Mark’s Musings

The Searchers is all the way up at number 12 on the top-100 2007 AFI list. Alas, I am not a fan of westerns at all. I imagine this is a really great film to those who like a good Cowboys-n-Indians film, but I’m not among them. The fact that this was selected (by AFI) as the greatest western of all time only serves to reinforce that.

I mean, it was OK, but I just couldn’t get into it. It seemed loaded with clichés. You start off with the loner Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), then you meet the people he cares about. Once that’s done, the injuns attack and kidnap the wimminfolk. And then the loner goes after them with his sidekicks. The non-redshirt sidekick is none other than Jeffrey Hunter. Yes that Jeffrey Hunter! And he could not act in this film. Boy was that distracting. Wayne was fine as the Ethan, but Hunter, playing a part-English, part-Welsh, part-Native American Martin Pawley, was horrible. Maybe because he was sharing the screen with Wayne, but he just overacted everything.

The women are mostly there to serve as motivation for the men to do what they need to do, although this film does barely squeak by in Beschdel Test, just before a Comanche raid. One standout in this film is Vera Miles, who plays Laurie Jorgensen, and she not only has a fairly meaty role (for someone who isn’t a main character, I mean), but actually does a terrific job with it.

However, given the fact that westerns in general bore me, I found this film kind of tedious to get through. It took several nights of half-hour bursts to see the whole film. Here’s the thing, though: I have no idea why. If this were a sci-fi film, for example, I probably would have eaten it up, as the saying goes. Imagine the same exact plot, only with humans and aliens. After all, the role that the Native Americans are playing is The Other, and there’s no greater Other than extraterrestrials. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an SF film out there that recycles the The Searchers plot. There were certainly elements of the first Star Wars film that borrowed from this, especially when Wayne & Co come back to a burned-out homestead, but not the plot.

I think one major stumbling block for me, aside from the fact that it’s, y’know, a western, was that Martin didn’t get any older and/or wiser in their multi-year search for Debbie (played in the latter part of the film by a teenaged Natalie Wood), who is Ethan’s niece and Martin’s sister-in-law. So while Debbie grows up, Martin does not.

Maybe that’s one of the problems I had with this film: there is no character arc to Martin or Ethan. They are who they are and the plot comes from how their characters influence and change the world around them. Martin starts off as a hot-headed kid, and he ends up that way. Ethan starts off as a man who does his own thing in his own way, and he ends up the same. Sure, they both would have liked things to have ended up differently, but they don’t and that’s that. The only bit that could be construed as development is that Ethan at first would rather see his niece dead because she’s the wife of a “Comanch”, and at the end (SPOILERS!) he’s just happy to see her alive again, and he takes her home. But there’s no way to show that that wasn’t his plan all along. And also, hello, if Debbie had children wouldn’t she want to be with them, or bring them home with her? Maybe she didn’t have any. One wonders how Ethan would have reacted to being a grand-uncle to a half-Indian-half-White baby, given his views on miscegenation.