Stagecoach revolutionized the Western. Nowadays it is fashionable to speak of it as 'the Western which created the clichés,' but Stagecoach did not create clichés nor even sustain them. It defined Western archetypes and created a new frame of reference rich in irony and sophistication….

The effect of the film has been mixed. On the one hand, the self-consciousness it brought to the form has enabled the Western to continually transform itself, chameleon-like, to pressures in the society which produces it. Before Stagecoach, the Western seemed to be dying; after Stagecoach, it became the one permanently popular film genre. (p. 53)

What makes Stagecoach so durable, however, is not its historical significance but the vividness with which it creates a dream landscape from the American past and peoples it with simple and striking characters who, despite their reincarnation in countless 'A' and 'B' Westerns, still retain a believable ambivalence and depth…. [What] seemed to delight Ford most in Stagecoach was the possibility of glorifying disrepute by plunging a group of pariahs into danger and having the most apparently abject of them emerge as heroes. (p. 54)

[Like] all good fables, Stagecoach has a universal application. It is the idea of the noble outlaw, the 'good bad man' represented most concretely by … the Ringo Kid, which provides the film's centre. Outlaws (and outcasts in general) have always fascinated Ford not so much for their rebellion as for the subtle ways they are linked to the society which scorns them. They act for society in ways society cannot see, and they understand society better than society understands itself. Their rebellion (even at its most complex level, that of Ethan in The Searchers) is as much a matter of circumstance as of temperament. (p. 55)

The ending is a paean to primitivism, but it is important to realize that the film is endorsing primitivism as an ideal rather than as a viable reality…. Stagecoach leaves the question of American imperialism, the Cavalry vs. the Indians, tantalizingly unresolved. The Indians are totally one-dimensional here, but Ford's attitude to the role of the Cavalry, which will undergo complex metamorphoses in his later work as his interest in the Indians grows, is strangely ambiguous…. (p. 56)

Both the challenge and the salvation are metaphorical. What was it, after all, that threw the outcasts together but the rupture of order in their own lives? The war-ravaged desert through which the stage passes (the curtains on the windows for ever whipping in the wind) becomes a metaphor for the instability of this archetypal primitive community, thrown together of necessity and chance and forced to rediscover the meaning of society. (pp. 58, 60)

[The exchange between the doctor and the sheriff] adds the perfect note of irony to the film's portrait of society. The primitive couple's flight into the freedom of the wilderness is seen through the eyes of society's watchdogs, the lawman and the doctor-poet. It is as if they are watching their own dream being realized at a distance—a dream whose beauty lies in its contrivance and improbability. This is Ford's vision of primitivism and the American past. We can feel it, watch it and cherish it, but we cannot quite touch or recapture it. (p. 62)

It is characteristic of Ford that They Were Expendable did not attempt to offer an upbeat, jingoistic view of the war, but dwelt instead on its most hopeless moments—the crushing defeat in the Philippines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was at this point, this 'tragic moment', that the human meaning of the war could be most clearly and deeply felt. (p. 75)

They Were Expendable is probably unique for a war film of the period in that it contains not a shred of enemy-baiting. In fact, we never even see an enemy soldier or sailor. This can be attributed in part to Ford's professionalism—the warrior's instinctive respect for his enemy's ability—and partly to his respect for the integrity of separate cultures…. [What] the invisibility of enemy troops gives They Were Expendable, most of all, is a pervasive sense of fatalism. (pp. 79-80)

Ford's use of the family as a metaphor for national solidarity governs all the relationships in They Were Expendable. The squadron is representative of the national 'family', Brickley the stern but understanding father, and Ryan the prodigal son. Ford places great emphasis on the touching callowness of the ensigns—most memorably in the shot of a very young sailor drinking a glass of milk as the men toast their retiring doctor—and on the paternal overtones of Brickley's authority. (p. 82)

