I remember being in Chicago back in the day, listening to an FM rock station. After a bevy of alternative rock, the DJ suddenly put on the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands. I'll never forget that moment. We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that? Here was music making its own case. It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked. And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock. The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than. It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day. And maybe that's the way great music should be heard. Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approa...
TERRA FIRMA LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: SOUNDTRACKS MATTER #1
The Searchers. No film like it on all the Earth.
You can announce a masterpiece with bombast and orchestral sweep and set the tone for something REALLY BIG. The Searchers does exactly that in its opening moments. But the fabulous composer Max Steiner quickly understands that what really matters is the landscape of the human heart—not so much the land itself, though the glorious vistas of the Arizona/Utah desert rule with an elegance that stuns and delights the eye.
More importantly, what happens in this, the greatest film ever made, is something we can put up against Shakespeare and Bach without shame. It is on par with any of their great works—and there are many: the Henriad, say, of Shakespeare, or TheSix Partitas of Bach.
And Steiner knows what Ford is doing.
He quickly heals the frame, bringing in a strumming guitar and the soaring voices of The Sons of the Pioneers singing Stan Jones' immortal question:
"What makes a man to wander...
what makes a man to roam..."
And we are off into mystery and magnificence with no guardrails.
That John Ford—who some say is the master beyond masters—worked every chamber of the human heart here is undeniable. But he had help, much help, from the unstoppably great acting and from Steiner's score, which, when it does hit orchestral-sweep mode, does so humbled and respectful before the titanic, and sometimes troubling, scenes we see in our minds. For The Searchers, made in the middle 1950s, keeps some of its most hideous and awful scenes from our gaze.
Then comes that ending like no other ending in all of cinema.
Steiner brings back Stan Jones and The Sons of the Pioneers. A man searches his heart and soul, searching somewhere "way out there," looking for the peace of mind he may—or may not—ever find.
And then:
"Ride away, ride away, ride away."
I have argued that what separates The Searchers from all other films is its power. Its darkness. Its redemption. And, finally, its mystery.
And I have to say that the sublime soundtrack—even in its most orchestral and percussive moments—is a major contributor to the film's shining greatness.
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