Tag: Vera Miles

The Searchers (1956)

Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne on a long search, in John Ford’s exploration of racism in the West The Searchers

Director: John Ford

Cast: John Wayne (Ethan Edwards), Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Pawley), Vera Miles (Laurie Jorgensen), Ward Bond (Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton), Natalie Wood (Debbie Edwards), John Qualen (Lars Jorgensen), Olive Carey (Mrs Jorgensen), Henry Brandon (Scar), Beulah Archuletta (Look), Ken Curtis (Charlie McCorry), Harry Carey Jnr (Brad Jorgensen), Hank Warden (Mose Harper), Dorothy Jordan (Martha Edwards), Walter Coy (Aaron Edwards), Pippa Scott (Lucy Edwards)

John Ford’s career was a long tribute to the decency of the regular American. How fascinating then that one of his greatest films is in fact a dark investigation into the dangers of obsession, vengeance and prejudice in ordinary Americans. Working with his regular leading man, John Wayne, together they created a character who shared many qualities with Ford’s other leading men – a rugged, determined, taciturn man of the wilderness – but laced him with deeply negative attitudes and a horrendously damaged psyche. The Searchers becomes a masterpiece, presenting how narrow the line between hero and villain can be while – in an admittedly very gentle way – posing questions about the claims of the settlers to moral superiority.

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother’s homestead from an unspecified (though clearly morally questionable) career as a gun for hire after fighting for the confederacy (a cause he sees no reason to disavow). He’s an awkward presence, with an unspoken love for his brother Aaron’s (Walter Coy) wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) and a racial hostility towards their adopted son Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) who is one-eighth Cherokee. Shortly after his arrival, an Indian raid draws him and most of the local men on a futile chase. While they are gone, the Edwards’ homestead is destroyed, with the family all murdered except daughter Debbie. Ethan and Martin begin what becomes a five-year quest to find her and bring her home – although as he discovers Debbie has become wife to her kidnapper, the war chief Scar (Henry Brandon), Ethan’s aim shifts from rescue to executing Debbie for racial disloyalty.

Racism is what lies at the heart of The Searchers and around discussions of the film today. Firstly, let’s acknowledge how brave the film is in presenting Ethan’s racially motivated rage without excuse. This was after all John Wayne, the straightest shooter of the lot. Here, in no doubt his greatest ever performance, Wayne’s Mount Rushmore-like qualities are inverted into a bitter, lonely man whose murderous rage against the Native Americans is extreme, even within an environment which sees the tribes as a dangerous “other”.

Edwards’ racism tips into everything and is there right from the start: “I could mistake you for a half breed” he scowls at Martin. Later he will prevent Martin drinking alcohol – a clear reference to the belief among settlers that one drop of alcohol turns Indians into savage beasts. One of his first actions on the trail is to desecrate the buried corpse of an Indian, shooting out his eyes (condemning him to walk sightless in the afterlife). In a gunfight he has to be stopped from shooting retreating Indians in the back. Later, in a crazed fury, he guns down buffalo simply to deny them as food to the tribes. That’s not to mention his disgust with every trace of indigenous culture.

What’s striking watching the film is that, even though he’s the central character and is played by John Wayne, Ethan may well actually be the villain of the piece – or at best an anti-hero wild card. Our actual hero is the kindly, decent and brave Martin Pawley, played with a slight nervousness by Jeffrey Hunter. Martin is appalled by Ethan’s violence, his anger and above all by his plan for enforcing racial harmony by exterminating the niece he sees as a race traitor. It’s not just the fact he has Cherokee blood that makes Martin appalled by the danger in Ethan. It’s the simple fact that he’s just a decent guy, who recognises that good and bad isn’t a question of race but a question of people. And his presence on the quest, it’s made clear, is as much about protecting Debbie from Ethan as it is finding and rescuing her.

You can see these attitudes quite clearly late in the film, where the pair encounter white women who have been recovered from Indian kidnappers. These women are confused and traumatised. But while Martin attempts to communicate with and comfort them, to Ethan they are worse than nothing now. “They ain’t white anymore” he scowls at a soldier. Leaving them, Ford holds the shot on Wayne who turns to look back at them with a face dripping with such disgust and loathing, it sears into the memory.