Ford shows the squadron as a group of ghostly shadows on the ground as Brickley leaves his command post and, eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat, gives his last order: 'You older men … take care of the kids.' (pp. 83, 85)

[There is an] explicit point of contact between [Fort Apache and Liberty Valance] which has gone unnoticed; it occurs at the exact moment of climax in Thursday's tragedy. Conferring with his officers on what to do about Cochise's flight from the reservation, Thursday murmurs to himself, 'The Man Who Brought Cochise Back'. Ford underscores the legendary and megalomaniac implications of the phrase by having Collingwood remove his pipe from his mouth and stare at Thursday in shock, realizing that from then on the commander will be working for his own posterior glory at the expense of his men's lives. It is instructive, in this context of individualism vs. community, to contrast Ford's handling of the massacre itself—the group bunched tightly together waiting for the Indians, and dying as one in long-shot under a cloud of dust from the Indians' charge—with the massacres in two other superb films about the Custer legend, Arthur Penn's Little Big Man and Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On, both of which show the troopers deployed at distances from each other, dying not en masse but one by one, as individuals. (pp. 106, 108)

What makes the ending so complex and powerful, and so difficult to reduce to a simple statement, is that Ford,… forces the audience's collaboration. He does this by … forcing us to see through York's lie, and perhaps most disturbing of all, by forcing us to realize that we are sympathizing with men who are following a suicidal course. Ford has not only exposed the danger of Thursday's play-acting at legend, he has given that play-acting the same glorification—in his romantic, 'magnificent' depiction of Thursday's Charge—that he ridicules through the reporter's naïve description of the painting. And, daringly, he repeats the glorification moments after ridiculing it: he has York stand at a window eulogizing the Cavalry while an image of marching men is romantically superimposed on the glass. (p. 108)

The remarkable achievement of Fort Apache is that it enables us to see with Brechtian clarity that an insane system may be perpetuated by noble men, and indeed, that it needs noble and dedicated men to perpetuate itself. Whether this will shock or intrigue a viewer probably depends upon his devotion, or lack of it, to an ideological system. It is comforting to think that evil is done by beasts, monsters or 'pigs', but profoundly disturbing to realize that it is done by human beings. (p. 109)

The Rising of the Moon and The Last Hurrah look at the same subject from different sides of the Atlantic: the dwindling away of Irish communal traditions in the face of modern social pressures. The latter film, which deals with the Irish immigrant community in Boston, has hard, bright, sculptural lighting, as if it were all taking place in a mausoleum, and is climaxed with the most grandly protracted deathbed scene since Dickens (a full eighteen minutes of screen time). The Rising of the Moon is jovially melancholic, for the Ould Sod is within touching range. On the face of it, the three stories which make up the film seem arbitrarily selected to illustrate different 'humours' in the Irish character…. [However], The Rising of the Moon reveals a rigorous, almost schematic orderliness. It deals with what could be called the national consciousness of the Irish people (more precisely, the people of the Irish Republic), evolving a concept of folk heroism by means of a subterranean chain of logic running through the three stories. Ford's better-known Irish films, The Informer and The Quiet Man, both present the land through a single character's perspective; here, Ireland itself is the hero, a mass hero gradually revealed through successive incarnation in a series of individuals. It is the dream-world of The Quiet Man brought into the waking air, an insider's view of the national mystique. The soft pastels of the earlier film give way to the sharp, argumentative clarity of black-and-white.

