A Film Canon

One of the oddest westerns of the 1950s, The Searchers feels like an amalgam of several different films. The first heightens the proto-vigilantism of Anthony Mann, as the single-mindedness with which Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) pursues revenge on a vicious Comanche tribe, imbues every confrontation with an extraordinarily visceral intensity, culminating with the unmentionable fact of scalping, itself a cipher for the even more disturbing possibilities of conversion, indoctrination and deindividuation. The second represents Ford's first application of Technicolor to his distinctive Monument Valley backdrop, elaborating a series of sublime vistas whose transcendence of the frame is now extended from breadth to depth, requiring the additional distance of the doors and interiors that bookend the narrative, suggesting that it may be the collective gaze of the homebound women of the west that is most alive to this sublime potential. The third - and weakest - strand disrupts this dialectic between personal and topographical sublimity with an inexplicable recourse to painfully broad comedy, nascent songs and stagy interior sequences, as if confusing the overtly regressive nostalgia of the 1950s musical with the more melancholy, reflective nostalgia of the 1950s western. The result is a classic that nevertheless falls just short of the sum of its parts, making its dated elements - especially the use of Comanches and Mexicans - more grating than they might have otherwise been.