I can’t figure why it’s regarded so highly. There was a John Wayne and John Ford special on PBS not long ago which went into all sorts of superlatives about why this was among the definitive Westerns and a high water mark in both Wayne’s and Ford’s careers. I just don’t get it.
This movie came out when I was a teenager and I can’t remember if I saw it first run. If I did I had forgotten most (if not all) of the story and all of whatever I may have liked about it back in the 50’s. It was painful to watch last night.
The acting was stilted and wooden. The action scenes were fakey. They went out of their way to shoot the same sections of Monument Valley over and over. The “Indians” were phony and over-painted. The white characters were mere caricatures, and the “Festus Hagen” character’s dialect/accent/brogue/whatever was ridiculous.
I never was a big John Wayne fan. I tolerated him in such movies as Rio Bravo and True Grit and thought his only really convincing role was in either The Shootist or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I thought The Quiet Man was merely a pleasant comedy and if anything was special about it it was Maureen O’Hara. This can also be said of any of the other Wayne movies where she appeared.
Aside from the superlatives ladled on because of John Ford’s reputation, is there anything special in this movie from your own point of view?
Concur. I bought it last year, after hearing about its greatness for years, and its influence on filmmakeers (especially the burnt-hut scene in STAR WARS), and came away going pretty much, “Meh.”
So you’re not a big fan of john Wayne and you find you didn’t paticularly like a John wayne movie, this is a surprise?
I like the movie for the sense of just how long they spent looking for his niece, you really get the feel that years have gone by. The suspense at the end and the granduer really work for me. A plus is that unlike his usual hero charactors, in this movie John Wayne is rather a bastard, right up until the last moment.
But if you are not a John Wayne or a John Ford fan then you won’t like it.
I prefer other Wayne movies (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Fort Apache), and I do think it’s a bit overpraised, but it’s still a top-notch western overall.
Hijack accepted. For me they’re all very much alike, what with the recycled casts and gimmicks. Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jr., those old guys with the “Swedish” accents, the overwrought women, the weirdos and drunks, the Irish music, the all-in-fun brawls. If you like that sort of thing, there they are. And if you don’t, there they are.
They still stand up. You just have to approach them from a historical perspective. I regularly show “The Quiet Man” and “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” to my classes after the AP exams, as observations of Irish culture and immigration. The list of his movies rightly considered classics is a lengthy one: Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Mr. Roberts, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cheyenne Autumn, etc. Some of those will always resonate with people. 500 years from now, Mr. Roberts will still have people in stiches and tears.
To judge westerns by realistic acting or sets is like judging Kabuki theater on that basis.
The Searchers is great because it is, in spirit, the last western. Kind of a eulogy for the western. It was also Ford’s last film.
You see, the western is built on a mythos that can’t last. These brave and wild souls go out to tame the wilderness. So that settlers can come in. But once the settlers come in there is no more wilderness and no more need for these brave and wild souls.
The Searchers was the first (or at least greatest) western to really come to terms with that. Time were changing in modern America at that time The Searchers was made. The old values were losing ground. Modernism was giving way to post-modernism, and everyone was beginning to question the very ideas- like manifest destiny- that our nation was founded on. Manhood began to mean something different. REligion was no longer something to rely on. Everything got more complicated.
The Western was a myth for the old way of thinking, and it was on it’s way out. After The Searchers, westerns exist only as nostaliga.
And so The Searcher’s questioned itself. It’s whole mission. Westerns in general. Was it really worth all that to find the niece? Was her new life with the Indians really that bad? John Wayne’s character had to come to terms with the fact that his mission was done and was perhaps not a great mission to begin with. The telling shot is at the very end in the house. He doesn’t come through that doorway. The world had changed and there was no place for John Wayne anymore.
It’s an amazing piece of art that can at one embrace the past and question it. The Searcher’s doesn’t simply reject the western or insult it. It doesn’t distance itself. It is, fundamanetally and wholeheartedly, a westerm. But it doesn’t really give it any passes either. It’s a hard and honest look and provides a clear and poignent conclusion. Few pieces of art in any tradition are that perfect, complex, and final.
Incorrect. The IMDB lists over ten films by Ford after The Searchers, including The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He wasn’t in classic form, but he still kept working.
even sven, I appreciate the effort you put into defending or explaining the value of The Searchers but I must say that your explanation sounds like something Roger Ebert would say. Not that that’s bad, it’s just overly apologetic for a weak movie, as I see it.
For my tastes, there have been quite a few genuine Westerns since the mid-50’s with way less stilted acing, hokey characters, cardboard settings, etc.
To name a few: Unforgiven, Silverado, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and even Last Man Standing if you want to appeal to the Japanese influence.
The things you allude to about how times were changing and values were being questioned may be valid, but I still find this movie to be well below the acclaim it has received.
The thing about The Searchers is that many of the most important things in the movie happen offscreen, or are never actually referred to, or exist only as subtext. (I’m not talking about symbolism that critics read in; I’m talking about stuff that Ford deliberately put into the movie but chose to keep ambiguous.) To understand what the movie’s getting at, you have to understand that Ethan is in love with his brother’s wife; that Ethan and his nemesis, Scar, are similar people leading parallel lives; that Ethan’s past includes crime and possibly murder. None of this stuff is directly spelled out in the movie but Ford intentionally put the clues in there. Ethan’s change of heart at the end comes when he picks Debbie up the way he picked her up at the beginning of the film; but if you don’t remember that throwaway moment from the beginning, then the ending makes no sense. Even an important clue to Ethan’s character is done as a throwaway shot in the background that lasts about five seconds (behind young Debbie in the back yard, we see a grave indicating that Ethan’s mother was killed by Comanches). It’s a movie that buries all kinds of meanings and motivations just below the surface and forces us to pay attention to figure out what’s really going on. That’s part of the fascination.
Not to hijack, but while “The Searchers” is good, is isn’t among my favorites. I much prefer “Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” and probably among John Wayne’s best films is his last film “The Shootist” which actually managed to understand how it needed to end better than the book did.
I think “Searchers” represents something to those who practically worship it (my father among them) and it does represent a particular ideology that ultimately (and to some extent deservedly) fell out of favor.
PS: There simply is something special about Maureen O’Hara, she is always special.
I love it for the reasons even sven and Captain Corcoran stated. Plus the great score. I could have done without the romance between Martin and Laurie, and that hee-haw guitar-playing character, but other than that, it was pretty near perfect. Just about every minute is infused with sadness, or whatever that feeling is when you know things are changing and moving on without you.
The fundamental problem with your position is that none of those movies (absent the Japanese influence) could have been made without movies like the Searchers.
The Searchers has an epic feel to it yet still manages to humanize the characters. From Marty’s fundamental insensitivity to his alleged true love to Ethan’s myopic hatred of the Indians, the movie doesn’t pull any punches.
One of the best scenes is where Ethan (Wayne) shoots out the eyes of an Indian corpse so that he’ll wander the spirit land forever being unable to see. Ethan knows a tremendous amount about the very thing he hates. Similarly, the Indians are losing and rapidly running out of time. Scar is eventually forced back to the location of the first raid as he simply has no where else to go. It is Wayne who scalps Scar and it is Wayne who is the true barbarian. It’s a much more complicated and nuanced movie than any of the others you mentioned
The final scene is one of the best I have ever seen, if not the best.
Film school does that to a person. There wasn’t any effort involved in that post. I truely think The Searchers is one of the most brilliant and beautiful things put on film, but maybe not for reasons that most people care about.
