer in Hollywood than in the big, wild, and beautiful filmmaking community they had built.
The silent cinema of exuberance, of mechanical abstraction and the transformation of peoples and cities into tethered, breathing masses that Vertov and the futurists had pioneered got hijacked by the most evil actors during the sound days; their techniques for revolution became tools for villains. In 45’ a lot of the world felt like it was waking up from a nightmare, and their cinema was adapting to its devastation. It took a few more years for the Soviets to be able to reconsider their relationship to truth, but all they were left with was more doubt. Their cinema started to stray away from those early works of pure construction and tended towards letting the events in front of the camera unfold and be witnessed—there will always be the frame but you cannot deny you at least are seeing for yourself.
John Ford was always popular with the Soviets (in fact, he was one of Stalin’s favorite filmmakers). Maybe it has to do with his work in many ways being an extension of Griffith’s pastoralism, a favorite subject of early Soviet film writing on American cinema, or maybe it had to do with his relationship to the truth and his insistence on letting the images speak for themselves. His deconstructions of myth are equally fascinating for people in a state of active nation building or ones trying to understand their own past. They fit into the pre- and post-war lens equally well. But there is no doubt that the films he chose to make changed in that time. Peter Bogdonavich once observed that Ford’s postwar works, many of his most beloved works including The Searchers, were increasingly sad. Ford gave a snarky reply, but he was right. The war had changed him and it had changed cinema. There is something elegiac about all these films.
Stagecoach ends with the couple running off to Mexico in the sunset to build their lives, but by the time we get to Martha handing Ethan his coat we already know that some future they dreamed of has long since passed in opportunity—this is the ranch out West that they’re escaping too, there’s nowhere left to run and they’ve realized that all they have left to do is stop running and killing and make way for tomorrow. Whatever Martha and Ethan had before is impossible now, she’s trying to tame the West by building a family, a community, whereas he’s trying to do it the only way he knows how: violence. Clayton straddles this line, knowing the violence it takes to colonize the world they want, he knows what needs to be said and what doesn’t. These three weaving around each other create a tapestry of Ford’s own beliefs, of conflicting ideals: their sense of clanship and kin, their need of ideology and social constructs to commit violence to establish that clanship, their senses of duty and loyalty.
We understand everything from the moment Ethan’s arms slip out from Martha’s hands. The whole movie might as well be a circle back to that moment. Of how Ethan’s hate makes him lose his humanity, only to get it back again the moment he decides to save Debbie rather than kill her. In a mirror to the opening when he raises her in his arms as a little girl accidentally calling her her sisters names (“I’m not Lucy, I’m Deborah” “Deborah, Debbie”), when he finally catches up to her he lifts her up above his head once again, and in a moment of recognition perhaps, a moment of love, he lowers her back into his embrace. But Ethan knows he has no place in the house he’s taking her to, in the world he’s helped build, he knew that for certain as he kissed Martha on the forehead. His place is out there, his brother’s is here. His old ways have cursed him to wander forever between the winds.