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A comparison of the original with Nugent's screenplay causes admiration for the screenwriter but also for his obvious collaboration with the director, John Ford (Nugent's father-in-law),2 in the subtle enlargement of the themes of family and racism suggested by the novel, in the creation of roles for the John Ford stock company suggested by the characters in the novel, and in the development of a cinematic subtext beyond, but grounded in, LeMay's text. In the film, Bluebonnet and Scar have become a single character; the white women at the fort in snow country, thought possibly to be Debbie (who prove not to be), have been substituted for the white girl in Bluebonnet's camp; the three homecomings have been condensed into two, and the barn party has become the wedding of Charlie and Laurie which, interrupted by Martin, leads to a fist fight.

Reading Alan LeMay's novel The Searchers (1954) after developing a familiarity with John Ford's film version of it (1956) is at once like entering a well-remembered room to find that its shape remains unchanged even when the furniture has been rearranged and the walls have been repainted in different tones; in addition, the drapes and the furniture coverings have changed color, and there are now gaping holes in one corner of the room, but the bric-a-brac is instantly recognizable, even though some of it has disappeared entirely. This analogy suggests that LeMay's good fiction was altered for the screen by scriptwriter Frank Nugent who retained the broad outline of LeMay's narrative but reshaped and colored many of its major elements to create a film like-yet unlike-its source, in some ways tighter in structure and more complex in theme: 212 pages set in Linotype Caledonia1 as opposed to two hours running time in Vistavision. A comparison of the original with Nugent's screenplay causes admiration for the screenwriter but also for his obvious collaboration with the director, John Ford (Nugent's father-in-law),2 in the subtle enlargement of the themes of family and racism suggested by the novel, in the creation of roles for the John Ford stock company suggested by the characters in the novel, and in the development of a cinematic subtext beyond, but grounded in, LeMay's text.

In broad outline, both novel and film are parallel. Like the novel, the film draws much of its strength from its narrative form, a quest story, but a plot synopsis of the novel reveals that the screenwriter has rearranged its second half. In the book, a Comanche raid on the home of the Edwards family in Texas in the 1 860s results in the deaths of the entire family with the exception of two daughters. The elder, Lucy, is subsequently raped and killed. The younger, Debbie, is taken captive and raised by the Comanches who, by a stratagem (stealing cattle), lured the men of the area away from the Edwards ranch and from a neighboring ranch owned by the Mathisons. After an initial search for the girls by a group of settlers, during which they are attacked by the Comanches at "the Cat-Tails," three men continue the search: Amos Edwards, uncle of Lucy and Debbie; Martin Pauley, the Edwards' adopted son; and Brad Mathison who had been courting Lucy. Brad is soon killed, but Martin and Amos search for more than five years for Debbie. After returning home once, they pursue her through northern territory (where they are ambushed by and kill a Mr. Futterman). Martin inadvertently acquires a wife, an Indian girl, Look, even though he has been courting Laurie Mathison. But Look soon disappears. Next Amos and Martin spend sixty hours in a gully during a blizzard and then, just when they think that they have tracked Debbie to the camp of a Comanche chief, Bluebonnet, they lose her trail after soldiers raid an Indian village in snow country: they know that Debbie was in the village because they find her locket which had been a present from Martin. They return home again. At a barn party of a neighbor, Mose Harper, Laurie dances and flirts, and Martin fights with Charlie MacCorry, a Texas ranger. Later, in New Mexico territory, Amos and Martin encounter Lige Powers, an old buffalo hunter, who has been searching for Debbie. A Comanchero, Jaime Rosas, leads them to Bluebonnet, who has a white wife, but the girl is not Debbie. After a third homecoming, Lige Powers appears, having found Debbie at Seven Fingers. Amos and Martin make their way there and meet Yellow Buckle or Scar, whose captive Debbie is. After they leave Scar's camp, Debbie follows them to warn of Scar's imminent attack, then runs away. In the attack, the Comanches wound Amos. The searchers afterward ride to Camp Radziminski where Martin, securing the Texas Rangers for a raid on Scar's camp, discovers that Laurie has wed Charlie MacCorry. In the final battle with Scar, Amos is killed, and Debbie flees into the wilderness, followed by Martin. When he finds the exhausted girl, a reader understands that Debbie herself, now nubile, who has always been the object of Martin's quest, will now be his final reward.

