Here’s a book I’m looking forward to, The Searchers: Making Of An American Legend by Glenn Frankel. It covers the connection between an actual abduction case (Cynthia Ann Parker was taken by the Comanches when she was nine), Alan LeMay’s novel and, of course, what it often held up as the greatest Western ever made, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).
Glenn Frankel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and his former employer, The Washington Post, likes his book. Their review is here. An earlier piece on The Searchers can be found on his website.
Interview with Glenn Frankel at directedbyjohnford.com: http://www.directedbyjohnford.com/blog/
I followed all the links that both Toby and Paula provided and am now definitely intrigued to read the book.
I already know a little of the Cynthia Ann Parker story–and some of the history from the Comanche side is carefully laid out by Dana Andrews in “Comanche”
directed by George Sherman and released earlier in 1956 (Quanah Parker is a character there, as he also is in Ford’s own 1961 “Two Rode Together”). So I’m well aware that of course “The Searchers” is history made into myth.
Sometimes, historians take a completely negative attitude toward this in works of art and I think that’s the wrong attitude. History is arguably subjective in any event, and can be told in different ways. The way that it plays in works of art is a complex thing and deserves a complex response.
So reading that the film is Glenn Frankel’s favorite and that was his motivation is kind of reassuring. I sense before reading it that he will balance the actual history he recounts with a reading of the film that allows a positive view of history made into myth and the deeper truths that this allows.
I think those who know it will agree–and this comes up somewhere in these links, in the interview I believe–that “The Searchers” is not centrally about Debbie at all, and that seems like it was a wise decision, for made possible a plausible narrative (but arguably imperfect, though mostly great, in her scenes) which is much more about the protagonist Ethan stilling hatred and coming back into spiriitual balance at the end, finally and profoundly the hero for all the darknesses we have seen in him. I’m not sure you wouldn’t have to go back to Achilles in “The Iliad” (a model surely, as Odysseus is also in other ways) to find this theme ever played out more movingly than in John Ford’s film, and it is surely the finest of themes, because the most spiritual. I’ll go so far as to say that in Ford’s hands and as played by John Wayne, Ethan might actually be a richer and more complex character than either Homeric hero.
The Searchers (56′) happens to be my favourite western.
I’d love to read this book.