“Here comes John Wayne! ‘I’m not gonna cry about my pa! I’m gonna build an airport! Put my name on it!’ Why Michael? So you can fly away from your feelings?” -Tobias Fünke, circa 2004
John Ford’s 1956 Western epic The Searchers is a complicated film. It’s beautifully shot, but tonally tough for modern audiences. Admittedly, this was my first time watching (though far from my first John Wayne film), and I had a middling experience with it. I’ll split the review into two segments: what worked for me and what did not.
The Searchers (an adaptation of a novel of the same name) is the story of a Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards’ (John Wayne) return to his family in West Texas following the unconditional surrender of the South. During his return, a group of Comanches raid the homestead and take at least one woman hostage. Ethan recruits a handful of local Texas Rangers (unfortunately Nolan Ryan was not available) to search for the abducted women.
What Worked:
The film is shot in VistaVision making the wide-angle set pieces absolutely breathtaking. Many of the scenes were filmed on location in Monument Valley in Norther Arizona/Southern Utah, and they are absolutely gorgeous. The dazzling photography of the buttes (specifically the West Mitten Butte) is about as impressive as you will see in film. Notably, the beautiful vistas and nature shots in this film were recreated (if not elevated) some 6 years later in Lawrence of Arabia.
This film was also impressionable to one Quinten Tarantino as there were two specific bits in the film that were lifted nearly identically in Inglourious Basterds (the last shot of this film correlates to Hans Landa following Shoshanna out of the dairy farm and there is a nickname fiasco that is replicated with “Aldo the Apache and The Little Man”).
The performances from the supporting actors are quite good as well. Jeffrey Hunter in particular really stands out as the one carrying the emotional weight of the film. John Wayne is and always was incapable of that task, so Hunter picks up the slack here very well. I also enjoyed the performances of Ward Bond as Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson, Vera Miles as Laurie Jorgenson, and Natalie Woods as Debbie Johnson.
What did not work for me:
This is the part of the review where I try to get the Ghost of John Wayne aka the Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson of the 1950s to fight me.
You get what you pay for with John Wayne. The one-note, hyper-masculine image of a man just does not work in this day in age. Maybe I’m an optimist, but the day has long since passed where the only acceptable response to a young man in his 20s losing his sister is a strong right hook to the jaw. John Wayne’s form of masculinity may have worked on my grandparents and to an extent on my parents, but it does not work on me or anyone around me. There’s a reason this kind of character is reserved for Clint Eastwood movies that no one under 60 gives a damn about these days.
To further on the Dwayne Johnson comparison, was there some kind of clause in every John Wayne contract that he was not allowed to be bested at anything? At times (and maybe it’s just me), it feels like when I watch a John Wayne movie, I can feel his influence on the director to ensure that he’s always on the winning end. Never the butt of the joke. No one ever getting over on him. It’s truly not allowed. The issue that differentiates him with the Rock is the Rock usually doesn’t take on films with the weight of an issue like the genocide of the Native Americans.
Textually, this film is critical of the eradication of Native Americans in the West. There are unnecessary acts of violence that the protagonist unleashes these people (and their corpses) that show this hatred in a bad light very clearly, but is there really any introspection or transformative internal moment Ethan has in his character arc? I certainly did not feel that. Instead, he walks away smiling at the end of the movie into the west that has now been conquered. It is also completely impossible for me to divorce John Wayne’s baggage as a person who believed “in white supremacy” and did not believe we “did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians” from my viewing experience of this movie.
With all of this being said, I understand why the film works for generations before me. I also have some level of nostalgia for Westerns as I distinctly remember watching them with my grandparents as a child (two of whom are no longer with us). I recommend this if you want to appease your elders, but if you’re a modern movie watcher who wants to see a western without quite as much baggage, I might suggest Tombstone, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Once Upon A Time in the West instead.
7.0/10. I’m not going to go out of my way to watch this film again. In its time, It was worth two letter grades higher probably, but I can think of multiple modern and not-so-modern westerns that I would watch before this.
119 minutes
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