The changes in the translation from novel to film by the adaptor are minimal but important in the first half, extensive and thematically provocative in the second. The homecoming of Ethan Edwards (Amos) in the first scene, the following scene of the family at supper, and the breakfast on the following morning when the men set out to find the missing cattle are either new material or material considerably amplified from the book. The finding of the cattle and the headlong rush to return to the Edwards ranch in the film precede what is the opening scene of the novel: Henry Edwards surveying the land around the ranch and suspecting an Indian raid. The sending of Debbie to the graveyard, the return of Ethan and Martin to the burning house, the funeral, the initial search follow in order. However, the events following the first homecoming, shown in a long voice-over by Laurie as narrated by Martin ("pencil in hand") in a letter to her, is a cinematic addition. Obviously, though, the second half of the narrative has been rearranged. In the film, Bluebonnet and Scar have become a single character; the white women at the fort in snow country, thought possibly to be Debbie (who prove not to be), have been substituted for the white girl in Bluebonnet's camp; the three homecomings have been condensed into two, and the barn party has become the wedding of Charlie and Laurie which, interrupted by Martin, leads to a fist fight. By far, the greatest change is the transference of the conjunction between the searchers and Scar to the New Mexico setting, a much earlier time in the film than in the novel. In some ways this transference could be considered a mistake because it leads to the emotional climax of the book, the scene between Martin and Debbie in which he tries to convince her to return to life with white people (I'm your brother Martin! Don't you remember me?), and because it is also, perhaps, the most dramatically tense in the film, only a little past its halfway mark. Indeed, the actors (Jeffrey Hunter as Martin and Natalie Wood as Debbie) are at their best here, and the complication of Ethan's attempt to kill Debbie, not in the book, creates great dramatic conflict. On the other hand, in view of the altered ending of the film, Debbie no longer being Martin's final prize, the scene need not be climactic, as the final raid in the film is. Additionally, the gaping holes of my initial analogy-the marriage of Laurie and Charlie, the death of Amos, and the implied union of Debbie and Martin-must come as major shocks to readers who know only the film. Still, the overall structure of the narrative is leaner, certainly closer to a cinematic than a novelistic structure, even if it leads to concluding events far different from those in the book.

Again, in a streamlining process, the number of characters in the story has been reduced, and the names of some of the characters, as I have already indicated, have been changed.3 In the novel, the land in Texas was originally settled by three families: the Edwards, the Pauleys, and the Mathisons. The Pauleys (Ethan and Judith and two daughters) were massacred by Indians eighteen years before the opening of the novel; however, in the film the Pawleys (sic) were killed in an attack on a wagon train. In both novel and film, Martin, the survivor, was raised by the Edwards. In the film, Henry Edwards becomes Aaron Edwards; his brother Amos becomes Ethan Edwards, taking on the name of Martin's father in the book; the two Edwards sons-Hunter, 19, and Ben, 14-are reduced to one boy. The Mathisons become the Jorgensons, and their Quaker faith of the book is eliminated. Brad is an only son in the film, too, since his brothers Tobe and Abner, have also been dropped. Mose Harper, a settler and a member of the initial search party of the book, has given his name to the figure of the old buffalo hunter, Lige Powers, who functions later twice in the novel as Mose (Hank Worden) does in the film. Charlie MacCorry, clearly seen in both book and film as an original member of the search party although in the early sequences of the film he has no lines, is a Texas ranger in the novel. All in all, Nugent wisely reduced the clutter of characters, concentrating on a nucleus of them who eventually unite as one family.

