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The Searchers (1956)

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Edgy MD May 18 2011 06:23 PM

John Wayne is a lot dickier than he is in his other movies.

Edgy MD May 19 2011 08:07 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

I don't know. This is supposed to be a standout amoung the Ford films, but it's problematic. Wayne is an embittered itinerant Civl War vet who heads back to his old Texas town to set a spell with his brother's family. His brother has a teenage daughter, a pre-teen son, a tween daughter, and a young adult 1/8 Indian adoptee son-ish guy that Wayne himself had rescued as a baby from a Comanche raid. Wayne's characters usually run the gamut from code hero to paladin to misunderstood braveheart to last-of-his-breed legend. But here he's a real asshole anti-hero and gets to stretch a little beyond his limited acting pallette. He hates the Comanch so much that it keeps him up at night. Were you ever nice to one? Then he hates you too! Are you a comanche who's not a coldblooded killer? Bullshit. No such thing. He shoots Buffalo and leaves them to die just to warm himself with the thought of one more starving Indian. He comes across an Indian corpse and shoots his dead eyes out because, he explains, Indian spirits need their eyes to find the spirit kingdom in the afterlife. And that's the kind of dick we're dealing with. When a raiding party runs off with the herd of a neighboring Swedish Texan rancher, he's enlisted into a pursuing party of Rangers, but then his brother's home gets raided while he's out playing cop and the only survivors are the two girls, carried off into God knows what. You can imagine how pissed this guy is. But he doesn't go crazy. He lets it burn. Slowly. Holy fuck this guy. And that's where we get the title. He rides in search of the girls, along with the octaroon adoptee son (and boy, does that kid get some shit) and the Swede's son --- also the sweetheart of the teenager. And that's what we've got. For five years they ride in pursuit of a warchief named Scar (!!). Other Ford movies can be more charitable to the Indians, painting the calvary in a mixed light, protraying the exploitations of the US Indian agents as so hateful that the tribesmen had little choice but to go to war. But the bitter racism of Wayne's character in this movie is unambiguous, and it can't help but infect the tone of the movie at large. Wayne's that iconic a dude. There's probably a lot of messages in here deeper than I'm describing --- about the burdens men carry, about living beyond tragedy, about fathers and sons --- but they're sublimated in a movie about how them Injuns need to be scalped but good. Plus it's supposed to be in Texas, but Ford's clearly further west shooting under the same buttes he always likes to shoot under. Then there's the colorful townsfolk that the film occasionally switches back to --- the Swedes and a preacher/marshall guy with a funny hat, and the town halfwit. The comic relief in Ford films can often feel a little forced when contrasted with the bloody work of his heroes, but here, while this Wayne-monster --- with his spirit broken to bits multiple times over --- is on a gruesome five-year vendetta, it feels almost insulting. Anyhow, some of the most beautiful Western scenery on film is here, starting with shot one, and some typically great stunt-riding. And it's all wrapped up in a complicated and problematic picture. What did you think?

Vic Sage May 20 2011 02:44 PM Re: The Searchers (1956) Edited 2 time(s), most recently on May 20 2011 03:08 PM

I think reading 21st century post-racial sentiments onto a 1950s Western is irrelevant and unfair, and anyway SEARCHERS is about "injuns" the way MOBY DICK is about a whale. It's about the nature of obsession, and what "heroism" is, and what it took to carve civilization out of an unforgiving wilderness. The Indians are totems, symbols of unforgiving Nature. Wayne stands with his fist upraised, shaking it at the hurricane. Ultimately, the love of family overrides his instincts and he rescues his niece, despite her having gone "native". He returns her to that cabin on the plains, and the movie ends with the family going inside, but the Duke cannot enter their world. He is uncivilized; he is necessary for civilization but not a part of it. He walks away from the camera as the door to the cabin closes behind him. This scene bookends the opening of the film, in which the door first opened and the camera went out into the West... And it's TEXAS like its CIMMERIA. It's "the West", and that's all it has to be. It's not a nature documentary. But even on the most literal (and least mythic) level, the movie doesn't celebrate Wayne's attitudes toward the Indians. In the end, he is as "other" as the Indians, and he is shut out (literally) for it. Still his hate fuels him, and gives him the strength to continue the search, just as love fuels the others. He was a necessary beast whose time was passing, but he got the job done. if anything, Ford is attacking racism as one of the bases for genocide against the native population. Even the more genteel characters express racist attitudes toward the indians, and especially toward miscegenation. That was the world in which Wayne's ETHAN EDWARDS lived. Edwards' racism is primarily motivated by desire for revenge against acts of cruelty actually committed by the commanches in the story against his family and community, not some small-minded prejudice formed outside experience. He is a complex character that to simply dismiss out of hand as a hateful racist is to miss the point entirely. Ford's westerns always had that corny, sentimental humor going on in the background, but this had a much hotter flame burning in the foreground, for which SEARCHERS deserves every accolade its achieved.

