John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [94]
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determination which in turn is driven by his complete hatred for Indians. Neither Martin nor the audience realizes that Ethan has come to the conclusion that when they find Debbie, he is going to kill her because she will have become an Indian.
In a scene that has become a classic moment in cinema history, Ethan, on horseback, chases Debbie who flees on foot. He corners her and grabs her, and it is the moment the audience expects him to kill her. Then, suddenly, he cradles her in his arms and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.”
“A lot of people ask me why Ethan had become so hell-bent on killing Debbie and then, at the final moment, takes her home,”
Wayne said to me. “Pappy was clever because he hinted, and so did I, that Ethan had had an affair with his brother’s wife. But we didn’t spell it out. It was for the audience to figure out. So Ethan’s thirst for vengeance wasn’t just for killing his brother, but also for killing the woman Ethan had loved. When Ethan picks up Debbie at the end, I had to think, what’s going through his mind as he looks into her face?
I guess he saw in her eyes the woman he’d loved. That was enough to overcome his hatred. Wow! That was a terrific moment. And a great part for me to have the opportunity to play.”
Many actors who worked on that film were impressed, and some even quite shocked, to see Wayne giving a performance so different from anything he had done before. Ken Curtis told me, “Duke was usually pretty laid back when he was working. He usually found time to play practical jokes, and he loved to laugh if someone told him a joke, but when we were making The Searchers he wasn’t quite so loose. He just didn’t seem as relaxed. I thought at first it was because he was expecting John Ford to lay into him like he usually did, and sure enough Ford found opportunities to say things that would needle Duke. But then I came to realize that wasn’t why Duke was so pensive. It was simply his concentration on the part. Dobe Carey said to me, ‘Did you notice the look in Duke’s eyes in that scene we did?’
I asked him what he meant, because I’d not been there to see it, and he said, ‘When I looked at him, he had the coldest, meanest eyes I’d ever seen. I’ve never seen Duke like that before.’ And that was because Duke was, I felt, reaching down deep inside himself into some dark corner he’d never gone before. Now that’s a mark of how 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 177
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good an actor he was. Anyone who says Duke always played himself—and I’ve even heard Duke say it—should take a look at The Searchers, and they’ll see John Wayne with a whole new dimension to his character.”
Wayne told me the secret of how he found that dark place he’d reach down to for his performance as Ethan. “I just thought of the Apaches not as Indians but as the Communists who’d been trying to kill me. I thought, What if the Commies were the ones who had done this? What if they had managed to burn down my home and kill my family? You see, I can be a method actor too.”
Since Wayne himself had not given me any details of the attempts on his life at his home but had mentioned that it was Yakima Canutt he owed his life to, I asked Canutt if the attempt had any bearing on Wayne’s portrayal of Ethan. He said, “Why, of course Duke was thinking of the Apaches as the Communists who’d tried to kill him.
He was so goddamn mad and full of rage when I told him we’d put all the Communists we could round up on a plane for Russia. He was spitting mad. He said—though I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally—but he said, ‘You should have called me and I’d have come over and shown those sons of bitches what it means to threaten my life, my home, my wife.’ I saw the look in his eyes that I later saw in Ethan’s in The Searchers. He should have won the Oscar,