This week I didn’t have a chance to watch any movies at home, though I did continue reading Glenn Frankel‘s “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend“, which I mentioned in last week’s “What I Watched”. Last week I was only a few pages in to the film, now I’m about 125 pages deep and it continues to get increasingly fascinating as Frankel has gone so deep into the history of the people that inspired the film and tells their story in such a compelling way it is very hard to put down.
This past week Martin Scorsese actually wrote about the book and the film for The Hollywood Reporter, here’s a snippet:
Ethan also is genuinely scary. His obsessiveness, his absolute hatred of Comanches and all Native Americans and his loneliness set him apart from any other characters Wayne played and, really, from most protagonists in American movies. Even his gunfighter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, his final performance for Ford, doesn’t run as deep. Ethan Edwards as brought to life by Wayne and Ford is a cousin to Melville’s Ahab on one hand and his Bartleby on the other — driven to the point of madness and absolutely alone. And neither director nor actor cuts corners with Ethan’s race hatred. There’s a shocking scene early on, in which Ethan and his search party find a Comanche buried under a rock. He shoots out the dead man’s eyes so that he won’t be allowed to enter the spirit lands and will remain destined to wander forever between the winds. No one in his posse understands the meaning of the gesture: He hates Comanches so much that he actually has bothered to learn their beliefs in order to violate them.
When he finally tracks down his niece, the girl he’s spent the past 10 years searching for, and finds that she’s taken on the ways and language of her captors, he’s suddenly ready to kill her. That’s the craziness of Ethan Edwards and the craziness of race hatred — murderous fixation and disgust are side by side with fascination and attraction. The author does an excellent job of addressing that craziness and how it played out in American history and in the Western genre.
You can read the full piece right here, but I suggest anyone with even the smallest interest in John Ford‘s The Searchers or good writing in general buy this book.
Otherwise, this week and this weekend has been spent watching college basketball, and working on a new feature on the site, which I revealed on Facebook recently. For box-office fans the weekly predictions are going to become a lot more fun. However, that is a feature you will need a registered account to participate in, so if you haven’t registered yet, get on it.
