The Searchers (1956)
directed by John Ford
John Ford's The Searchers is a fascinating movie. It's a Western classic in terms of story and technical execution, with cowboys and Indians, chases on horseback, shootouts, a lone hero, and Ford's legendary use of location and epic wide/long shots - all things that make up the genre of the movie. But at the same time, this film seems to me like an early moment of Western revisionist thinking via its main character. John Wayne's Ethan Edwards is unlike many of the early Western heroes, and in my opinion, for a reason. Whether or not Ford meant to do this, I think audiences can view this movie as more than just genre entertainment, but in fact as a subversion of how The West as a concept is often perceived. By the end of the movie, Ethan "saves" Debbie and finishes his years-long obsessive quest, giving audiences a happy ending. However, along his journey, Ethan is one of the meanest, most negative, and most aggressively racist characters I've ever seen, contrasting what I would say is John Wayne's usual archetype.
In the context of the movie, I don't believe Ethan's character was written to be so terrible for the sake of it. Instead, I think Ford's decision to make this "hero" such an unlikable character has more to do with the film's purpose for the audience. Disguised as a simple captive narrative, The Searchers seems to have an underlying message that the often over-romanticized idea of the "Wild West", and even the Western genre as a whole, should be analyzed critically rather than simply taken at face value as a mythology of morally-positive stories. Sure, at the end of the movie Ethan Edwards does his job and strolls back into the desert from whence he came, cool and quiet like an early Eastwood character. But should we really be happy at the end of this film just because Debbie was brought back to "humanity" and "civilization"? The death and hatred presented to us in this movie make me question why The West is so loved and memorialized, when it was really just full of terror and inhumanity. For example, Ethan doesn't face any consequences for his words and actions towards Native Americans because the people around him are probably just as terrible as he is.
And that is at the root of the film's commentary on the West. John Ford made a living helping to create the Western genre as we know it today, but The Searchers seems so ahead of its time for being (what I think) almost anti-western in the way it showcases such a terrible person whom we're supposed to respect and be grateful for - a person who is never held accountable for his actions, no matter how bad they are. Of course, I don't think the "true" purpose of this film was to bash any type of person or create any contempt for either The West as an idea or the Western as a film genre. But I do believe that The Searchers can make us think about our values and perceptions of such things, while still presenting us with a story firmly rooted in the foundation of American, Western films.
