The Searchers

Director: John Ford

8 July 2024

See

Ethan (John Wayne) an American Civil War veteran returns to his family at his brother’s  homestead only for them to be massacred while he’s part of a posse hunting Comanche. Along with Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) they set out to rescue the survivors held captive. 

Think

I’ve never seen a John Wayne film before, nor one by John Ford, despite an appreciation for the Western genre. They collaborated 14 times and this is said to be their best. But the classics aren’t quite like what I like about Dances with Wolves or Deadwood. I see the bravado as having more in common with Yellowstone, though I like alot about that series and its spin offs as well as modern western films written by Taylor Sheridan like Hell or Highwater, Wind River and Sicario. The attitudes here feel more parochial. IT comes across in the machismo of cowboys vs indians rather than showing the perspectives of both cowboys and indians. Ethan is overtly racist, yet knows how to perate in dealing with renegade chief Scar (Henry Brandon). More troubling is the idea that his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) has been tainted by that captivity. Sebastian Junger’s writing in Tribe explains that white women who became part of Native American Indian tribes experienced a more egalitarian society than their own, and upon being returned to their white settlements would often run away again to their tribe. Here that nuance is flattened to them being brainwashed, like they’ve been lobotomised by near scalping, rather than taken in. It was after all made in 1956. Roger Ebert wrote this kind of quest and rescue was referenced in George Lucas’s Star Wars, Martin Scorses’s Taxi Driver, and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Or even Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas. These are all variations of John Ford’s film, based upon a novel by Alan LeMay, and adapted by Frank Nugent. 

Feel

A bit perplexed, apparently the storyline spans years, characters driven mad are confusing. Maybe classics require practice, movies as well as books require patience and to be read and watched slower. I prefer the style of western like books written by Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuance and Callan Wink which contain more exposition and heartache. The ending of The Searchers might have been where that type of western storytelling began.