All three of the apparently dissimilar stories centre on the Irish people's anarchic tendency to resist any kind of externally applied order. (pp. 125-26)

[After being accused of making illegal liquor,] Dan's self-defence at the impromptu 'trial' before the magistrate—conducted over cups in his own home—is a long, eloquent harangue, similar in spirit to O'Casey's words, about the ancient and honourable art of liquor-making, which is 'not what it used to be'. Old Dan is speaking for Ford…. (p. 128)

[The Sun Shines Bright] is simultaneously a work of nostalgic Americana, a raucous comedy, a caustic social protest and a Christian parable. And Charles Winninger's Judge William Pittman Priest is probably Ford's idealized self-image—humble, sagacious, comic, melancholic. Billy Priest, the old clown who sneaks drinks at a temperance rally and has to take a dose of 'medicine' to 'get my heart started' in moments of crisis; Billy Priest, who leads the funeral procession of a prostitute on election day; Billy Priest, who leaves his Confederate encampment to escort a 'captured' Yankee flag back to the GAR Hall; Billy Priest, the indomitable rebel who defies a town gone mad from lynch fever; this is John Ford. (p. 136)

Like Mark Twain, Ford is sufficiently sure of his touch to be able to ridicule the sources of racial discrimination even while brushing round the edges of stereotypes. He could never ignore a man's origins or the colour of his skin because, as a social commentator, he must acknowledge that these are among the basic data of American culture. Ethnic humour is never divisive in Ford, but always a sign of sanity and fellow-feeling, a refusal to evade distinguishing characteristics in the name of a spurious and enfeebling homogeneity. (p. 137)

The Sun Shines Bright is like a précis of the Judge's life, a testing and a summary of his ideas in a series of events which dovetail into each other with the uncanny symmetry of a dream. But the film finally seems less concerned with the Judge himself than with the community's reaction to him. (pp. 138-39)

The Sun Shines Bright is closest in spirit among Ford's works to Wagon Master, because like Elder Wiggs, the Judge proselytizes Christian values through secular communal activity, as the name 'Judge Priest' indicates. The fact that there does not appear to be a priest or a minister in Fairfield underscores the importance Ford places on personalized religion…. The moral vision Ford gives us in The Sun Shines Bright is that of a child, a magical, exaggerated, innocent vision in which a lynch mob, after being rebuffed like a gang of unruly schoolboys, undergoes such a complete transformation that it reappears at the end of the film marching behind a banner reading 'He Saved Us From Ourselves'. (pp. 140-41)

For all its sense of communal life, the film contains none of the traditional family unity which gave How Green Was My Valley its sense of order. The Judge is a widower (this is not made clear in the film, though it may have been in a cut scene, but the most poignant moment in Judge Priest was the character's address to his dead wife's portrait); the general's family is chaotically scattered; and the prostitutes are a constant Fordian testament to maternal longing. The absence of nuclear family life is actually the impetus for the film's religious spirit, its gathering of all the characters, however old, eccentric, wretched or abandoned, under the mantle of 'children of God'. The prostitutes, the old soldiers and, especially, the blacks, form communal 'families' based on a childlike sense of protectiveness, and the Judge (who is still 'Little Billy' to the old general) reconstitutes the benevolent paternalism of the fabled Old South by bringing them all together. Pointedly, it is the superannuated and socially disreputable communities within the disorganized community of Fairfield which are its real source of unity and strength. (p. 142)

By any standard of historical accuracy, Ford's view of the Old South is rosy and unreal, and by contemporary standards, his solution to the racial problem is drastically limited by its overtone of paternalist condescension. The beauty of The Sun Shines Bright is in its innocence; the film is not a piece of historical documentation but one man's fervent creation of a simpler, kindlier and more gentlemanly America than ever existed. (p. 147)

The Searchers has that clear yet intangible quality which characterises an artist's masterpiece—the sense that [Ford] has gone beyond his customary limits, submitted his deepest tenets to the test, and dared to exceed even what we might have expected of him. Its hero, Ethan Edwards …, is a volatile synthesis of all the paradoxes which Ford had been finding in his Western hero since Stagecoach. A nomad tortured by his desire for a home. An outlaw and a military hero. A cavalier and a cutthroat. Ethan embarks on a five-year odyssey across the frontier after his brother's family is murdered and his niece taken captive by the Comanches. Like Homer's Ulysses, he journeys through a perilous and bewitching landscape.