Nugent' s other changes, those in the nature of the characters, doubtlessly pleased John Ford. The possibilities for good roles for Ford's favored players are not perhaps immediately apparent in the novel, but a major displacement occurs when Amos Edwards, rechristened Ethan (Bull Shoulders in the book and Big Shoulders in the movie), is transformed into a leading role for John Wayne and when Martin Pauley (Pawley) is demoted to second lead (The Other in the book, He Who Follows in the film); for Martin is the central intelligence of LeMay's The Searchers, a young man of eighteen when the novel opens but already skilled in the ways of the frontier. For instance, in the novel (chapter three) both Amos and Martin rest their horses and feed them grain before the furious ride back to the Edwards house, and both (chapter five) ride their horses to death as they approach the burning ranch house. In the film, of course, Martin rushes hastily off while Ethan feeds and rubs his horse. Later, as Martin trudges along on foot, toting his saddle, Mose and Ethan ride past him, Mose admonishing, "Next time, listen to your Uncle Ethan." In effect, because it is presented from Martin's point of view, the novel is a young man's book, but the movie is not a young man's film. As played by Jeffrey Hunter, commensurate with the way the part of Martin is written, the young man is inexperienced, often boyish, and naive, sometimes comically so. In contrast, Ethan Edwards, as conceived for John Wayne, is a far more complex character in the film than is Amos Edwards on the printed page; in fact, it is probably the most difficult part that Wayne ever undertook.4 Also, Mrs. Mathison, a colorless figure in the book, becomes not only a surrogate for Martha Edwards but a strong figure in herself. Her speech, for a prime example, "We be Texicans. . . Some day this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come" (pp. 52-53) is voiced in the novel by Amos Edwards, but it is awarded by Nugent to Olive Carey, who also warns Ethan not to waste years, searching out of vindictiveness and hate. Plainly, Aaron Mathison has become Lars Jorgenson to allow John Qualen to portray a Scandinavian, as he did memorably for John Ford as Axel Swenson in The Long Voyage Home (1940). Ken Curtis, who had played for Ford in The Quiet Man as Charles MacCorry, becomes a bucolic swain, essentially a character for comic relief except for the moment when he sings a virile-sounding "Skip to My Lou" to Laurie (Vera Miles).5 The single almost completely new character in the film is the gun-totin', Bible-spoutin' Captain Reverend Samuel Clayton (Ward Bond), modeled on the Texas Ranger Sol Clinton, who appears late in the book at Camp Radziminski, just before the final attack on Chief Scar's village. Clinton speaks in this vein:

"And don't pay them Comanches no mind, neither-just keep your eye on me. I'm the hard case you're against around here-not them childish savages. If you don't hear me the first time I holler, you better by God read my mind-I don't aim to raise no two hollers on any one subject at hand." (p. 257)

This speech is not in the film, but I think that any seasoned moviegoer can hear Ward Bond's voice speaking it, as maybe Nugent and Ford did. One other character has been added late in the film, the rattled young shavetail, Lieutenant Greenhill (Pat Wayne). In the novel, there is a problem of competing strategies in the raid on Scar's village between the Texas Rangers, commanded by Clinton, and the United States Cavalry, commanded by a Colonel Greenhill; but the foolish young lieutenant who eventually sticks Clayton with his saber during the attack is, for better or worse, Nugent's invention and a way of introducing into the film a second generation Wayne, who Ethan in one of the film's inside jokes refers to as "son." In sum, then, the novel provides figures translatable into parts for people whom Ford likes to work with and from whom he is able to draw strong performances.

Certain moments in the book obviously suggested to Nugent ways to enlarge or alter situations for dramatic or thematic effect. Again, a moviegoer coming to the novel for the first time will recognize the origins of the breakfast scene (scene three of the screenplay):

"Laurie had been flying around, passing Out coffee and quick grab breakfast, with two of the Harper boys and Charlie MacCorry helping her on three sides-all of them clowning, and cutting up, and showing off. . . . She ran out to his stirrup, and said, "Hi," hardly looking at him as she handed him a hunk of hot meat wrapped in bread-no coffee-and was gone again. . . (p. 8)

This little moment is the basis for the full-scale serving of breakfast, magnificently staged by Ford, when Reverend Clayton and his men come to the Edwards home to deputize Aaron and Martin into the Texas Rangers before they set out to track down the missing cattle. The girl with the coffeepot in the film is Lucy (Pippa Scott). Similarly, the lighting of the lamp at dusk, melodramatic in the film as Lucy realizes the impending Indian raid, is seen from the view of the eldest son, Hunter:

"Within the kitchen he heard a match strike.., he knew his mother was lighting a lamp. He called softly, "Ma ... not right now."

