Old movie night

We watched an old movie the other night. An old Western movie. An old John Wayne Western movie. Barb went to the Public Library ( the poor man's Netflix) and checked out "The Searchers." Filmed in 1956 in the brand-new VistaVision format, the movie has become perhaps the penultimate John Wayne Western. Entertainment Weekly voted the film both the 13th Greatest Film of all time and the Greatest Western of all time. Maybe.

In case you didn't catch it in the theaters in the late 50's (or late nite on the movie channel), the movie's theme was suggested by the real-life kidnapping of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker way back in 1836, the search by her family for her (particularly her uncle James Parker), and her reluctant restoration to "civilization" some twenty-four years later. It was only a suggestion.

But let me back up and set some groundwork here. Every Texas schoolchild and most history buffs know the Cynthia Ann Parker story and the subsequent saga of her renegade-turned-politician Comanche Chief son, Quanah Parker. Never mind that most of what we know is wrong, it is a basic Texas legend.

In 1954, a man named Frank LeMay published a serialized story in the Saturday Evening Post called "The Avenging Texans" and then published the story in a book named "The Searchers." LeMay's story was somewhat inspired by the Cynthia Ann Parker story and the book was well received. The movie rights eventually ended up with Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, a playboy businessman who wanted to be in the movies. Whitney immediately signed John Ford, a legendary director of that era, to make "his" movie (nobody ever told Whitney that Ford never, ever, shared his movies).

Ford immediately called up his repertory of actors, writers and technicians and set out for Monument Valley, where he made most of his westerns. So that's why, after the opening credit says, "Texas - 1868" the door opens to a vista never seen in the Lone Star State.

Then in early 2013, Glenn Frankel, the director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, published a book about the writing of LeMay's book, and the making of Ford's movie from that book, and for good measure included a meticulously-researched telling of the real Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker story. Titled "The Searchers - the Making of an American Legend," the book entertains at many levels; as a history book, as a Hollywood Insider story,as  a biopic of Ford and Wayne and their complicated relationship, and as an interesting observation of  the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality and violence in movies of that era.

And that's why we ended up watching a John Wayne Western the other night!