Larry McMurtry Has A Bone to Pick with John Ford
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Larry McMurtry is currently working on five movie scripts, ![Larry McMurtry IMG_6027[11]](http://frontburner.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Larry-McMurtry-IMG_602711-210x300.jpg "Larry McMurtry IMG_6027[11]")
including the film adaptation of S.C. Gwynne‘s Empire of the Summer Moon about the legendary half-white/half-Comanche chief Quanah Parker. So when McMurtry (shown in photo by Randy Hunter)Â made a rare appearance in Snyder, Texas, Labor Day weekend to take part in the first-ever John Wayne Film Fest, you knew he would speak with authority introducing The Searchers, director John Ford’s classic western. The 1956 flick, which starred Wayne, Natalie Wood and Jeffrey Hunter, was said to have been based on the kidnaping of Parker’s then-9-year-old mother by Comanches in the 1830s–in what’s now the state of Texas, not Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona, as depicted in Ford’s masterpiece.
“I’m very contrarian where The Searchers are concerned, because I know a whole lot more about the history of Northwest Texas than I did 50 years ago,” McMurtry told 60 or 70 people gathered in an open field for the outdoor screening near Snyder’s old VFW hall Friday night. “… Ford was an autocrat. He simply decided that Monument Valley was the best place to film, so he turned Monument Valley into the West. Monument Valley isn’t the West. There were no Comanches there.
“The kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker, the mother of Quanah Parker, [took place] in 1836, not 1868 [as shown in the film, when] Comanche power was diminishing,” McMurtry went on. ” It also “didn’t take that long to find out where Cynthia Ann Parker was. But here we have a four- to five-year search. … I’m not saying it’s an ineffective movie. It’s very potent. But there are some discrepancies that bother people like myself.”
The following morning, the author of Lonesome Dove and other best-selling novels showed up at the crowded Manhattan Coffeehouse, on the Snyder town square, and spent nearly an hour answering questions from fans and festival-goers. Asked what he thought of Wayne, the focal point of Snyder’s 72-hour movie marathon, McMurtry replied: “John Wayne is a very powerful iconic American actor. I think his work varied, according to the director.”
Since many novelists and filmmakers take historical liberties, the writer was asked, do the discrepancies he referred to Friday night make The Searchers less of a film? (The movie, after all, was voted the best western of all time by the American Film Institute.)
“The historical discrepancies make it less of a good movie for me,” McMurtry replied. “Movies are not stories; they’re pictures … [and] the visuals are extraordinary. … The story can be bulls***; it’s the pictures and acting that matter. [Wayne] spends five years looking for the girl [in the film, just] so that he can kill her? How did he change [in deciding against killing her, in the end]? When did he change? That bothers me. It’s a mystery.
“I think [the film company] got better work out of John Wayne than it did out of John Ford.”
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17 comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkNXhTSTmbY
Great scene. There’s a reason Tarrantino pays homage to it in Kill Bill.
It may not be an accurate picture of history, but as film making it’s superb.
I loved Lonesome Dove. Is it an accurate picture of the story of Goodnight and Loving?
Fictionalized History.
I just don’t follow the logic of McMurtry’s criticism. It ain’t a documentary. And Bill, I agree on all counts, but many of the story lines in LD were pulled from various sources, some of which involve Goodnight or Loving, as recounted in The Trail Drivers of Texas, I believe, and Sally Reynolds Matthews’ Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle.
You should have heard his rant before the Alamo Drafthouse screening of The Last Picture Show in Archer City back in July. It lasted for what seemed like 30 minutes. The man still has a lot to say, on everything from Bogdanovich to how Terms of Endearment deserves more recognition. I went up to speak to him before the screening. I shook his hand and told him how great it was to see the film in the same spot they shot it 40 years later. He mumbled something and walked away. They say that’s just Larry.
Ransom Stoddard (Senator Stoddard played by Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence): You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott (newspaper writer): No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
John Ford, autocrat and visionary, printed legend in every frame his cameras ever made. Thank God – and Monument Valley.