His mother came to the door and looked at him oddly, the blownout match smoking in her hand. He met her eyes for a moment, but looked away without explaining. Martha Edwards went back into the kitchen, moving thoughtfully; and no light came on." (p.2)

In addition, Debbie's locket, a gift from Martin in the novel, becomes a stronger signifier in the film, a war medal given to her by Ethan (with dialogue mentioning a locket given by him to Lucy) which the audience sees later worn by Scar, prefiguring the appearance of the grown-up Debbie. Finally, when Mrs. Mathison puts her anns around Martin, "as if he were her son" (p. 71), Nugent seizes upon this suggestion, splendidly visualized by Ford, so that Mrs. Jorgenson becomes a replacement for Martin's adoptive mother, Martha Edwards.6

Impressively, Nugent has taken other suggestions of actual dialogue from the book and reset them in a new context to enrich the film. Lige Powers's wish, for instance, for a chair by the stove in his old age as a reward for finding Debbie (pp. 17 1-72) is presented in a bitter tone in the book as Martin thinks of it "as just a place to lie down and die," but, as Ford stages it, Mose Harper's wish is expressed early visually when he sits in a rocking chair standing outside of the burning Edwards home. In the final scene, of course, he is shown to have secured his heart's desire. Similarly, Martin's bashfulness after Laurie had mended his underwear (p. 81) is reproduced entirely in the script, but the scene takes on a humorous coloring as Martin sits in a bathtub while Laurie picks up his travel-stained clothes. Again, in the film, Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche so that he will "wander forever between the winds," but in the book Amos (p. 29), for the same purpose, scalps the Indian, the scalping in the film-never completely seen-being reserved for Scar at Ethan's hands almost at the end. Lastly, Henry speaks of Martha's determination to stay on the land in the novel ("It was Martha who would not quit" p. 5) as a result of pioneer spirit, but audiences understand in the film that Martha has been waiting for Ethan to return, even though their love must remain unexpressed. Moreover, Amos, who had repeatedly left but always drifted back to the Edwards's ranch7, had always been in love with his brother's wife, but Henry (Aaron) never suspected it " - and Martha least of all" (p. 33). Thus, the unspoken love between Martha and Ethan is the screenwriter's invention, and Martin's realization of Amos's feelings is transferred in the film to Reverend Clayton, in a scene for which Andrew Sarris has the highest admiration,8 as he inadvertently sees Martha caressing Ethan's army coat.

Altered context and suggestion also influence one of the film's prominent themes, racism, less strongly emphasized in the novel even though, there, Martin thinks at one point (p. 247) that he would like to see all Comanches dead, "cleaned off the face of the world." The stronger emphasis in the film is the result of the characterization of Ethan Edwards who, as portrayed by John Wayne, is a much more virulent racist than is Amos Edwards. Martin fears Amos's "black fits" of hatred for Comanches and tells both Laurie and Amos himself (pp. 2 1 9) that Amos, who would rather avenge Martha than save Debbie, might blunder into a village on a killing spree and endanger Debbie who would, as a result, be put to death by her captors. But this fear is less chilling than the one Martin expresses to Laurie during the first homecoming, that Ethan is now searching for Debbie to kill her because she has been living with Indians, or, more precisely, living with a buck. The dimension of Ethan's hatred (in addition to the element of suspense) is surely enlarged in the film. Martin's fears are confirmed in that tense scene when Debbie comes to warn them; Ethan's attempt to kill her and Martin's shielding her with his body have no counterpart in the novel, and this scene naturally foreshadows the famous climax during which Ethan pursues Debbie and Martin ineffectually tries to protect her. The context of another scene is altered to a racist context when the description of Martin as "dark as an Indian except for his light eyes" (p. 8) is converted literally in the film to "one eighth Cherokee."9 In this circumstance, the dialogue between Amos and Martin (p. 9) in which Amos asks Martin, as Ethan does in the film, not to call him "Uncle" ("Nor 'Grampaw,' neither. Nor 'Methusaleh,' neither") shifts significantly from one between an older man who resents an implication of advancing years in the deferential respect of youth to one between a man who wants no one who is part-Indian or mixed breed as "kin." Another added scene, Ethan killing buffalo in a frenzied attempt to deny Indians a winter food supply, heightens his racist image, and the linking of the two scenes in the book involving white women captives produces the shot of Ethan, his face bitter with hate, pronouncing that the women at the fort are no longer white: "They're Comandi." Laurie sounds remarkably like Ethan in her last speech before the final homecoming, warning Martin that Debbie is just "a buck's leavings" and advising that Ethan ought to "put a bullet in her brain," but this speech is summarized from the point in the novel when, as in the film, Martin sets out for the last time to find Debbie (pp. 203-05). The Laurie in the book, seeking to dissuade Martin, will wait no longer, and indeed she does not. Whatever the Laurie in the film expresses appears to be forgotten in the closing moments.