Does the film condemn these attitudes? You can argue that the film plays into a racial nightmare – white women kidnapped and violated by savage tribesmen. But Ford is, I’d suggest, presenting racism here – and going as far as he could in the 1950s to attack it. Ethan and Martin encounter an Indian settlement that has been attacked by the cavalry. The settlement is a burnt-out husk, with Indian women and children among those indiscriminately slain – visually it is immediately reminiscent of the burnt-out Edwards homestead. Another later cavalry charge against the Indians will again see panicked women and children flee in terror. Even Scar, the villain of the piece, is motivated just like Ethan by anger – his actions are a response to the murder of two of his children. And his scalping, rape and murder don’t look so different from Ethan, who shoots people in the back, plans to murder his niece and later scalps a dead man.

The Searchers takes a slightly nihilistic view that the West was a violent place – for all the beauty Ford discovers in his crisply sublime shots of monument valley – and that many of the people in it had questionable motives and principles. A ”hero” for this time might well be Ethan, a sullen and violent man under a veneer of gentlemanly politeness, clearly motivated from the start far more by a desire for revenge for the murder of the woman he loves. Ford, Wayne and Jordan establish this love between Ethan and Martha subtly but unmistakably – the opening scenes are littered with moments of the two of them sharing glances and a hesitant but unmistakeable physical intimacy.

Again, a lot of the quality of this comes back to the wonderful work Ford draws from Wayne, helping the actor to find the cracks and flaws in this marble bust of Americanism. Wayne’s Ethan is awkward, angry, distant, difficult, cruel – a natural outsider, who has grown bitter against the world. Discovering Martha’s body, Wayne also allows Ethan to crumple into the sort of grief that translates within seconds into an iron loathing for the world and everything in it. He talks of the certainty of finding Debbie – but it’s a certainty born more of his idea of his own superior (white) determination rather than any faith (for all the language could suggest that). Ethan is in fact hostile and contemptuous of faith of any sort.

Ford frames Ethan frequently as an outsider, often framed uncomfortably in doorways, darkened walls seeming to close around him. Nowhere is this more beautifully done than in the film’s final shot which finds Ethan alone and forgotten outside the Jorgensen homestead, a man who has no place in the civilised world of family and friends, but an outsider with no place anywhere who must return to the wilderness. Wayne does this with a quiet, deflating gentleness – a beautiful suggestion of Ethan’s knowledge that the world is leaving him behind. Ford frames this beautifully in mid-shot to create one of the iconic images of cinema.

The Searchers isn’t perfect. There is a prolonged, slightly comic, sub-plot around Martin’s marriage to Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles in a thankless part), which culminates in the sort of fisticuff based comic stuff that looks more suited to The Quiet Man than here. The beautiful shots of monument valley are brilliantly done – but they also serve to point out the odd decision to shoot many of the exteriors on such obviously fake soundstages. While the film questions the attitudes and assumptions made about the Native American people in Hollywood films, the violent figure of Scar is the only Native American character given any real screen time (Martin’s accidental “wife” Look is treated as a joke, right up to her surprisingly tragic fate), making it easier to still see the tribes as an existential threat to civilisation, for all that Ford tries to contrast their suffering with the death of the settlers.

But Ford was trying to sneak something in here under the wire, at a time when people would only accept straight-forward stories of goodies and baddies in the West. He did this by turning Wayne for a pillar of taciturn goodness into someone who is almost a mirror image of his nemesis Scar, both men motivated by racial hatred. He parallels the violence of the Indians with the cavalry. He suggests in fact that there was good and bad on both sides. And I can’t think of another film where the viewer is convinced for a huge portion of the runtime that our hero intends to carry out an honour killing. The Searchers presents a man who holds racist views and trusts that we are smart enough to see the danger in Ethan’s extremism. Thankfully most of us are.

Psycho (1960)

Janet Leigh takes an unwise shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s disturbing slasher-noir Psycho

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), Janet Leigh (Marion Crane), Vera Miles (Lila Crane), John Gavin (Sam Loomis), Martin Balsam (Detective Milton Arbogast), John McIntire (Sheriff Al Chambers), Simon Oakland (Dr Fred Richman)

Psycho is so famous it’s almost impossible to watch it as Hitchcock intended. When it was released, the old showman made a huge amount of play from literally banning people from entering the cinema after it had started, with huge billboards in theatres urging people on no account to tell anyone what happens. It was the first major anti-spoiler campaign – and it worked a treat, because the film became a sensation. Such a sensation, that I don’t think there can be many people alive who aren’t familiar with the basic intricacies of its plot, whether you’ve seen it not.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from her employer, in order to marry her love Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Fleeing New York, she drives through two nights, changes her car, frets about being caught – and finally rests for the night at the Bates Motel, run by shy Mummy’s-boy (“A mother is a boy’s best friend!”) Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Exhausted by two days of stress, Marian thinks it’s time to have a shower – and so we suddenly switch genres completely….