Edgy MD May 20 2011 02:49 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

Vic Sage wrote: I think reading 21st century post-racial sentiments onto a 1940s Western is irrelevant and unfair... Don't makke me a presentist again. I contrasted it with other Ford films of the era, mostly films that pre-date it, in fact. Way to give up the spoiler!

Vic Sage May 20 2011 03:01 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

most earlier westerns make no attempt to show white racism toward natives and simply embrace white heroism against a hostile horde. I don't know see how one could accept that as preferable approach. and i don't give spoilers for 55 year old films. If you haven't seen it by now, then tough shit. Especially since the move was selected for preservation by National Film Registry in 1989, and has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time, with the 2007 AFI 100 Greatest American Films list ranking it in 12th place (they also name it the greatest Western of all time).

Vince Coleman Firecracker May 23 2011 01:07 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

The film presents Edwards both as heroic and anti-heroic. The character (as Arthur Eckstein noted in his essay "Darkening Ethan") is significantly "darkened" (if that's an appropriate term) from the novel to the screen, signaling a desire on Ford's part to present him critically, but, as Edge pointed out, he's played with such charisma by Wayne that he evokes identification and, perhaps, even empathy from his mostly white audience. While he's ultimately excluded from society at the end of the film, he's also shot heroically (low angle, etc) throughout most of the film. I think it's the tension between these two ends that makes the film interesting. I do think Ford was trying to be critical of "mainstream" attitudes towards the white violent hero that conquers the red savages, but his film still retains many of the problematic conventions of the genre (and of Hollywood (and, you know, America) in general). And I don't think it's anachronistic to read the film as racist. While resistant readings may have not been as widely considered as they are now (not that they are really all that widely considered today), they were definitely happening. Stanley Vestal's "The Hollywooden Indian," for one example, was published in 1936. The film's presentation of miscegenation, in particular, would have certainly been read as conservative by a decent segment of its audience, and reactionary by at least a small percentage. And the Comanche are certainly essentialized and dehumanized in a way that may be acceptable if you're attaching it to a whale (and a white one at that), but doesn't look so hot when you're dealing with human beings. I think the film is great. And racist. And critical of racism. It's an important historical, political, generic and aesthetic text.

Edgy MD May 23 2011 01:56 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

Yeah, I'm certain I'd see more (and less) on a followup viewing. And I'd focus on other angles. But I certainly didn't mean to whack Ford (who I'm a fan of) with an anachroistic bat that he couldn't have anticipated. But I contrast it with Wayne's character of Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, who deals quite diplomatically with the Indians even as he accepts that, when dimplomacy runs its course, it's his duty to make war on them. Having seen those immediately prior, the relative defecit of that trait is what jumped out at me. So Ford of all people knew what he was doing, even as the effect is mixed (and maybe --- or probably --- supposed to be). And yeah, I guess it is both racist and anti-racist. ...he's also shot heroically (low angle, etc) throughout most of the film. It's amazing. Whenever they engage the Indians, Wayne's fellow Texans take cover behind rocks and trees, laying low with their rifles for self-preservation, while he stands like a statue, usually firing his pistol, as if no bullet could harm him. It's as if, as Richard Pryor theorized, Wayne could look death in the eye and say, "Get the fuck out of here."

Edgy MD May 24 2011 05:59 PM Re: The Searchers (1956)

Vic Sage wrote: He is a complex character that to simply dismiss out of hand as a hateful racist is to miss the point entirely. Please give me some credit. I didn't dismiss him out of hand.

RealityChuck May 25 2011 08:50 AM Re: The Searchers (1956)

Not a terrible movie, but immensely overrated. Wayne gave much better performances for Ford in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (both of which show a much more nuanced view of settler-Indian relations). Rather dreary overall, which may account for its critical acclaim. That and the fact that it wears its message on a big neon sign that flashes throughout.