The Searchers (1956)
John Ford's
The Searchers is a classic and all, but for me it is ruined by one crucial scene at the end. After a long and bloodthirsty Hellbent mission to hunt and kill the Indians responsible for massacring much of his family, John Wayne's Ethan Edwards finally gets the Injuns and finds Debbie (Natalie Wood), his niece who was captured during the initial raid and forced to become an Indian squaw. Edwards as a character is a racist who absolutely despises the Natives. His stated goal if they ever find Debbie alive is to kill her, since she has now lived among them and is impure. But when that moment arrives during the finale, Ethan of course has a swift change of heart and instead of shooting her dead he sweeps her into his arms and says they're finally going home.
As a Hollywood movie of the 1950s, I suppose there's no other way it could have ended. But for me the sudden change in the character is very unsatisfying and there are few real hints or justifications that it is coming. The Ethan Edwards we see for most of the film is a sad, bitter, angry, lonely man who's naked rage and racism makes it for me far and away the best role of Wayne's career. Had the movie carried through with that darkness to its logical conclusion and had Ethan murder pretty little Debbie in her moccasins, then
The Searchers becomes an extremely bold and brilliant movie in my book. But since Ford and company can't quite commit and let the character do what he was designed to do, it really ruins the whole movie for me. The hairpin turn in character gives it a kind of "happy" and hopeful ending, and Debbie is reunited with the family before Ethan walks out into the wilderness to be alone forever. But imagine the statement the movie would have made and the acting Wayne would have had to pull off if he gunned her down in cold blood and
then had to return her body to the family, realizing after his rage and ingrained racism has subsided a bit what he's actually done. THAT is an ending....but that scene doesn't exist.
Suspicion (1941)
Alfred Hitchcock's
Suspicion is about handsome playboy Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) who has a whirlwind romance and quickly marries a spinster heiress (Joan Fontaine). But while he is charming and suave, she begins to suspect that he has only married her for her fortune, and what's worse intends to murder her. The body of the film is filled with typical Hitchcockian suspense as even small seemingly innocent gestures become sinister. What a great part for Cary Grant. After becoming a movie superstar in romantic comedies like
Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth and
My Favorite Wife, using that inherently likeable screen persona to mask an opportunistic murderer is a brilliant touch. Unfortunately, the ending lets us down again. After event after event that seem sinister, Johnnie takes her for a drive up a twisty, dangerous road. At the moment when it seems he is going to finish her off once and for all, he takes her into his arms, expresses his true love, and the audience is supposed to buy that every single thing that happened in the flick was just a series of misunderstandings. And they lived happily ever after.
In the book and the way Hitch wanted to shoot it, Aysgarth
is a killer, and he eventually poisons his bride. Hitch even had a great twist for the finale, where she writes a letter explaining how she was killed just before he enters the room with the poison, and after she's dead seeing the unmailed letter he casually takes it to the mailbox, not realizing he has sealed his own fate in the process. Had THAT been the ending, I think it shoots near the top of Hitchcock's best movies. Instead it is stuck somewhere in the middle, very forgettable despite good work from Grant and Nigel Bruce. The ending as is doesn't work, it's fake and illogical. A couple years later Hitch returned to the theme and got it dark and right with
Shadow of a Doubt, where Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie is an unrepentant monster. Too bad the powers that be at the Studio wouldn't let Cary Grant play such a character first.