John Wayne’s character changes right before he lifts Natalie Wood’s character in the air. He sees his brother’s dead wife – the love of his life – in his niece’s eyes – he sees the daughter he himself might have had with the woman – and realizes intuitively that the one redeeming act of his otherwise miserable brutal xenaphobic life will be to cradle “his found daughter” in his arms and take her back home – which he does. So what if it takes five years of searching for him to come to this realization? It took him a lifetime of savagery to get to the mouth of that cave and discover his humanity.
Of course, the change in Wayne’s character is subliminally undergone, then communicated outwardly in that same non verbal manner – because that’s what movies do, right? Even McMurtry says movies are pictures. So John Ford brilliantly did his job.
By the way, that subliminal communication is what makes people cry at the end of The Searchers. They understand the whole ball of wax at that crucial moment and just let loose – except, I guess, for Larry McMurtry. Sometimes you can be too close to history.
Larry’s criticisms are absurd. The Searchers is a work of fiction. The story may echo a real life event – many works of fiction do – but so what? Film makers create their own worlds. Look at Alfred Hitchcock movies. Many defy logic. In North by Northwest Hitchcock makes Glen Cove a rocky coast. It isn’t! The top of Mount Rushmore is different from the studio set Hitchcock created. Who cares?! Stop being so literal minded Larry. It’s not an intelligent way to watch a movie, or interpret a work of fiction.
I met McMurtry at a Book Club of Texas dinner in the early 90′s. Stanley Marcus originally founded the club in 1929, but it faded until he brought it back in the 1980′s. McMurtry was the evening’s speaker, promoting a new hardback edition of Lonesome Dove, which had been revived in bookstores after the miniseries just two years earlier. He did a talk and a signing after dinner, and I mentioned an acquaintance who was one of his relatives, not terribly far removed and born with his same last name.
“I don’t know who that is,” he said with his characteristically dyspeptic look and accompanying nature (it didn’t fall far from the tree, either, if you’re familiar with James’ music-to-slit-your-wrist-by).
I looked at him bewildered and repeated the name. Nope, he said definitively. So I turned to the woman next to him, an assistant, and looked pleadingly. She leaned in his ear and said something like, “Oh, Larry, that’s so-and-so, who is one of so-and-so’s kids.” The assistant used real names that I don’t remember, and he finally offered a tepid “Oh, yes, of course. Say hello for me.”
If the guy can’t be accurate about his own family, he has a lot of gall demanding literal accuracy from other storytellers, much less ones who work in a totally different medium as the film director John Ford did.
So far, McMurtry has been accused of:
1. Mumbling and having less than a Kiwanis handshake
2. Being unfamiliar with a “not terribly far removed” family member
3. Ranting, being surly, being tepid
4. Being a harsh critic of some folks’ favorite films
This is what happens when we try to turn great writers into celebrities. Read his books; otherwise leave the man alone.
(Disclosure: McMurtry generously spoke to a group of young writers at Archer City in July, an interruption of his regular routine. I was there. He submitted to questions and patiently answered them. He was straightforward, clear. He assessed himself as a “second-rate regional author.” He was blunt and clear in his assessment of other writers. Not the ideal talk-show babbler, perhaps, but more than one might expect of someone with better things to do.)
Music-to-slit-your-wrist-by? Talk about a dyspeptic assessment. Jamrs McMurtry is greatness.
James is pretty good, too.
Hey Bill Marvel, I think you read too much into my comments on Larry. I thought his rant was really freakin’ awesome! And though I grew up not far from Archer City, & spent a lot of time there, this was the 1st time I got to meet him. I was just glad to see that he still had such fire left in him regarding his works. I’m a writer/filmmaker and he’s probably the #1 influence on me. I’ve read almost every book he’s written & I think Horseman, Pass By & The Last Picture Show are masterpieces. They depict life in small town North Texas better than anything I’ve ever read. I wish more of my generation would read his work. And Larry can rant, be surly, be tepid, talk shit about John Ford, forget family members, mumble, ignore me, or do whatever he wants, he’s Larry ‘Fucking’ McMurtry.
