The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Seunple films - synopses and character lists
THE SEARCHERS US 56

McCorey with his broad Texan accent and his exaggeratedly
country bumpkin ways. There is the reading of the letter, the
wedding party, the fight between Marty and Charlie over
Laurie. These ’domestic' interludes function in the
narrative's unfolding as relief from the rigours of the
protracted search: these two halves, as it were, of the story
are linked in the figure of the Reverend Samuel Clayton. This
is a key figure in which the contradictions between the old
and the new, the military and the religious, the masculine and
the ridiculous, are presented in uneasy and often comic
coexistence. Rev. Clayton possesses a double authority in the
community in that he is both the preacher, performer of
baptism, wedding and funeral rites, and the Captain of the
Texas Rangers. He fought in the Civil war for the
Confederates, but unlike Ethan he accepted defeat and found a
place in the new order of things which followed the Civil war.
Unlike Ethan again, his character is firmly established as one
operating 'within' society and the law, in the melodrama mode
of the film, yet he is also offered, particularly in the final
and successful assault on Scar's band, as an experienced and
convincing inhabitant of the western generic mode. The
distance between Clayton and Ethan, often a diametric
opposition, is in this segment so narrowed that we are invited
to view them, as they stand in close up on the bluff
overlooking the Indian village which they are about to attack,
visible in the far distance of the desert landscape, as
equivalent if not equal. This harmony, however, is violently
disrupted, in generic terms, in the resolution of the attack.
Here we have the sombre suggestion of Ethan's barbaric
scalping of the dead Scar juxtaposed with the comic scene of
Clayton squatting with his trousers down while his men perform
a minor operation on his backside, inadvertently stabbed by
Lieutenant Greenhill (played by John Wayne's son) sabre.
Throughout the film Clayton is offered as a comic opposite to
the exceptionally independent and self sufficient Ethan, and
in their first confrontation it is Clayton who is shown to
have been in the wrong. In the denouement they act together,
and he mediates between Ethan and Marty in the crucial
question of Debbie's worth. Thus, despite often being a comic
figure, he is also shown to be pragmatic in his ability to
reevaluate his experience in the light of new situations.
Though in the end the film appears to validate a pragmatic
approach to events - when the door closes in the last scene
Clayton is inside with the Jorgensens - it is Unrelievedly
racist in its visual representation of the white:indian
opposition, and heavily patriarchal in its delineation of
female characters. Whereas there is no respite from the
film's racism, however, the question of its sexual politics is
more complex. It is in the negotiation of the female
characters that the fracture precipitated by the coexistence
of two generic modes is most clearly evident. Women in this
film are, to use Mulvey's phrase, 'bearers not makers of
meaning' and yet since the scenes involving female characters

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