“It was a big influence on all of us”: the John Wayne movie that shocked Martin Scorsese
As one of the most well-studied cinephiles working in the industry, it stands to reason that Martin Scorsese has experienced every single emotion that cinema is capable of causing a captive audience.
From euphoria, joy, and elation to heartbreak, terror, and existential angst, the moving image has conspired to traverse the entirety of the human experience. Scorsese was enthralled by the greats from a very young age long before eventually becoming one himself, one of whom was the inimitable John Ford.
One of America’s all-time directorial icons, the filmmaker was woven into the fabric of the nation on-screen, with his back catalogue of classics famed for their stunning vistas, epic sense of scale, and the occasional shootout that caused no shortage of collateral damage.
They were very much products of their time, and while some of the content depicted in Ford’s films hasn’t aged particularly gracefully when reappraised through a modern lens, Scorsese’s first experience watching one of the maestro’s finest works left him shaken to his core the first time he saw it in the 1950s.
Ford made a huge number of top-tier pictures, but for many, The Searchers remains the magnum opus of not only his career but that of favoured collaborator John Wayne. For Scorsese, it was an eye-opening and earth-shaking moment in his cinematic upbringing that put him through the wringer in more ways than one.
“The nature of Ethan Edwards’ anger, hate and racism is so deep in that film that it’s shocking. It’s a shocking movie,” he said to the British Film Institute. “And it was a big influence on all of us. And it is a film that, of course, is difficult. Of its time. It has white actors playing the Natives, all of this sort of thing. But the whole idea is fascinating. The big issue in that film, why we watch it repeatedly, and besides the poetry of it, is Ethan Edwards and the depth of his anger and his hatred, which is fascinating.”
He was only a teenager the first time he saw ‘The Duke’ embarking on his quest for revenge, but The Searchers made an impact that was hard for Scorsese to shake off. “I was 13 years old,” he reflected. “That’s the Ford film I saw, and that’s the one that made sense to me. That character makes total sense in post-war America.”
In Scorsese’s esteemed estimation, the very things that made The Searchers so shocking were the same things that made it so important. Edwards’ bigotry, racism, and hatred were “the American story” in a nutshell, with Wayne representing the nation as a whole. “He’s so full of hate that ultimately he’s got to leave and he can’t be part of the community,” he explained. “Because America has to change.”
Ford and Wayne rarely pulled any punches, but the first time he sat down to watch The Searchers, the young Scorsese couldn’t have been expecting the film to hit him with one right in the gut.
