About the Book

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 the Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's story has been told and retold 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," directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne: "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest . . . and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made "

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.

Product Details

Media: Hardcover Book, 320 pages

Publication Date: Feb. 19th, 2013

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

ISBN-10: 1608191052

ISBN-13: 9781608191055

Series: Not Applicable

Language: English

• Categories: Film History & Film Criticism Native American History