Martin Scorsese on “the greatest performance” of an American actor
Granted, he excels in a multitude of areas, but Martin Scorsese is undoubtedly the master of coaxing commanding performances from his cast. In his storied career, he has honed his working relationships with recurring actors in the arsenal of his call list down to a fine art. Given the often-stark nature of his films, he brings subtlety to the American brutality on display by chiselling down into the nuance of the characters—finding humanity in the inhumane. One great American monolith of the silver screen proved to be a defining force when it comes to the performances Scorsese leans towards.
He first watched The Searchers when he was 12 or 13. It blew him away. It continues to do so. It remains in his “10 greatest films of all time lists” to this day. But beyond the pioneering exploration of racism in an otherwise happy-ending era of conservative Hollywood, John Ford’s social odyssey delivered “the greatest performance of a great American actor,” according to Scorsese. “Apart from being an American epic,” Scorsese says, “The Searchers also is a John Wayne western.”
That says a lot for John Wayne. The fact that he still stands out as a tour de force amid the broad brushstroke of American culture and history on display is a paradigm of his pillar-like place in the western genre. While Ford might use the cowboy form to hint at the near-primordial problem of American racism, Wayne uses it to centre the film. The shocking subtext proves all the more impactful, given that it comes from a familiar setting.
The way that Wayne grounds the film in a world we are accustomed to actually helps to create nuance and originality as it avoids the tropes we are used to seeing. This highlights the relationship between Ford and Wayne. Scorsese has been searching for something similar in all the actor collaborations that followed his fateful first viewing. Just as there was a shorthand and dynamic contrast between Ford and Wayne off-screen, the same applies to Wayne’s character, the sadistic yet oddly heroic Ethan Edwards, and the intricate implication of the movie’s underbelly.
Given that we are all now familiar with Wayne’s personal dark side, this duality is even more effective in Scorsese’s view. “Not everyone shares this opinion,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “For me, Wayne has only become more impressive over time.” It’s his odd mix of iconic status and iconoclastic undertone that still soars to this day in the film.
“Ethan also is genuinely scary,” Scorsese explains. “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 is a very complex character. On the one hand, “he literally acts out the worst aspects of racism in our country”, Scorsese says. Alas, vitally, there are also likeable parts to him. Wayne’s charisma naturally shines through the fear that he induces. In essence, this made the performance indicative of two societal realities: how the racism of the 1950s went far beyond any objective and lingered in the psyche and how such a vengeful and ugly doctrine can actually be hidden beneath a rather personable surface. The same surface presented as heroic in a thousand other westerns, a reality that Wayne subversively leans on throughout his brilliant performance—one that still inspires the likes of Frances McDormand to this day.
It also clearly inspired what was to come from Scorsese. Goodfellas is the classic example; in actual fact, these are the worst fellas around, but even still, you can’t deny their charm. In the same way that The Searchers is ostensibly a western, Goodfellas is ostensibly a gangster film. And while both films tick all the boxes of their respective genres — Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is an old-school cowboy and Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito is an old-school quick-talking, quicker-shooting crook — they stay true to form but refuse to abide by tropes, in the process purveying the decay of virtues in American society.
To do that, Ford had Wayne subvert classic heroes, and Scorsese has had everyone he’s put in Wayne’s cowboy boots thereafter do the same. These characters might walk in straightforward narratives, but like Wayne himself, they are anything but resolved. In Scorsese’s eyes, that is the crux of great cinema. “In truly great films — the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable — nothing’s ever simple or neatly resolved. You’re left with a mystery. In this case, the mystery of a man,” Scorsese proclaims. And it takes a damn good performance to leave that mystery lingering.
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