One correction for sure…McMurtry said Howard Hawks (not the film company)got better work out of Wayne than John Ford. I was there and the written report is accurate, but McMurtry started it by saying he was a “contrarian” and one could not take away from the potency of “The Searchers” So he acknowledged he was being picky because he had been working on a screenplay for Gwynne’s “Empire of the Summer Moon” and he was struck by his thoroughness. He also mentioned that he had made his own mistakes and he had been criticized by numerous people about his scene in “Lonesome Dove” that described the water moccasins balling up in the flood. They told him moccasins do not do that. In any case his comments were entertaining more than anything else. Nevertheless, as McMurtry said the written word and film are distinctly different mediums. I think all would agree both McMurtry and Ford are icons in their respective fields. the only thing I would add about the event is that Barry Tubb and the volunteers of Snyder should be commended for putting together a great weekend!
Great article!
@Cheeca: Thanks for correcting the point about Hawks.
Ok…I can understand his problem with them filming in Monument Valley when it all took place in West Texas…but I watched Lonesome Dove and when Gus rescues Lori from the Comancheros up on the Canadian…they spend the night at Adobe Walls…they showed ruins with Roman Columns leaning against the walls…Adobe Walls had no Roman Columns on any of their adobe buildings…That does not take away from the movie though, just as Monument Valley does not take away from Ford’s movie.
Great article.
Thanks to all who visited Snyder. The JOHN WAYNE FILM FEST was a big success.
McMURTRYs introduction to THE SEARCHERS and Coffeehouse appearance added to a spectacular event. Those who heard MCMURTRY surly took time to pause, reflect and arrive at their own conclusions to his comments. We are all free thinkers and come away with diferrent prospectives. Isn’t this GRAND.
Almer John Davis: Amen! “The Searchers” is art, not documentary. Of the modern obsession with so-called “realism,” film scholar Tag Gallagher has the following to say in his essential book, “John Ford: The Man and His Films”:
“‘Realism,’ said Brecht, ‘doesn’t consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are.’ Thus realism is a function of style (and thus differing greatly from one artist to another); but too often the term is used in ways both meaningless and confusing. What critics praised in 1935 as the ultimate word in realism seems today ultimate contrivance. To many casual moviegoers, any film made before 1970 looks artificial and anything made today looks realistic. This state of affairs exists because people are reluctant to engage a movie on a stylistic level. The concept itself of realism is misleading. There is more reality outside my window than in all the movies ever made. We do not need art for reality.
“Among movie artists Ford should be classed with Murnau, von Sternberg, Vidor, Renoir, Ophuls, Mizoguchi and Rossellini, as denoting a cinema of felt expression through aesthetic form. Ford’s sort of movie implies complete stylization of every element. All content becomes formalized; every quality of sight or sound is thoroughly aestheticized. This process of stylization was, it seems, prompted by Murnau’s demonstration of the artistic potential of cinema: how cinema could formalize feelings, and be “modal.” Such stylization, far from being antipathetic to ‘realism,’ treats our sense of reality as a feeling to be formalized and intensified.”
Film is art, however, the screenplay of Empire of the Summer Moon carries a great weight and expectation for many who wish to see this tragic story told on the big screen. This is a tragedy for the Indianas and the Whites; for all the lives lost. Of course, the Indians pay the final price in the end. This needs to be portrayed in as realistic manner as possible, yet be entertaining. The film should be bloody without being gratuitous and show the complexity of the various tribes and bands within tribes. I think Larry McMurtry is up for the challenge.
Where the film is shot is central to the plot and is the heart of the book (movie). This is a story about plains indians! McMurty is absolutly right about “The Searchers”. I had the same feeing when seeing the original “True Grit” with John Wayne. They talk about being in southern Oklahoma when they are obviously in Colorado. There is no reason why this can’t be shot in Texas AND Oklahoma. I suggest using alot of the living Parker Clan as extras!