SEARCHING FOR FRENCHIE

The Westlit listserv -- a “bulletin board” for academics who study Western literature at the college level -- burst briefly into flames of a mild sort over whether “The Searchers” was worth writing about. Clearly it IS. HAS been. My personal notion, however, is that so MUCH has been written about “The Searchers” and then written about the writing about “The Searchers” -- both why Native Americans feel it is racist and why others feel it is NOT (because John Wayne makes a conversion) -- that it might be worth moving on. This is a 1956 movie probably reflecting concern about Korean wives (war, even Indian war, always means women from the other side get pulled into American lives or vice versa). Both IMDb and Wikipedia have excellent and lengthy discussions of “The Searchers” which has risen up and up the list of “best all time movies” until the actual subject matter -- that “Ethan” intends to kill his niece because she has gone Indian -- gets lost.

If one were making a movie with the shock value of “The Searchers” today, it would probably have to be a story about a Middle Eastern girl killed by a member of her tribal family because of having been seen in public talking to an American soldier. It’s a “blame-the-victim” story with titillating erotic overtones. I would leave in the part about Ethan also having a “forbidden” love: his brother’s wife -- and not unrequited, either, just unspoken and unconsummated. Today probably a feminist approach would “fly” better than the racist angle. We’re obsessively opposed to genocide, though we don’t do much about it. We NEVER try to justify it. Probably other changes would have to be made to a plot line over fifty years old. Society has changed.

What is mostly praised is the fabulous scenery (therhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife must be something equivalent in Afghanistan or Iraq!) and the complexity of character in the others. I don’t remember whether this was before or after Jeffrey Hunter played Jesus.
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Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers_(film)

In the course of trying to make light of the surprisingly strong feelings about “The Searchers”, I brought up “Frenchie.” “Searchers” has page after page of comment, but Frenchie has this lone comment:

"Frenchie" (1950) is based loosely on the western classic "Destry Rides Again" only this time featuring a woman as the heroine. In her prime the shapely and gorgeous Shelley Winters as Frenchie Fontaine returns to her town and opens a saloon as a front to avenge her father’s murder. Besides the usual gun play there is an old fashioned saloon fight when Frenchie tangles with another woman which is a hoot. Rounding out the cast of this technicolor co-feature are Joel McCrea, John Russell, Paul Kelly, Elsa Lanchester, John Emery and the ever dependable Marie Windsor.

I saw this movie when it was released. I was eleven and thought it was great fun. Sort of a precursor to the John Ford/John Wayne “The Quiet Man,” which featured a spunky Irish woman (Maureen O’Hara), Frenchie was a spunky French woman who didn’t wait around for a man to provide her revenge. I can’t remember the rest of the movie very well, but the famous “cat fight” was lots of fun and our family joked about it for years. It was a “Taming of the Shrew” sort of scene. It’s a bit puzzling that Frenchie hasn’t attracted the attention of a feminist academic who wants to look at role reversals and independent frontier women.

Also, I’ve never seen writing about Ford or other directors (or the screen writers who supplied them with yarns) about the use of national stereotypes: the amorous French, the drunken Irish, the thick Norwegian, etc. In the Fifties these folks were around and still discernibly immigrants, but not quite in the way of today’s perceptibly “different” (i.e. darker) immigrants. There were Mexican spitfires like Katy Jurado then, but it would be hard to get away with that now. And Indian maidens were likely to be simply brunette white girls. The broad comedy of the Fifties Westerns depended on drunkenness, blunders, and offenses -- but they weren’t seen as politically incorrect.

Given all that, when whites write about Indians they almost always write apologetics. Not “apologies” but “apologetics” in the sense that Christian “apologists” explain Christianity: a formal argument explaining the circumstances and defending the beliefs. This makes many Indians go cross-eyed with frustration. They see that “Ethan” softens and changes, etc., but to them that doesn’t excuse his early attitude and they don’t like such an anti-hero made into an ideal. Political Indians don’t care how beautiful the scenery, how influential the camera placements and pacing, or what Spielberg says about the movie: they want the focus to remain on the atrocity of the blame-the-victim attitude that demands the death of a woman “sullied” by her relationship with an Indian. So the two positions are irreconcilable because they are referring to two different things.

I suspect that was also what was happening on the listserv. I was talking about the real and authentic feelings of Indians I know. (Actually, what I said was that when I showed “The Searchers” in a classroom of young Indians, they couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. They never really grasped that Ethan intended to kill his niece. Miscegenation was an unknown concept to them.) Other people were talking high lit theory that I can’t understand (I'm approaching 70 and it wasn't taught in my day) and that I feel (from the outside) reduces people to chess pieces, markers for ideas. It was as though two gunslingers paced off the distance between them, but never turned around to face each other -- instead, each fired at a horizon the other couldn’t see.