It’s been said before; you’re just as likely to have insulted me for repeating myself as you have for ridiculously overrating the movie as a DVD nerd engaged in a refusal to admit that at least forty minutes of the movie is awful. (If you want to call me a liar for *pretending *to like a movie that you so clearly are *right *about, please open a pit thread. Thanks.)
Back to a CS tone, I hope: the forty minutes that you declare, absolutely, are “awful,” are probably the parts of the film that were stylized in a that the contemporary audiences had come to expect from a Hollywood epic. Our tastes have changed over the years, and thus our aesthetic context for such stylization. But if you make an effort to take that different context into consideration, or if you watch enough movies of that style so that it no longer sticks out like a sore thumb, it’s possible that the stylization wouldn’t be as jarring–scuse me, awful–to you. Possible, I say; unlike you, I’ll leave room for an honest difference of opinion.
John Ford is America’s Shakespeare. And, like Shakespeare, he recognized that he was creating art for a mass audience. Shakespeare had his bawdy asides tossed to the “penny public”; Ford had his comic relief characters, his dances, his romantic hyperbole. But, also like Shakespeare, the universal scope and breathtaking impact of the stories he told–at least in the masterpieces–is there for anyone who’s willing to meet these works on their own terms, instead of imposing your own expectations and ignoring the very important concept of historical context.
I’m not saying that everyone *must *do this. I’m also not saying, like you are, that anyone who doesn’t is a liar. I’m only saying that the context from which you judge these works is not the context in which they were created, so there will necessarily be a disconnect in your judgment.
Anyway, yes, I agree with most of the posters in this thread, that if you judge The Searchers without any effort to understand its context, you probably won’t like it. (There is, of course, as I acknowledged above, the possibility that even if you do fully understand its context you won’t like it; it’s certainly not the single movie ever made that deserves 100% approval. Personal taste will still out, no matter the individual knowledge base.) Even with customers in my video store, it’s not the first Western I recommend when someone wants to “try some old Westerns.” I consider it a difficult film, and I understand that most “newbies” won’t *necessarily *appreciate it. (I don’t know if he remembers it, but the first time I saw it was when **Cervaise lent me his copy. I didn’t get it, I didn’t like it. Then a couple years later, after I’d gone on a John Ford kick after really enjoying My Darling Clementine, I watched it again and it blew me away.) For newbies, I recommend Rio Bravo, Red River, or My Darling Clementine first. Those movies are far and away more entertaining than The Searchers. But The Searchers is, for want of a better term, a *deeper *film, and once my newbie customers have acquired the “vocabulary” to appreciate The Searchers, I recommend that.
*The Searchers *is not about getting the cattle to market, or winning a woman, or defending your honor. It’s about the irreconcilable contradictions of the settling of the American West: the men who couldn’t live in a community, and so kept looking for wilder lands further west, and in doing so inevitably blazed a trail for the community that would follow them, keeping them pushing further and further. It’s about the irreconcilable contradictions of the American character; at least of the American character as Ford saw it in his time.
