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181 chapter 8 In the Shadow of The Searchers Two Rode Together and Sergeant Rutledge The Quiet Man may be John Ford’s most enduringly popular film with the moviegoing public and his most successful from a financial standpoint , but it is The Searchers that is considered his masterpiece. Two films lurk in its shadow: Two Rode Together and Sergeant Rutledge. Two Rode Together is generally regarded as among Ford’s worst, a film Ford himself called “the worst piece of crap I’ve directed in twenty years.”1 Both The Searchers and Two Rode Together are captivity narratives that gave Ford the opportunity to reexamine America’s frontier past in terms of the confrontation between whites and Indians. Both films come to the same conclusion: racism is deadly. The films reach this point, however, in very different ways. The Searchers is rich in imagery, subtle in its storytelling, and overpowering in its emotional reverberations . Its score contributes, significantly, to the film’s power. Two Rode Together deploys recycled images, pedestrian storytelling, and tepid emotion. Largely abandoning the folk songs and period music of other Ford westerns, the film also lacks the rich nondiegetic score of The Searchers. In its unconventional use of the guitar, however, the score of Two Rode Together anticipates later developments in the western film score. The Searchers received good reviews and did more than respectable business. It was generally thought of as a solid Ford western, hardly a message film. With Sergeant Rutledge, Ford put race on the front burner, and no one who saw the film could doubt his intentions. Musically, however, Sergeant Rutledge has more in common with Two 182 In the Shadow of The Searchers Rode Together than with The Searchers, with little in the way of the characteristic folk and period music so intrinsic to earlier Ford westerns. But the score does have its one big moment. Two Rode Together revisits some of the same plot elements as The Searchers. At the center of the film is a cynical, mercenary sheriff, Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) recruited by the U.S. cavalry but hired by the families of whites held by the Comanches to get back their loved ones. McCabe gruesomely recounts the probable fate of the captives, but he is willing to negotiate with the Comanches if paid to do so. Among the hopeful is Marty Purcell (Shirley Jones), who has traveled to the fort for the return of her brother, captured ten years earlier. McCabe, accompanied by Lieutenant Jim Gary (Richard Widmark), who is more enlightened but ultimately an ineffectual check on McCabe’s baser instincts , rides to the Comanche camp and finds three captives still alive: two women who refuse to return (one who describes herself as “dead” and another who is insane) and a young man, Running Wolf, whom they rescue against his will. A fourth captive joins McCabe and Gary voluntarily —Stone Calf’s woman, a Mexican captive named Elena (Linda Cristal), who returns with them but seems to have little will of her own. None of the families can identify Running Wolf, who so aggressively lashes out against his captors that he has to be restrained. It is clear that he will never to able to reintegrate into white American culture. When he murders a woman who attempts to help him, he is lynched. On his way to his death, he recognizes Marty’s music box; he is Marty’s brother after all, but the mob is unstoppable. Elena, also rejected by the Anglo society , decides to leave for California, and McCabe, witness to her humiliation and confronted by the ugliness of racism, decides to leave with her. It’s a toss-up who is worse in this dark and cynical tale—the Indians, who abuse their captives and willingly sell one who begs to stay, or the white settlers, who lynch one young captive and cannot disguise their fascination and disgust with another. Reintegration of the former captives into white society is impossible. “Good God, this is a lousy script,” Ford himself complained,2 and Harry Carey Jr., was neither the first nor the last to comment upon the images, narrative devices, and dialogue recycled from previous Ford westerns. “Two Rode Together seems to me to be a hodgepodge of incidents and pieces of business from every western Jack ever made,” Carey writes.3 Working for hire at Columbia Pictures , Ford did not shoot the film in Monument Valley, but in Brackettville , Texas, using...

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