The Searchers

John Ford – 1956 – USA

I’ve seen The Searchers probably over a hundred times.  It has never not been on my list of top three or four favorite films.  I’ve seen it deteriorate from a respected work to a resented work as the end of the 20th century brought with it post-modernism and its conjoined twin, political correctness, which together wreaked a successful holocaust on appreciation of the arts.  The world is now full of people who claim to love cinema but who either will not watch a classic film or watch it grudgingly, because nothing can ever live up to “the hype.”  The irony of the received wisdom about The Searchers – namely that it is a relic from an unevolved era; (that’s fancy talk for racist, sexist and homophobic) – is that contemporary intellectuals, filled with deconstructionist lingo and little else, haven’t the faculties to recognize art at all.  In the case of The Searchers, what they read, robotically, as offensive is exactly the opposite.  The film is not only the apex of the Hollywood western, but it is the first revisionist western; single-handedly making possible Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.  With no context in their prickly minds, progressives see John Wayne making insensitive comments and take this to mean that the film, and its maker, John Ford, must be racist.  In truth, The Searchers is (not the first, but) the most vocal of Ford’s melancholy critiques of the western mythos.  In late middle age, sobered by World War II and the years of McCarthyism in America, Ford, a political liberal, spent the 50s and 60s making films that attempted to redress some of the simplistic attitudes movies had expressed in previous decades, especially with regard to Native Americans.  This period peaked with the dour chamber drama The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), (the message of which is that recorded history is often more fable than fact), and culminated in the epic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), directly about the U.S. government’s genocide of the continent’s indigenous population.  The Searchers is more multifaceted and less didactic than those films, though, which means that it is ripe for misunderstanding and other abuse by cultural critics of the stripe who believe that art can only be comprehended as sly propaganda for good or ill.  Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is a craggy, unrepentant ex-Confederate soldier who is reluctantly persuaded to accept his half-breed nephew, Martin (Jeffery Hunter), as his companion in a quest to rescue his two nieces from the Comanche warriors who have kidnapped them.  Ethan’s virulent hatred of the Comanche is so severe that it impedes his judgment; as it becomes evident that, in his view, the girls’ defilement by the savages is so obscene and irreversible that it can only be corrected by their deaths.  Bigoted ideas about race, gender, culture and sexuality broil together in Ethan’s mind into a mix that can only result in violence.  Ethan scalps the war chief, Scar, who took the girls, in gleeful imitation of the savagery he claims to despise, but Martin’s presence – as a mediator between two worlds – manages to calm Ethan enough to let his niece live.  Is it because he has really seen the light, or simply because she is right in front of him – a bright, young girl full of life – that he cannot bring himself to harm her?  Ford offers no easy answers, nor does he imply that Ethan’s behavior is heroic or admirable, but he merely shows us that – if only one man at a time, and one decision at a time – things can improve, and progress can take the place of irrational hostility.  Ethan, of course, has no place in the civilized homestead that he has helped to restore, and he knows it, and in the film’s haunting closing image, he stands alone in the house’s doorway, uninvited in and forgotten, and turns to walk back into the wilderness alone.  According to the demands of today’s cultural commissars, Ethan should have been portrayed as a mindless monster, so that kids and/or the dimmest of all possible viewers will know that racism is bad.  The fact that Ethan is instead a three-dimensional human being capable of humor and warmth is confounding to activist-critics and it would be unacceptable in a film today.  That’s something that we – not Ford – should be ashamed of.  This issue is only one of a great many that revolve around The Searchers’ legacy, and what’s unfortunate about it is that it discourages people from appreciating some of the greatest works of art we have.  The Searchers is a graphic poem of staggering beauty and delicacy, gently crafted by an auteur at the peak of his talent, and comprised of images and sentiments that challenge and edify the viewer; (though they don’t conveniently fit into the slots created by the small-minded thought-police who feel qualified to tell us which movies are okay to watch).  I consider the ongoing backlash against The Searchers sad evidence of the rapid dwindling of brainpower in American society.  The pious impulse that makes this happen is exactly the same as once put fig leaves on nude statues and bashed the noses off the faces of the sphinxes; “fixing” art in the name of progress, not because it’s right but because it suits those who happen to hold the power at the moment.