The Searchers (1956)
(In French, On Cable TV, November 2017) As I dig farther away in the vault of classic movies I have never seen, there’s an entire section dedicated to westerns … a genre that has never interested me all that much. With The Searchers, another issue is that the film revolves around John Wayne, not an actor that I’ve liked a lot so far and who literally comes across as a creepy uncle in the opening moments of the film. Add to that a first act that makes Native Americans look awful and I was definitely struggling to make it through the film’s opening half-hour. What helped power through this bad start is some spectacular scenery, and seeing the comfort of a straight-ahead western gradually give way to a far more morally ambiguous plot. What, in a lesser movie, would have been a few days’ worth of adventures becomes a kick in the gut as the story stretches upon years, becoming a quixotic quest featuring a damaged hero. (I do like the theory that the girl is his daughter.) It leads to a dramatic riverbed confrontation that becomes the highlight of the film, and to an off-putting climactic sequence that doesn’t entirely condone what’s happening. The ending would have been coded as happy at the beginning of the quest, but comes across as bittersweet-at-best by the end of the film. Better yet, Wayne does play a rather bad guy here. I’m not sure that director John Ford had, in 1956, the tools or social latitude to make the film he wanted to make about revisiting common attitudes toward western tropes. The Searchers does make the best out of what it could say, however, and the result eventually won me over.