Even more than in Ford's earlier Westerns, the land is felt as a living, governing presence…. The demons which drive [Ethan] onward, almost against his will, seem to emanate from the 'devilish and grinning' land. The killing of the family, an action horrifyingly abrupt, brutal, and gratuitous, is only the first in a long chain of bizarre events which bedevil Ethan and, finally, drive him mad. Within the classical symmetry of the story—the film begins with a door opening on Ethan riding in from the desert and ends with the door closing on him as he returns to the desert—Ford follows a subjective thread. (pp. 147-48)

[The film is] a crystallisation of the fears, obsessions and contradictions which had been boiling up under the surface of Ford's work since his return from World War II…. Ethan is both hero and anti-hero, a man radically estranged from his society and yet driven to act in its name. His strengths and failings, like the promise and danger of the land around him, are inextricable. The Searchers is, on the surface, a highly romantic subject—a knightly quest—but the knight's motives are impure, and as the search progresses, Ford begins to undercut his morality.

Ethan starts out seeking the return of his nieces, Debbie and Lucy, but after he finds Lucy's mutilated corpse and realizes that Debbie is being made into an Indian squaw, he becomes nihilistic, seeking only revenge. When he finally catches up with Debbie, he tries to kill her. And the search itself would have been a failure had not Old Mose Harper (a Shakespearean fool …) accidently found Debbie after Ethan had spent years losing her trail. Ethan loses her again, and Mose finds her again.

It is this grotesquerie, and the anarchid humour that accompanies it, which the contemporary reviewers found incomprehensible. But Ford's sense of humour is one of his strongest trumps. In his greatest works, the plot line oscillates freely between the tragic and the ridiculous, with the comic elements providing a continuous commentary on the meaning of the drama. The comedy, broad and idiosyncratic and self-conscious as it may seem, is the rough prose to the exalted visual verse. Just as Ford's few actual comedies have had notably grim undertones (such as The Quiet Man, which is about the romantic fantasies of a guilt-ridden boxer), his tragedies always have undertones of giddiness…. His view of drama embraces the conviction that what is most noble, most poignant and most terrifying in life is frequently a hair's breadth away from howling absurdity. What makes films such as The Searchers and Seven Women great is the striking manner in which they reconcile the noble with the absurd, the way in which their seemingly straightforward situations are shaped to encompass the maddest perversities and still retain a sense of order. When Ford fails, his sense of humour is usually the first casualty….

The first images of The Searchers are the invocation of a myth…. Ethan rides slowly, silently, inexorably toward the little homestead, Ford cutting again and again from him to the waiting family; the intercutting gives a feeling of magnetic attraction…. As Ethan goes to kiss his brother's wife, Ford gives us, for the first time, a full shot of the home, harmonious with the landscape. The home is a shrine of civilisation in the wilderness, a shrine almost as ridiculous as it is sacred, for we see only one other pioneer home in the entire film. The communal impulse around which the generative principles of Ford's universe are organised is centred precariously around these tiny dwellings. The two pioneer families are infinitely precious and infinitely vulnerable.

Ethan is a descendant of Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, whose character, according to Henry Nash Smith in his classic study of the Western myth, Virgin Land, is based on a 'theoretical hostility to civilisation'. Ford is usually considered a conservative, but despite his nostalgia for traditional values, the term is somewhat misleading. Like Cooper, he is impatient with the artificial harmony of organised society, as his fascination with the West and with all varieties of nomads, outlaws, outcasts and warriors makes abundantly clear. There is a strong streak of anarchy in his Irish temperament. His characters are typically refugees from constricting societies (Europe, urbanised America) in which once-vital traditions have hardened into inflexible dogmas. The traditions he celebrates are the tribal traditions of honour, justice and fidelity, and all of these come together in the image of the family, the purest form of society.

