BFI Top 50: The Searchers, Released in 1956, Directed by John Ford

What I know going in

I have seen the film once a decade ago.

 

Immediate reaction

The Searchers is a film at odds with itself. The basic plot, and a few of the characters, is incredibly dark and subversive for a western from the 50’s. The word “revisionist” was just a twinkle in the genre’s eye at this point in time, but The Searchers was already paving the road for the boom of nihilistic westerns that came out in the 60’s and 70’s. Here are just a few of the major events in the film:

-        At the start of the film, Ethan’s entire family is slaughtered or kidnapped.

-        Ethan stumbles upon his kidnapped niece and discovers she has been raped and killed

-        Ethan and Marty come upon an army base where several rescued white women have been reduced to the point of screaming or staring into the void

 

That’s not really light, turn-your-brain-off entertainment. In addition, many of the character turns and acting choices are twisted just enough from typical western archetypes that they warp into something wholly new and iconic. There is of course John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, but I’ll get to him in a bit. Ethan has a tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it subplot with his brother’s wife. Just as he and Clayton are setting out to look for the Comanche, Clayton looks through a doorway and sees Aaron’s wife, Martha, gently caressing Ethan’s outfit. Martha then enters the main room, passes the outfit to Ethan, who then embraces her for a split second and kisses her on the forehead. Ethan then exits and Martha silently grasps after him, all while Clayton is standing awkwardly in the foreground. The movie tells a mini-story in the span of few minutes, with no dialogue, and all based on a few simple gestures. It’s an amazingly subtle sequence that, in addition to Ethan’s hinted-at past, quickly tells the viewer why he has been out in the wild for so long. Even the villain, Scar, gets a few minutes of backstory to explain his actions against Ethan’s family and turn the film into a commentary on the cycle of violence.

 

And now to get to Ethan himself. I have unfortunately little experience with Wayne outside of The Searchers. Of course, I know that he his famous for playing tough, simple men of action in war films and westerns. Even without the knowledge of Wayne’s other films, I can tell that his performance here is special and a commentary on his typical persona (whether that is because of Ford’s direction, or a choice of Wayne’s, I’ll leave till later to find out). He takes his typical tough-guy charisma and curdles it. He is essentially an early example of an antihero and even starts the film by wearing a black hat! This a man so racist that he shoots a dead Indian’s eyes to make sure he wanders the spirit-plane forever, shoots at retreating Indians, and indiscriminately kills buffalo to make sure they won’t be feeding his enemies. He is gruff towards Marty for maybe being 1/8 Cherokee, and, up until the very last seconds of the movie, is trying to kill Debbie for being forced to adopt the ways of the Comanche. He is not sympathetic least, and to make him the protagonist of a populist 50’s western is a daring choice.

 

No discussion of The Searchers is complete without talking about the film’s visuals. It needs to be said that this film is fucking gorgeous. It’s taking all of my restraint to not turn this piece into a collection of pretty thumbnails. Like the previous entry, Sunrise, there are shots in The Searchers that took my breath away just from their sheer beauty. Of course, if the film didn’t go beyond that, it would be a little shallow. Fortunately, there is a lot of thought to the way the film is shot. There is the famous motif of people and vistas being framed by entranceways. In addition, Ford makes Monument Valley seem like a strange, almost-alien place at times, more like the surface of Mars than a desert on Earth. There’s a shot, right before the Indians attack Aaron’s farm, where it looks like hell is spilling into his homestead. The actors always looked dwarfed by the ground, the sky, and the valley’s rock formations.

 

So why did I hedge my opinion of the film at the beginning of this piece? The issue with The Searchers is that it builds to epic sequence and attempts to carefully subvert some basic tropes of the western, but destroys that balance with terrible comic relief and annoying subplots. This is a film that has a character saying “Some day this country's gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” followed quickly by a blatant Jewish stereotype kvetching about. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem for me if it was kept to a minimum, but there are four comic relief characters in this film. In addition, the subplot between Martin and Laurie is terrible, and the film devotes so much time to it. Vera Miles is incredibly one-note as Laurie and pretty much just shrilly yells at Martin, and the plot adds absolutely nothing to the film. You can say it’s a bit of a breather from the action, and that it’s part of Marty’s arc of becoming a man, but there are better of ways of accomplishing that without completely tanking the film’s momentum.

 

That focus on comic relief and random subplots is why I can’t get fully behind The Searchers. I would never hesitate to call it a great film, but to grant it masterpiece status would be to ignore a few serious flaws.

 

Further thoughts

All of the films on the BFI list are either established classics or widely acclaimed modern masterpieces. As such, it is very rare for me to find dissenting opinions on these films, and when I do, it is usually on random, poorly written blogs. It was a bit strange when I discovered a handful of mainstream critics dismissing The Searchers and calling it corny and outdated. This has caused me to reevaluate my initial opinion of the film. Originally, I said that the comic relief bits in The Searchers prevented it from attaining all-time-great status. I should rephrase that. The comic relief bits, and some of the relationship drama between Martin and Laurie, are mediocre, and feel like leftovers from bygone era of oater. Everything involving Ethan, his family, and his quest however, deserves its masterpiece status.

 

The critics who denigrated the film wanted to strike it from the record, and I cannot agree with that. The Searchers’ influence is just too great for it to be forgotten or condemned to the “dated” category. I already knew of its relation to Taxi Driver from reading about that film. Both have essentially the same arc: a disturbed man rescues a young woman, who may not want to be rescued, from what he assumes are predatory captors. Taxi Driver twists that story to its most disturbing extreme, but they are similar nonetheless. Going through literature about the film, I discovered that the violent incidents that jumpstart the plot in both Once Upon a Time in the West and Star Wars (two wildly different films), are taken from Ford’s film.

 

Beyond the obvious influence the film had on the New Hollywood era, I can little bits and pieces of The Searchers flitting about and getting stuck in a huge variety of movies and TV shows. The way the desolate, red-soaked environs of Monument Valley provoke changes in Ethan and Martin’s demeanor reminds me of landscape-heavy films like Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I think part of the reason the nature montage in Koyaanisqatsi begins in Monument Valley is due to Ford’s predilection for the place. The Searcher’s influence is still being felt today. In the mid-to-late 200’s there was a huge wave of dark TV shows about obsessed antiheroes, the show to cap this trend was Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad’s epic use of the New Mexican desert and Walter’s alternating obsession with saving killing Jesse can be traced all the way back to Ford’s seminal film.

 

Why is the film on this list?

Before the western would get exploded and deconstructed in the late 60’s, The Searchers was already questioning some established tropes of the genre. That Ford did this with his favorite actor, one of the most famous men on Earth, and in such a picturesque locale, makes it all the more remarkable.