The closing moments, the reunion of the Jorgenson and Edwards families in the film's divergence from LeMay's text, indicate most strongly that Nugent reworked the idea of "kin" or family to suit a director whose films like How Green was My Valley celebrate the family unit, but in The Searchers the sense of kindship is inevitably tangled with race, especially because in the film, Martin, the adopted son, is part Indian and because, in a sense, his sister has been "adopted" by Comanches. When, in both book and film, Martin tells Debbie, "I'm your brother Martin," there is a nice ambiguity because genetically there is no link between them at all. They are not "blood kin," a fortunate circumstance in the novel, considering its ending, but an idea reinforced twice in the film using dialogue from the book in, again, a slightly altered context. Thus, when Amos (p. 77) tells Martin that Debbie is no kin of his, he is trying to discourage Martin from the quest so that he can settle with the Mathisons and take the place of Brad, whose boots he literally wears. The film, however, seems to assert family identity strongly, and the rejection of his kin by Ethan in his will follows his attempt to kill Debbie, whereas in the novel (p. 220) Amos gives his will to Martin just before they enter Scar's village. By far, the strongest element in the film linking racial hatred and blood ties occurs in the famous moment when Ethan seizes Debbie and lifts her up, the audience believing, from everything that he has said and done, that he will kill her. Instead, he says simply, "Let's go home." Although Jean-Luc Godard's admiration for this moment is well-known, a number of others, missing the thematic linking of home and family, have seen only an abrupt change of heart in Ethan necessary to bring about an arbitrary happy ending. However, Ford established visually the reason for this change of heart in the first scene of the film when, upon his homecoming, Ethan, mistaking his niece for her older sister, lifted Debbie up. This repeated action, so carefully prepared for yet staged in the opening moments as a casual, spontaneous one, clearly indicates that, for Ethan, blood ties, the sense of family or kinship, prove stronger than murderous hate. Ford is perhaps too often credited with working in broad brush strokes on his cinematic canvases, whereas in this instance one could say that the old man had much subtlety in him, for the parallel actions of lifting Debbie, occurring almost two hours apart, are not those that imperceptive viewers will notice; nonetheless, they provide the logical conclusion to the quest for Debbie and to the theme of family conveyed in the opening moments.10