Ford's heroes, whether they are outlaws (Harry Carey in his early silents, the bandits in Three Bad Men and Three Godfathers, Ringo in Stagecoach) or lawmen (Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, the soldiers in the Cavalry films), all have a primitive awe for the family. (This, to Ford, is beyond reason. When a French interviewer asked why the 'theme of family' is so important in his work, he replied, 'You have a mother, don't you?') Some of these men seek revenge for the murder of members of their own families; others sacrifice themselves for orphans; the cavalrymen act to keep the plains secure for the pioneer homesteads. All, to some degree, are also loners and outcasts: their role as the defender of primitive society forces them to live in the wilderness with its enemies, the Indians. But of all Ford's Western heroes, only Ethan turns his violence against his family—against Debbie, who could just as well be his own daughter—and that is what makes him such a profound and unsettling figure. (pp. 148, 150)

As the search progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to appreciate the difference between Ethan's heroism and the villainy of Scar, his Indian nemesis. Ethan hates Indians—is he envious of their freedom? Certainly Scar and Ethan are the only characters who fully understand each other, because their motives are so similar. We learn eventually that the massacre, which seemed at first totally wilful, was performed in revenge for the death of Scar's own children. 'Two sons killed by white men,' he tells Ethan. 'For each son, I take many scalps.' The pattern of primitive revenge is endless; Ethan will eventually take Scar's scalp…. There is a very strange scene early in the pursuit when Ethan shoots out the eyes of an Indian corpse so that, according to Comanche belief, the dead man will never enter the spirit-land and will have to 'wander forever between the winds'. Seemingly a blind act of vindictiveness—or a gesture of contempt toward an alien culture—the act in fact has undertones of kinship. Ethan himself is doomed to wander forever between the winds. He takes on the nature of a primitive in desperate recognition of his own failure to find a place in civilised society. (pp. 151-52)

What lures him out of the wilderness is a home impulse—his love for Martha—but it is also an anarchic impulse, for his presence threatens the stability of the family. Ethan's attachment to his sister-in-law is futile, and any overt action would be unthinkable, the shattering of a taboo. (p. 152)

When the massacre occurs (the very day after Ethan's arrival), it has the disturbing feeling of an acting-out of his suppressed desires—destruction of the family and sexual violation of Martha. With the links between Scar and Ethan in mind, it becomes easy to see why Ford, much to the consternation of certain critics, cast a white man in the Indian role. Scar is not so much a character as a crazy mirror of Ethan's desires.

The Searchers stands midway between the 'classical' or psychologically primitive Western and what could be called the 'neoclassical' Western (more commonly, if rather crudely, known as the 'psychological' Western). It was not, of course, the first Western to criticise the basic assumption of the genre—that the solitude of the hero, because it is an instinctive revulsion against the hypocrisy of civilised society, is a priori a good thing. In the decade before The Searchers appeared, a whole rash of Westerns were made in which the hero's solitude was presented as socially unjust (High Noon), wasteful (The Gunfighter), callous (The Naked Spur), insane (Red River), or impossibly pure (Shane). Little as Ford is usually influenced by film trends, he could hardly have escaped coming to terms with the radical questions posed by this departure. Shortly before he began shooting The Searchers, Ford described it as 'a kind of psychological epic'. The terms are contradictory, certainly, but contradictions are what the film is about. (pp. 152-53)

[The] 'anti-Westerns', particularly Red River, jarred Ford into a new area of thinking by suggesting an alternative course for the working-out of the hero's impulses. In the classic Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine, Ford seemed to be endorsing an uneasy equation between force and morality by portraying revenge as socially beneficial and morally pure. The revenge transformed the community by cleansing it of its internal pressures—which were also the hero's pressures—and it won the hero the community's respect because he had done a necessary deed of which they, because of their civilised stultification, were incapable. When Ringo and Wyatt Earp take leave of Lordsburg and Tombstone at the end, it is of their own volition. Though they are still men of the wilderness, their desires and ideals are close to those of civilised men.

