Download The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend AudioBook Free
In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and finally became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her take, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to expire in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's history has been advised and re-told over years to become a foundational American tale. The myth offered surge to operas and one-act works, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be modified into one of Hollywood's most famous films, The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... & most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. Glenn Frankel, from Hollywood and then returning to the roots of the storyline, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a ageless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant history that has emerged departs significantly from documented record: it is of the unavoidable triumph of white civilization, underpinned by panic about the sullying of white women by "savages." Why is John Ford's film so powerful, therefore important, Frankel argues, is the fact that it both upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities encompassing race, sexuality, and assault in the settling of the Western world and the making of America.
