Martin Scorsese’s favourite John Wayne movie and how it inspired him
Martin Scorsese has seen more movies than most people, and his encyclopaedic familiarity with the medium has allowed him to draw his inspirations and influences from far and wide. However, one John Wayne movie casts a bigger shadow over his filmography than any other.
It’s been almost half a century since ‘The Duke’ passed away, but he remains as towering a figure in Hollywood as he ever was. Even people who’ve never seen any of his films know exactly who he is and the archetypal ideal of heroism he was most closely associated with, although there are plenty of auteurs greatly inspired by his work who remain active in modern cinema.
Scorsese is hardly in a class of his own, then, with everyone from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to James Cameron and Ridley Scott repeatedly pointing to Wayne pictures – particularly the classic westerns he made with his most famous collaborator, John Ford – as pivotal in shaping their own sense of directorial style, creativity, and authorship.
As the mastermind behind Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street and many more, Scorsese is well-established as one of the all-time greats. While it would be doing him a major disservice to say it was a single feature made by somebody else that placed him on that path, it also can’t be overlooked that The Searchers was his biggest touchstone, bar none.
The Academy Award-winning icon has waxed lyrical on the movie’s merits on countless occasions over the years, celebrating every fibre of its being, from its astonishing cinematography and a career-best performance from ‘The Duke’ to the way protagonist Ethan Edwards is a despicable character who exists on multiple levels beyond a morally grey figurehead who hates what the world is becoming.
It’s not even been particularly subtle, either, with Scorsese’s debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door containing a scene where Harvey Keitel talks about The Searchers and Wayne in extensive detail before the film is glimpsed onscreen in a cinema during Mean Streets. The most pronounced was, of course, Taxi Driver, with Paul Schrader and Scorsese confessing that Travis Bickle’s journey was based in part on Ethan’s redemption erstwhile redemption arc from callous outsider to repentant soul with an ironclad moral compass.
Many of Scorsese’s movies boast central characters who have a propensity for violence and selfishness at the expense of their personal relationships, which is basically Ethan all over. The director has never made a western because he didn’t think he was cut out for it, but that doesn’t mean his favourite film from the genre couldn’t make its presence felt in Goodfellas.
“You know the scene in The Searchers where Ward Bond arrives at the house and says, ‘Let’s get some of that coffee?’ That became the scene with my mother in Goodfellas,” Scorsese told Indie Wire, sharing that even during the casting process of his crime classic, he had Ford and Wayne’s masterpiece in the back of his mind even when it came to the specifics of creating a lived-in and authentic familial bond between the characters.
Another recurring theme in Scorsese’s career – which has been explored in his aforementioned crime classics, his period pieces, and most recently Killers of the Flower Moon – is the deconstruction of the ‘American Dream’ and the pulling at the thread of the fabric holding the country together.
No genre of cinema is more American than the western, none of the genre’s offerings come any better than The Searchers, and no actor has epitomised onscreen Americana on a level close to John Wayne, so in a way, it makes complete sense it would be the jumping-off point for Scorsese’s legendary career.