Now what is Ford, of all directors, to do with a hero like Ethan? Red River may have a parallel plot, but it is really about something altogether different, the maturing of the relationship between Dunson and Matthew. The Searchers is about Ethan's relationship to society, and the film's abruptly shifting moods and moral emphases are determined by the imbalances in that relationship. Since Ethan, for instance, finds it impossible to enter society through marriage, all the marriages the film portrays are, in varying degrees, grotesque. Either the female dominates the male (the Edwardses, the Jorgensons), or the female is held in literal bondage to the male (Scar and his wives) or the partners are wildly incongruous (Laurie Jorgenson and the goonish cowboy she turns to in Martin's absence; Martin and Look, the chubby Indian wife he inadvertently buys at a trading post).

Fundamentally alone though Ethan is, all of his dilemmas are shared by the community around him. When Brad Jorgenson learns, as Ethan did, that his lover (Lucy Edwards) has been raped and killed, he rushes madly off to be slain by the Indians, who are lurking in the darkness like the unseen, ungovernable forces of the libido. Martin, who is more restrained and civilised than Ethan, nevertheless resembles Ethan enough to suggest that his continual fleeing into the wilderness, away from Laurie's advances, holds a clue to what drove Ethan and Martha apart in the first place: a fundamental reluctance to become domesticated. Just as Laurie turns to the dull, dependable cowboy in despair of taming Martin, so it must have been that Martha turned to Ethan's dull brother for stability. (pp. 154-55)

Even after Martin becomes, in effect, the hero by attempting to restrain Ethan's nihilism, he is merely following the principles with which the search began. And despite Martin's actions, it is finally Ethan who makes the decision about whether to kill Debbie or bring her home. Gestures against Ethan tend to remain only gestures; minor characters are continually frustrated in their attempts to change his course. Toward the end, Martin cries, 'I hope you die!' and Ethan responds with his characteristic assertion of invulnerability: 'That'll be the day.'

The one white character who is able to give Ethan pause is Clayton, who keeps his schizoid roles of minister and Texas Ranger in a subtle, if disturbing, balance…. The most pragmatic of Ford's characters, he is a representative of the civilised order who has won his position by restraining an innate primitivism. He averts his eyes on witnessing Martha's infidelity … in acknowledgment of the tissue of discreet lies and tactful evasions which enables a struggling society to stabilise itself.

The difference between Clayton and Ethan is succinctly expressed in their first meeting since the end of the war, when Clayton asks Ethan why he didn't show up for the surrender. 'I don't believe in surrenders,' says Ethan, adding sarcastically, 'No—I still got my sabre, Reverend. Didn't turn it into no ploughshare, neither.' Ethan, the eternal rebel, carried his rebellion to the point of madness. Clayton compromises, and this is what makes him a leader. The two men are several times seen tossing things back and forth—a canteen, a coin, a gun—in wary gestures of mutual forbearance. Although they never come to blows, they are close to it several times. What holds Ethan back is the same fundamental indecision which holds him back from Scar. To make a decisive move against either one would imply a commitment to either civilisation or primitivism, and Ethan's dilemma is that he can't make the choice. (pp. 156-57)

When Scar dies, it is Martin, the half-breed, who kills him. In transferring the actual heroic deeds, the killing of Scar and the finding of Debbie, to Martin and to Mose, the fool, Ford is destroying the myth of the heroic loner. If Ethan's search is motivated by a desire to preserve the community, then the community, even against its will, must participate in the action. It would never have taken place if the outsider had not initiated it, but it is fundamentally a communal action. If the pragmatists (Clayton, the Jorgensons, Martha) are needed to stabilise society, the visionaries (Ethan, Martin, Mose) are needed to motivate it and define its goals. All, whether they realise it or not, are part of society, a fact which Ford visually underscores with his repeated shots through the doorways of homes. But the film is, as Ford has said, the 'tragedy of a loner': Ethan must reject a society he can neither accept nor understand, and the society must reject him, since he belongs to neither the white nor the Indian world.

