The Searchers Message Board
Zeke Steiner posts a message on 11/7/2005 12:30:40 AM
Martha Edwards in The Searchers, like most Ford women, stands powerfully against all that would threaten home and family. Sheltered inside, she represents peace, comfort, and the fragile stability of civilization. Like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and Mrs. Morgan in How Green Was My Valley, she has the quiet, steady strength traditionally assigned to women of endurance, patience, and self-sacrifice. She is protected from sun and wind and cold by a flimsy house her men have built and from the destruction of her carefully ordered world by those same men. In her turn she sustains them, gives their struggle meaning, and usually outlives them to carry on what they have died to preserve. Ezekiel Steiner
Ezekiel Steiner posts a message on 11/7/2005 12:25:18 AM
The first image in The Searches is the silhouette of a woman who is standing in the cool, dark doorway of a frontier cabin and looking out into the searing heat and sun of the desert. As she stoically waits, a man rides up, wearily dismounts, and walks slowly toward her. We are in John Ford country, and all the elements are there. Pictorially, it is a scene of stark contrasts, light in conflict with dark, interior pitted against exterior, the figures sharply etched in their solitude, the implacable outlines of a harsh environment looming behind them. The people are dramatic, larger than life, and what happens to them has the force and fatality of history recorded on the screen. Zeke Steiner
Ezekiel Steiner posts a message on 11/7/2005 12:18:57 AM
He stands in the doorway because he is the typical Ford hero. He is a wanderer and outsider who serves a society he cannot himself live in. He respects the values of that society, the domestic virtues of home and community, but he is driven by a higher call to duty. He is independent, self-reliant, more physical than intellectual, expresses himself more through gestures than words, and is not afraid to use violence when it is required. He drinks hard, fights hard, lives hard, and remains always alone. Living outside the law of society, he embodies the spirit of that law by adhering to a strict personal code of moral behavior and an almost religious respect for ritual and honor. He is an ordinary human being raised to the stature of hero through his courageous acceptance of a situation that he cannot, as a self-respecting man, avoid. He usually dies. He is almost always defeated. But the proof of his heroism is his private victory in the face of defeat. Ezekiel Steiner
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