The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Western

DIRECTOR

John Ford

WRITERS

Frank S. Nugent (screenplay); Alan Le May (novel)

STARS

John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles

BEFORE

1940 The Grapes of Wrath is Ford’s screen version of the famous Depression-era story.

1952 Ford directs John Wayne in The Quiet Man, a lavish comic drama shot in Ireland.

AFTER

1959 In Rio Bravo, Wayne stars as a sheriff standing up to a powerful rancher.

1969 True Grit is the story of a young girl who hires an aging US marshal (Wayne) to track down her father’s killer.

From the moment John Ford gave John Wayne his big break in the 1939 movie Stagecoach, one of the most iconic partnerships in cinema was born. Wayne’s rugged masculinity combined with Ford’s riveting action sequences to create movies that elevated the Western from B-movie status to a classic popular Hollywood genre in its own right.

The Searchers is regarded by critics as the best movie of the Ford-Wayne partnership. Its story follows Ethan Edwards (Wayne) as he tracks down his niece (Vera Miles), who was kidnapped by Indians in an attack that killed her family.

"In The Searchers I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide."

Roger Ebert

New vision of the Old West

Many Westerns benefited from (and contributed to) the romantic revisionism of the time, which presented the Old West as a dangerous place, but also one of noble heroes with clear-cut American values. In The Searchers, any heroism is tempered by the harsh realities of place and time. The movie foreshadows the darker Westerns of the 1960s. Ford takes pains to portray the difficulty of surviving in the West, with its icy winters and scarcity of food. Meanwhile, Ethan Edwards is portrayed as ruthless, bigoted, and crazy, a man who would rather kill his niece (who is not happy to be rescued) than see her grow up as an Indian. At one point, he shoots at the eyes of an Indian corpse so that its spirit cannot see in the afterlife. This is not a simplistic tale of cowboys and Indians.

What else to watch: Stagecoach (1939) ✵ Rio Bravo (1959) ✵ The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) ✵ Unforgiven (1992)