Martin belongs to both, which is why he is able to accept both Debbie's miscegenation with Scar and Laurie's desire for a home. Until the search is consummated, however, he is unable to accept Laurie and civilisation, for her perspective is just as distorted as Ethan's. Resplendent in the virginal white of her wedding dress, she urges that Ethan be allowed to kill Debbie because 'Martha would want him to'. Martin has told Laurie that Ethan is 'a man that can go crazy-wild, and I intend to be there to stop him in case he does,' but it is chillingly clear that Ethan's craziness is only quantitatively different from that of civilisation in general. Even the United States Cavalry, which Ford had eulogised in his 1940s Westerns, have by-passed their role as truce-keepers and become vindictive white supremacists…. Immediately after Ethan begins slaughtering buffalo so that the Indians will starve, a cavalry bugle merges with his gunshots. Ford gives the cavalry his traditional romantic trappings—jaunty marching lines, 'Garry Owen' on the soundtrack—but he undercuts their romanticism, as he does Ethan's.

The cavalry has frozen into an inflexible role: they make their entrance against a background of snow; they gallop through a river whose natural current has turned to ice; and—pre-dating Little Big Man by fourteen years—we are taken into an Indian village whose inhabitants they have massacred. Like Scar and Ethan, the cavalrymen have been trapped in a social tragedy whose terms have been established long before their arrival. The innocent Indians they slaughter, like the family slaughtered by Scar, have become pathetic pawns in a cycle of retribution which will end only when one race exterminates the other. (pp. 157-59)

Miscegenation, next to war itself, is probably the most dramatic form of collision between cultures, and by exploring a community's reaction to miscegenation, Ford is testing its degree of internal tension. The dark man, red or black, occupies a peculiar position in the American mythos: he is both a cultural bogey and a secretly worshipped talisman of the libidinous desires which the white man's culture takes pains to sublimate. The Western genre in both literature and film, which usually replaces the black man with the red man, is particularly expressive of the American psychical dilemma; Leslie Fiedler's celebrated thesis about American culture, which was received with scandalised disbelief at the time of its propagation, is rooted about equally in the writings of Cooper and the New England Puritans…. As Ford, starting with The Sun Shines Bright in 1953, began to probe deeper and deeper into the causes of social dissolution, racial conflict began to assume almost obsessive proportions in his stories, providing the dramatic centre of The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge, Two Rode Together, Cheyenne Autumn, Seven Women and even the comic Donovan's Reef. LeMay's novel lingers over the grisly details of the murders and rapes committed by the Indians on the frontier women. Ford's treatment of the massacre, by contrast, is marked by a devastating elision. The Gothic shot of Scar's shadow falling on Debbie in the graveyard and the fade-out on his blowing the horn are far more suggestive than an actual depiction of the massacre would have been. Our minds work much as Ethan's works when, in the next scene, he stares at the burning home with a fixed expression of horror. He is contemplating the unthinkable.

The emotion Ford emphasises in the moments before the massacre is the women's fear, conveyed through the camera's compulsive pull into a huge close-up of Lucy screaming (a very uncharacteristic shot for Ford and, as such, a doubly brutal shock) and through Martha's anxiety for Debbie. When Ethan, toward the middle of the film, finds a group of white women driven mad by their years among the Indians (one of them croons distractedly to a doll), he reacts with revulsion, and the camera pulls in to a large close-up of his face. He has become possessed by the same fear which possessed the women in the home…. It is revealing that the arch-racist Ethan finds Martin's 'marriage' to Look, the Indian woman, amusing rather than frightening. It has nothing to do with white culture. If a white man impregnates a dark woman, he is planting his seed in an alien culture; but if a dark man impregnates a white woman he is, in the eyes of the primitive white, violating her. The scene in which Ethan finds the mad white women is so disturbing that the spectator may momentarily wonder whether Ford is not succumbing to the same fear of miscegenation and trying to convey it to us with the subjective camera movement toward Ethan. But our first glimpse of Debbie as a woman makes it clear that the fear has a purely neurotic base. Like Martin, she has accepted her dual heritage; resigned to her role as Scar's wife ('These are my people'), she nevertheless remembers her childhood ('I remember … from always …'). Miscegenation has not destroyed her identity but deepened it. (pp. 159-60, 162)

