This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.
(G) ★★★★½
Director: John Ford.
Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Olive Carey, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey Jr, Antonio Moreno, Hank Worden, Beulah Archuletta, Walter Coy, Dorothy Jordan, Pippa Scott.
 |
| She loved watching his ass as he rode away. |
The western has been deconstructed, reconstructed, satirised, bowdlerised, bastardised, discounted, denounced, defiled, and had its last rites read more than any other type of film. And throughout this history of re-evaluation, re-invention, and re-animation, there is no film more important to the genre than The Searchers.
Like the girl being sought by the titular seekers, the movie is caught between two worlds. It pushes the genre into new territory; into deeper, darker places the western hadn't ventured in its previous half a century. It's surprisingly subtle and psychological in some ways, and its hero is a more complicated man than any gunslinger seen on the screen before.
But it's also still a product of its time and what has come before. It has a literal "bwah bwah bwah bwaaaaaaah" moment, some of the hammiest acting you've ever seen, and some comedic diversions that leave a lot to be desired. A romantic subplot that fills up way too much screen time is like a quaint relic from a lesser western.
Yet these flaws are not enough to drag The Searchers down. No matter how you look at it, it's a film as monumental as its landscape (it's literally filmed in Monument Valley, see what I did there?). It's one of the Big Three in the 20-something-film partnership of John Ford-John Wayne alongside Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Allan Hunter, writing in The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics, called The Searchers "the summit of (Ford's) achievement in the western genre".
 |
| Monumental. Get it? |
"The great strength of The Searchers," wrote Hunter, "lies in the way it takes one of the most basic of all western plotlines and transforms it into a psychologically and imagistically rich reflection on the genre itself and the myths it reflects."
The key to this transformation is John Wayne, who spent much of his career epitomising the man's man of the Old West. He was usually the laconic gunslinger who never betrayed much emotion. His characters typically had little time for niceties, society or modernity - they were disgruntled loners who got the job done by shot whoever needed shooting before riding off into the sunset.
But here, as Ethan Edwards, he is all that and more. He's a man with a dark past. He's a horribly racist Confederate soldier, and more than likely a criminal to boot. It's also possible Ethan knocked up his sister-in-law Martha and fathered a child, which is probably the child he's searching for in the film.
The movie never admits this possible parentage explicitly, and some people debate that it's there, but the subtle, lingering looks (and some not-so-subtle looks) early on between Ethan and Martha speak volumes. It's the film's great mystery, and it's a piece of the puzzle that makes Ethan's five-year quest a richer experience.
Ford and Wayne also manages to endear us to Ethan, despite his appalling racism. He's not likeable, but we can, at the very least, empathise with his drive and determination, even if we don't like what he does. It says a lot for Ford's direction, Frank S Nugent's script, and Wayne's performance that we are willing to follow this man, who has more in common with the Native Americans he reviles than he would care to admit. And is he going to kill the girl when he finds her, or rescue her? These questions help drive the film, all the while knocking some of the romanticism out of the genre's sails. This is no mythic ode to the Old West - this is acknowledging the racism, violence and weird moral code that dominated the setting and drove many of its once-lionised figures.
"Edwards is a hero in the contemporary mould," wrote James Monaco in How To Read A Film. "(He's) lonely and obsessive, as well as heroic, neurotically compulsive as well as faithful."
As well as re-shaping the genre's prototypical protagonist, Ford's film was part of the growing re-assessment of Native Americans. While far from being a nuanced take, The Searchers at least begins to acknowledge them as more than just a faceless enemy. Here, they have a culture, a purpose, and an understanding of the land, as well as a difference from tribe to tribe. There are still "evil savages", but the counterpoint in The Searchers is that, from a certain point of view, so is Ethan Edwards.
The high art of the movie extends beyond its content to its visuals. While most western directors were content to shoot in studios, Ford was all about the sun and the soil. The way he captures the beauty and harshness of Monument Valley (standing in for Texas) inspired David Lean to do the same with the deserts of Arabia. And like Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia, the men in Ford's movie are often mere dots in a brutal landscape. But the iconic imagery extends beyond the wide vistas of the west - the opening and closing shots, which frame Edwards through an open doorway, are just as beautiful and powerful, symbolising his status as an outsider and his rejections of society.
 |
| Yes, he was born in a tent. |
It's tempting to look at the The Searchers' ranking on the AFI list and think it is the best western of all time. But it's not the best. The Searchers is flawed - there are some second-rate performances (notably Hunter, Carey Jr and Curtis), and the film loses pace during a letter narration and the romantic subplot. It's more accurate to say The Searchers is the most important western of all time, but more than that, it's one of the most important movies of all time. The film's influence on the genre is massive, but it extends beyond the genre's boundaries - Scorsese, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Kurosawa, Spielberg, Lean and Welles all raved about and borrowed from Ford and The Searchers.
Some suggest Stagecoach was where people started to take the western seriously, and that The Searchers is where Ford elevated it to an artform. "One has the feeling," wrote William Bayer in The Great Movies, "that ... Ford for years was working toward some ultimate western. That quest it seems was resolved in the film The Searchers."
No comments:
Post a Comment