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Some film scholars charge that director John Ford was complicit in the savage racism of The Searchers' central character, Ethan Edwards. This essay demonstrates that Ford viewed Ethan as a negative, psychologically damaged, and tragic figure. By comparing the changes made from the source novel to the shooting script to the final film, a constant darkening of Ethan's personality is revealed-most of it directly attributable to director John Ford.
When The Searchers was first released in May 1956, some reviewers thought it was just another John Ford western.1 That, of course, is not the dominant view today: according to the Sight and Sound worldwide poll of film critics, The Searchers is ranked fifth among the all-time greatest films ever made.2 Critics universally acknowledge The Searchers to be visually magnificent. The movie also is often viewed as socially profound: as an insightful, pioneering attack on racism.3 Moreover, it is viewed as psychologically profound. Commentators allege that it locates the psychological roots of racism in the projection of one's own unacceptable impulses and desires onto the Other, followed by the ferocious punishment of that Other. Most specifically (to take a famous formulation), the Comanche war chief named Scar (Henry Brandon) is seen as the dark alter ego of the central figure, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). Scar does what Ethan Edwards wants to do but cannot do and cannot even admit to wanting: he annihilates Ethan s brother s family and seizes the women for himself (or else destroys them). Scar is thus Ethan s scar. No wonder Ethan hates Indians: from the very first scenes of the movie, they symbolize his own unacceptable and barely controlled emotions.4
Is this reading too much into the film? Despite early dismissal by some reviewers and John Ford's tendency to downplay those who took his films seriously,5 new evidence urges us to do just that: to take The Searchers seriously. This article examines Frank S. Nugent's revised final screenplay (manuscripts of which exist both at the University of Southern California and at Indiana University) and compares Nugent's screenplay both to Alan LeMay's original novel The Searchers and to the finished film. Although Nugent's script has never before been used to analyze The Searchers, it is clear it should be: there...