Psycho is a masterpiece of mis-direction. If you didn’t know what the film was about, you would expect, from the first act, you are in for some sort of mix between Double Indemnity and a documentary true-crime thriller. The entire first act is essentially a brilliant Hitchcock MacGuffin – both the money and Marion Crane turn out to be things of immense importance to the characters, but essentially less so to the audience. Hitchcock pulls one of his best con tricks by presenting Janet Leigh as the main character, only to dispatch her brutally less than halfway through the film.

Which is of course during one of the most famous scenes in film history: the shower scene. It’s a masterclass of unsettling, suggestive editing, disturbing imagery (you never see the knife plunging into flesh, but you certainly feel like you do, with constant cuts from knife, to body, to movement, to blood in the bathtub – but no links between them on screen), and of course Bernard Herrmann’s jagged strings scoring it all. For no other reason, this scene would cement the film in cinema history. It’s a slasher scene filmed by a master of cinema, a clear and simple statement for everyone else to come that this was how it was done – and no other director of slasher horror has come anywhere near Hitchcock’s skill here. It’s a phenomenal, terrifying, powerful piece of cinema.

It works so well because Marion Crane is not a faceless victim. Unwittingly, we’ve carefully followed her through the last few days of her life. We’ve seen her love affair with Loomis, we’ve felt her despair at their only being able to meet in motels, felt her temptation and then shared her paranoia and anxiety as she flees with the money. Leigh is barely off-screen for the entire opening third of the movie – and we’ve completely invested in her by the time the water is flowing. Leigh is excellent as Crane – and an overlooked coda to the shower scene is Hitchcock’s tight closeup on her eye immediately after the attack – Leigh pulls off the hugely difficult trick of letting her eye seem like the life is fading away from her in that second.

It’s one of many outstanding directing feats in the film. Hitchcock slowly builds the uneasy atmosphere of the Bates motel from the moment Marian arrives there, using increasingly unsettling, gothic angles to capture Norman and to suggest that all is not what it seems. As our characters explore the Bates motel, jump cuts to innocuous objects make them carry great peril and uncertainty. Everything at the Bates motel is unnerving, unusual and every shot is not quite right. The Bates motel itself looks like the most nightmarish gothic mansion (seriously who would want to stay there?!).

The identity of the murderer is pretty well known. Anthony Perkins is twitchy and fidgety, a softly-spoken peeping tom who is unable to meet anybody’s eyes and is obsessed with taxidermy – is it any great surprise? Perkins is perfect as Bates, and Hitchcock expertly inverts his boyish good looks to masterful effect. Could someone so shy, quiet and innocent-looking be a killer? As the final scenes show us mother’s disturbed voice in Bates’ mind (while the camera slowly tracks in on his increasingly unhinged, grinning face) we not only get some more Hitchcock tricks (a subliminal imposing of the mother’s decayed face over Bates) but also another wonderful scene, of iconic acting and simple but powerful camera work. Hitchcock could do it all.

Mother – oh yuck. It’s brilliant misdirection again. Who is mother? Where is she? Who is the woman we keep seeing? Who is the female murderer? Even when we are told categorically that mother died years ago, that information itself is immediately questioned (“If she wasn’t buried then who was?”). When we do find the truth it’s another horror moment – the greatest ever turn-the-body-around-to-see-the-horror moment you’re going to see in the movies. Lila’s scream and raised arms knock a lightbulb, which swings casting alarming light and shade over the scene.

So Psycho is a masterpiece of film, because it is such an unsettling clash of genres. It’s a film noir whose main character accidentally stumbles into a slasher film. Investigating the disappearance of Marion, Loomis and her sister Lila keep returning again and again to the money that has gone missing, assuming it is the motive of the crime – but they couldn’t be more wrong.

As is explained to them at the end by the film’s psychiatrist character. This is the weakest mis-step in the film: a psychiatrist explains in a dull lecture exactly what has happened, what was wrong with Norman blah-blah-blah. Maybe we are just much more familiar with things like that, but this scene surely always had a “let me tell you all the answers” flatness to it. Sam Loomis and Lila Crane are not exactly the most interesting characters you are ever going to see – Loomis in particularly seems at first he is going to be a slight rogue, but the character quickly settles into being a bore (what does Marion see in him?). After the first 45 minutes have gone by, most of the scenes outside of the Bates Motel are (whisper it) dull – probably because they focus on a lot of discussion about the money, an issue the audience has long since lost interest in. Did Hitchcock deliberately make these scenes flatter, knowing we needed the rest from the horrors of the Bates Motel?

