The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00G005TLY | Format: PDF, EPUB
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In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity.
Cynthia Ann's story has been told and re-told over generations to become a foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted into one of Hollywood's most legendary films, The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne.
Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant story that has emerged departs dramatically from documented history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white civilization, underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of white women by "savages."
What makes John Ford's film so powerful, and so important, Frankel argues, is that it both upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America.
Direct download links available for The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Free PDF
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours and 33 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible Studios
- Audible.com Release Date: October 18, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00G005TLY
I would love to give this book five stars, partially to poke a finger in the eye of the one-star reviewers who want their history black and white. Many of the one-star reviews, aside from those offended by Frankel not being goodthinkful, seem to have missed the point. This is not a book about The Searchers, it's a book about the idea of The Searchers. That is why Frankel spends many pages on Texas history, discusses Alan LeMay in context, and concludes with the countermythologies of Quanah Parker. The idea that the Anglo West was NOT racist (a prevailing one-star view) is a compound of silliness and ignorance that it's hard to take seriously. Frankel tries carefully to balance the racist bombast of white Texas history (Did 19C Texas have a single governor who didn't need to be whipped and tossed down a well?) with the stark (but apparently deniable) savagery of the free range Comanche, which of course offends the black and whities of both sides. He has done a good job of putting together the best of information, but this is not a book about information, it's an interpretation, and a good one.
If you are haunted by the moral ambiguities of The Searchers, that great and profoundly racist film peppered with embarrassing slapstick and yet stark in its moments of honesty, you will enjoy this book. Frankel is examining the American soul and Ford, a sentimental bully and great artist, is as close to that soul as any of our filmmakers. Frankel weighs the pontificating against The Fate Worse Than Death against the reality of colliding and merging cultures; and he reminds us that the one thing worse that being captured by Indians was being rescued.
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