The Searchers 1956 Wow

Somehow I missed that one.

 

Has Wayne’s performance in Red River ( Howard Hawks) been noted yet? Phenomenal. I like the Searchers more, but Red River is close.

Also a shout out to Ford’s “My Darling Clementine” w/ Fonda, Victor Mature, and Walter Brennan’ s superbly villainous Ike Clanton. The best movie ever about the OK Corral.

 

"The Conqueror" circa 1958


And my tongue was permanently implanted in my cheek!!! I think he disowned it. That role was always a punchline he had to endure.

 

Yep,the Duke was good in this one.

 

Red River and My Darling Clementine. Two All -Time favorites. Walter Brennan appears in both movies. How can you go wrong with those casts and the direction of Hawks and Ford? Can't be beat for classic Westerns.

 

the director Sam Peckinpah thought that the best Ford was The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, and Tobacco Road.

he didn't like The Searchers

maybe various prints of it back in the day didn't look too good, that's all I can think of.

 

I love Red River too, looks great on the Criterion Blu-ray.

I'll take Tombstone for that honor. Val Kilmer is so good as Doc Holliday. I can't stand Victor Mature in anything.

 

After seeing it listed as the most influential western of all time (yet coming out in the late year of 1956), seeing it as the highest ranking Western on Sight & Sound survey and remembering this thread, I decided on a 2nd watch. Earlier in this thread I wrote this:

It was more visually impressive (but not much greater than others) than the first watch. However, the film continues to not be what I expect from other reviews. It isn't a serious dissection of racist attitudes IMO, at least not consistently with the nearly screwball comedy Wedding scene. I didn't feel Ethan's hate led up to the point of trying to shoot Debbie. I feel like the movie wanted to have its cake and eat it to. Give us white people to focus on as upbeat cavalry music plays as they shoot their way through a Native American village, but Ethan's hate is given counterbalance not through a Native American, but a "turned" white woman. I often get this notion in my head when I watch white characters go through their struggles in old Westerns, "I wonder what the poor oppressed lied to Native Americans are up to in this moment?" The genre caters to an audience, and that audience wants to see their own race reflected, and that changes the focus of any Western film, including The Searchers. John Wayne gets his hero moment at the end and to come off as the macho know it all. I genuinely didn't get the vibe that Ethan was admitting fault at the end, less an arc and more a "sorry I tried to shoot you earlier but I didn't get much sleep the night before." Reminds me of Red River where he fully deserves a shot in the head for murder, but is given a "laugh it off" hero ending.

Beyond the plot/subtext, the film has some "less than great" moments. It has these shifts of feeling like a road movie with little vignettes (honestly a slog of a section) and then a "soap opera for men" feel. The comedy sections undercut serious meaning IMO. Then you have eye rolling moments like these:

• the awkward "and action" pause before Ethan picks up little Debbie.
• the first appearance of the obviously very white "Indian."
  
• the breathing "Indian" corpse in the ground.
• the gun that goes off seemingly mistakenly after Ethan tosses it to the guy.
• the arrow from far away hitting Ethan's hand just as he fires a gun at a pivotal moment.

So one of those "I don't get it" things. Ox Bow Incident, High Noon, Naked Spur, The Far Country, Johnny Guitar, Forty Guns and many others are better IMO, they don't have this uneasy aura of "it wants to say something but it won't piss off its audience enough to do it." Bogart played characters that movies treated as villains, did John Wayne ever?

 

Notable, among other things, for one of the greatest character entrances in a Western (or any other genre, for that matter)

 

Is Fort Apache the one with Fonda as the new base commander? I just re-watched it recently, and I was touched by the way even a relatively fluffy adventure western with lots of comedic elements can end with powerful commentary about sacrifice and the making of Old West mythology. The latter concept has something in common with Liberty Valance that way.

 

Or The Shootist, for that matter - one of my favorites.

 

Yes, and a 17-year old Shirley Temple.

Shows Indians in a different light, more like white people. I always was under the opinion that Dances With Wolves was a remake of Fort Apache, conceptually speaking.

 

And that is the folly of this movie, and this genre. It was always warring tribes you saw getting gunned down, not all the peaceful tribes that were massacred by people with an Ethan mentality.

By the time the Gold Rush started in California (my childhood homestate) the US Government basically condoned the widespread genocide of Native Americans in that area. One town Kesleyville CA is named after a guy who in 1850 enslaved a peaceful tribe, used them to get Gold, underfed them, murdered them, told the adults to give him their underage daughters and whipped them if they didn't until he took it too far and raped the chief's wife. So the tribe secretly decided to kill him and his partner in crime, they did and then they took off. I wish the story ended there, but a Cavalry came by and sought revenge for the death of these 2 SOBs, found a different tribe at Clear Lake CA which was mostly women, children and old men (the young men were hunting) and massacred 60 to 400 of them. That isn't the first large California Native American massacre. The first was 4 years before in my hometown of Redding where Kit Carson called it "perfect butchery" when they massacred between 125 and 900(!!!) peaceful Wintu simply because they were cornered on the river, and there wasn't a single casualty on the other side. After these you had several massacres in CA of often non-warring tribes, some single massacre totals like 300, 450, 1000, 283, 250, 240, 300. In CA between 1846 and 1873, at least 9,400 to 16,000 California "Indians" were killed by non-"Indians." Most of these killings occurred in more than 370 massacres.

After so many years of so many Westerns only focusing on the warriors who "deserve to die", I was hoping The Searchers or something from that time would try for the other end. It didn't. I feel it tried for some middle ground area and still messed it up by hanging onto the old tropes and hanging onto a white audience. The mere kidnap plot in The Searchers is a biased oversight:

Mistreating someone once he or she had been adopted into a tribe was considered evil (many Indian legends and folktales revolve around some villain who abuses an adoptee and is punished for this misdeed). Adoptees usually also had full social mobility, and often wound up in leadership positions or married to an important person in their new tribe.

So was this a barbaric custom? Well, the Europeans were certainly horrified by it (particularly the English, who tended to consider a white woman being married to a nonwhite man offensive). On the other hand, the Indians were equally horrified to find that the Europeans routinely killed women and children while raiding Indian villages, and that when they did take captives, they were frequently treated as slaves.

 

Monument Valley

 

One of my favorite books, one of my favorite movies (even though it took some liberties).