[During Ethan's climactic encounter with Debbie, it] is not just the physical contact that prevents Ethan from killing the last of his family; there is also a sense of the profound memories which are flooding into his consciousness as he touches her. The lifting gesture, which seems almost involuntary, recalls the moment inside the home long ago when he lifted the child Debbie into his arms. Gone now is the hatred caused by his knowledge that she has slept with the man who violated his lover; gone are the years when she only existed for him as Scar's squaw. The proximity of his scalping of Scar is vital. When Ethan rises after the scalping, we do not see the corpse. We see only his face, and it is a face almost identical to the one which looked upon the burning home, a face purged of all passion. When Ethan chases Debbie, it is more out of reflex (this is the moment he has been steeling himself to for years) than from any real hatred or desire to kill her. He has been freed from his memories of Martha by a deeper, tribal memory.

At the end, the symbolic acknowledgment of white and red heritages takes place as Martin accepts Laurie and the family embraces Debbie still wearing her Indian clothes, on the doorstep of their home. And it is then that Ethan, who seemed on the verge of entering the Jorgensons' doorway (the future), steps aside to let the young couple pass him by and turns away to 'wander forever between the winds' like his Indian nemesis. Scar and Ethan, blood-brothers in their commitment to primitive justice, have sacrificed themselves to make civilisation possible. This is the meaning of the door opening and closing on the wilderness. It is the story of America. (pp. 162-63)

What makes Ford's work in the 1960s so moving is his courage in trying to come to terms with problems he had tended to simplify or evade in the past; a desire to cut through long-accepted dogmas and traditions to find out 'what really happened'. One need only compare Hallie in Liberty Valance with her earlier counterpart, Ann Rutledge in Young Mr Lincoln, to see how disillusioned Ford was becoming with the woman's traditional role as catalyst for the man's ambitions. (pp. 198-99)

If there is one characteristic common to all Ford's heroines, it is this: they suffer. Their children leave home, their husbands are killed, their homes are burned. If they are single, they struggle to keep their men from leaving or neglecting them; if they are prostitutes, they are humiliated; if they are queens, they are beheaded. (p. 199)

To emphasize the unnaturalness of the group's isolation in Seven Women, Ford shoots the film in a hermetically sealed studio set with only a few glimpses of the world outside that the women are trying to ignore. The perverse thing about these missionaries is that, in their lust for purity, they have constructed a sanctuary which all but invites attack. Just as Ethan's odyssey in The Searchers becomes a parody of a heroic quest, the mission in Seven Women becomes a parody of civilization: the ideals which gave it birth have turned into a stale, joyless repetition of form which collapses in its first confrontation with the world it is supposed to contain. (p. 200)

The character of Dr D. R. Cartwright … embodies everything Ford believed in: candour, compassion, moral commitment, defiance of hypocrisy, sacrifice. She is also completely alone, utterly rootless, far more radically estranged from society than Ethan or Tom Doniphon. The fact that she is a woman makes her solitude, for Ford, all the more terrible and all the more heroic. Seven Women superficially seems to turn its back on the ideals of community and tradition which had always animated his work, but it is precisely our sense of the loss of these values which makes the doctor's sacrifice so important; this sense of loss coupled with her rekindling and passing on of communal values in the last part of the film.

What Seven Women ultimately affirms is the necessity of individual integrity in the face of nihilism. (p. 201)

Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, in their John Ford (copyright © 1974 by Secker & Warburg), Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1974 (and reprinted by Da Capo Press, Inc., 1975, 239 p.).