The final scene of the film also reminds us of the sense of family running through its entirety. Indeed, it is often difficult to determine who is really related to whom. First, the reduction of three families to two through the elimination of the Pauleys brings the Edwards and the Jorgensons closer together, particularly when the younger generation has been reduced to the two pairs of lovers, Brad and Lucy ("Brad and Lucy, Lucy and Brad" tease the youngest Edwards when the two are caught kissing) and Martin (of the Edwards household) and Laurie. In the novel, Martin is "scared sick over what they might find back home, and Laurie was in his mind too, so that people he cared about were in two places" (p. 41)11 and the situation is surely such that what happened to the Edwards might just as well have happened to the Jorgensons. These divided feelings are summed up by Lars Jorgenson when he blurts out, "Not Mama," (not in the book)12 an understandably human reaction which nonetheless essentially means "Let it be them, not us." Chance might have had Laurie instead of Lucy the victim, Mrs. Jorgenson rather than Mrs. Edwards dead. (There is no Jorgenson equivalent for Debbie.) The near interchangeability of the families is heightened when Mrs. Jorgenson tells Ethan that she loved Debbie and Lucy as if they were her own (an echo of "as if he were her son"). If we add that Martin inherits Brad's clothes and boots, Mrs. Jorgenson plainly having taken Martha Edwards's place visually at the first homecoming, then who is blood kin and who is spiritual kin in the film becomes a complex matter.13 The final reunion brings these two families together through the framing device of the opening and closing door. Martha opened one door to greet Ethan, and another closes at the Jorgensons. In effect, the two houses, represented by those two doors, have become one home for the Edwards- Jorgenson family. In contrast, in the novel the Jorgenson house is merely a place to return to, not to come home to, the Edwards true home for Amos and Martin remaining a burnt-out shell. The idea of home is such a powerful one in American film, "going home" exerting a strong emotional force on audiences from at least Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to E. T., that one might inevitably expect to find it in the work of John Ford, and in this respect Nugent in his altered ending accommodated his father-in-law well. The union of a family in the film is different from the sexual union of the novel and is almost naturally congenial to Ford whose films so often deal not with returns but with homecomings like those of dusty soldiers to a fort or of an American to an ideal Irish cottage. Critics like Lindsay Anderson who assert that "there is not a theme" in The Searchers14 and who are not deeply moved by its final images fail to discern the centrality of family and home in its narrative structure. Furthermore, this coming together of two families results in what Douglas Brode calls an "integrated" society wherein Martin with his Indian blood and Debbie with her Indian experience wil be sheltered under one roof with the Jorgensons. Visually, the doorway through which the characters finally move suggests that it leads to a haven where, Debbie finally safely inside, will live that family nucleus: mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife. In this context the final image of Ethan, for whom there is no place in this integrated world, evokes considerable pathos as the door is shut upon him.

Finally, one speech in the novel, it seems to me, has provided a governing principle for the visual quality of the film. This is Amos's speech in chapter eleven (p. 64) which John Wayne delivers memorably.

"This don't change anything. Not in the long run. If she's alive, she's safe by now, and they've kept her to raise. ... So we'll find them in the end; I promise you that. By the Almighty God, I promise you that! We'll catch up to 'em, just as sure as the turning of the earth."

The turning of the earth , the changing of the seasons , the passing of years is everywhere a part of the pictorial splendor of The Searchers. Calling the film Ford's "greatest tone poem," Andrew Sarris has praised its richness "in the colors and textures of the seasons and the elements, from the whiteness of winter snows to the brownness of summer sands,"15 but I would agree with Gary Arnold that "the epic elements were there [in the novel] to begin with, ready for Ford and Nugent to recognize and reproduce in cinematically effective terms."16 In effect, this description of Brad Mathison coincides perfectly with Ford's visualization:

"They saw him disappear over the saddle of a ridge at more than two miles. Immediately he reappeared, stopped against the sky, and held his rifle over his head with both hands. It was the signal for "found." (p. 12)

But more than this, the novel, in itself hardly at 272 pages of epic length, provides an epic sense of the American West, through Winton Hoch's magnificent photographynot even nominated for àn Academy Award-, as the narrative moves through snowscapes, buffalo herds, Indian lands, the Spanish southwest, and, of course, Ford's Monument Valley, masquerading as Texas. Few novels or films (cf. How the West Was Won) even begin to convey a sense of the vastness and variety of the American continent and of the American experience. I wish that I could agree with Gary Arnold that LeMay's The Searchers leaves "emotional reverberations that the movie never quite equals." The book is what the British call "a good read." It contains much novelistic detail of the historical background and of the Indian lore of the period ,-the work of a man who is himself a skilled screenwriter. However, in its enlargement of the themes of racism and family, represented by the revised ending in which the union is far more significant than the final uniting of Debbie and Martin in the book, and in its visualization of their quest, The Searchers achieves a fuller dimension than on the printed page.