Psycho, though, is a classic and it will always be a classic. A slasher film and psycho-thriller, directed by an absolute master filmmaker at the top of his game. When Hitchcock made this film – on a low budget, using a TV crew, in black-and-white – people wondered why he was slumming it, why he was wasting his talent. They weren’t asking that after the film was released. Psycho is one of his purest, most unsettling thrill-rides, as horrifying, compelling and unsettling now as it was when it was first released.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956)

Van Johnson hears something’s up

Director: Henry Hathaway

Cast: Van Johnson (Philip Hannon), Vera Miles (Jean Lennox), Cecil Parker (Bob Matthews), Maurice Denham (Inspector Grovening), Isobel Elsom (Lady Syrett), Estelle Winwood (Barmaid), Liam Redmond (Mr. Murch), Martin Benson (Pillings), Patricia Laffan (Alice MacDonald)

It’s an age-old truth that the movies always believe we can admire a hero more, if we see them struggling to overcome some form of disadvantage or disability that would normally rule them out of carrying out the actions they are trying to do. So what fits into that mould better than a blind man going up against a gang of criminals?

Philip Hannon (Van Johnson) is a successful American playwright living in London, who has lost his sight. One day in a pub, he overhears a conversation between a man and a woman that he suspects is related to the planning of a crime. But, unable to persuade the police of his suspicions, he has only his former secretary Jean (Vera Miles) and butler Bob (Cecil Parker) to help him investigate.

This is the sort of reliable B movie material, with some decent parts and interesting twists, that usually gets remade as a big-star, big-budget modern Hollywood drama. You know the sort of thing: Russell Crowe is a blind writer investigating a crime. In fact, it’s almost a surprise that this has never been remade, as it is an entertaining, diverting small-scale movie – the sort of thing that you can imagine settling down in front on a wet Sunday afternoon.

It’s a sort of sub-Hitchcock drama –fairly similar in tone to Rear Window – and there are several beats in there that totally fit with the master’s dramatic style. In fact, that’s what makes it such a quintessential B movie: everything about it feels like a slightly cheaper alternative to a major picture. Which isn’t a criticism as such: it’s just a very workmanlike, efficient little thriller, which fits neatly into Hathaway’s CV of safe, unspectacular film making. It’s still well made and does exactly what you would expect, but it’s not going to knock anyone’s socks off.

Van Johnson may similarly be a low rent Jimmy Stewart, but he’s pretty effective in this role, suitably vulnerable in places, while still suggesting enough of the prickly demeanour of the man who doesn’t want to be a victim. He also resists the temptation to overplay the blindness – something the whole film actually does quite well. As the man holding the entire film together he does a good job, and he even manages to be more or less believable as a successful playwright. Watching it, you think it’s a bit of shame he’s not better known today – he’s a good (if unspectacular) actor. Vera Miles offers some good support as a supportive love interest while Cecil Parker is quite droll as the butler.

The mystery itself has a few nice twists in it – the final twist is nicely set-up, enough for you to see it coming as we reach the dénouement (a well-staged confrontation in a darkened flat, which gets a lot of tension from watching our blind lead trying to identify all the lights in the house so he can remove their bulbs). The story sometimes doesn’t give us too much of a chance to work out the twists and turns before key clues are revealed by Hannon, but that’s no major problem. It’s also quite well filmed, with some nice shots of 50s London skylines.

It’s a decent and interestingly done film that gets some fresh content out of the blindness of its hero, never portraying him as a victim but as a proactive and determined man. Claims that this is some sort of lost classic are overdone – it’s never more than a sub-Hitchcock B picture – but it’s still highly watchable, has some engaging characters and some decent thriller sequences, and you care about the lead characters, even if you don’t particularly care about the crime itself and its victims (the victims in particular are pretty vague characters). It also relies rather heavily on the legendary heightened senses that blind always seem to have in Hollywood films. But for something that basically sounds like the plot of an ITV two part drama, this is solid craftsmanship.

One final note: the title means nothing. At one point Hannon guides a man through the fog. Turns out he’s 23 paces from his destination: Baker Street. The Hollywood suits were keen to drop in the “Baker Street” reference, to suggest a link to Sherlock Holmes. So goes to show – Conan Doyle, always good box office!