indians

The Searchers is another movie praised quite highly by AFI. Not only was it #12 on the ‘100 Years, 100 Movies’ list, they also selected it as the greatest Western of all time.

Directed by John Ford, it was released almost twenty years after Stagecoach.

The Positives: Visually, The Searchers was really impressive. Ford clearly took great pains to find remarkable shots and angles, and it was most certainly a beautiful film from that standpoint. There were moments where I found myself enjoying the film in spite of myself, which is no small praise.

The movie, up until the last ten minutes or so, was also far more ambiguous about racism than Stagecoach. Much of the racism was named and some even condemned in the text of the film.

There was also ambiguity in the morality of the characters. Wayne’s character was a thief with legitimate rage issues, and they never apologized or demonized it, they just let the character be. That’s something I didn’t expect, and it was refreshing.

The Negatives: For one, I’m decidedly not a John Wayne fan. I wonder if perhaps it is just different sensibilities in different eras, but to me all of his characters just seem drunk most of the time. His long, drawling speech coupled with his clumsy and awkward gait and movements just come across as being a lush, not an everyman.

Also, while I commend Ford for even attempting to address the racism in society and film, he ultimately failed. The racism was so deep that even the attempt to condemn racism was racist. For goodness sake, the main villain of the film was a Commanche war chief played by a German man painted a bronzish tan color… that’s right, a painted German guy.

Also, any ambiguity the film lets sit in the air during the movie falls apart during the climax, when all the white people kill off all the Indians and live happily ever after. Hooray!

It was almost as if Ford was saying, ‘Hey racism makes me uncomfortable, it’s downright sad even. But, they are savages, so what are you really going to do about it? If they refused to become “Americans” like us, they needed to be dealt with eventually.’

I guess for me, it doesn’t really matter how well a movie is made when its messages are this ugly, whether that was the intent or not.

Film #3 was the genre classic, Stagecoach. The film was #63 in the original AFI list of the greatest 100 films of the first 100 years of cinema.

Personally, I’m not really a fan.

I’m not challenging its appearance on the list by any means. I understand that the film was important in film history, if for no other reason than because it was John Ford’s first western with sound. I just find it uninteresting at best, and downright offensive at worst.

The uninteresting part of it was writing more than direction, the characters were simply all two-dimensional. The happily drunk doctor, the tough as nails marshall, the heroic outlaw who really hadn’t done anything wrong when you think about it.

The offensive part was spread all around.

There were two primary women, each fit into the mold of Madonna and the Whore, although the Madonna was closed off and kind of a bitch, while the whore had a heart of gold, the filmmakers still only had two places to put young women. That is until John Wayne rolls onto the scene and saves the poor latter woman from a life of whoredom.

I understand that when engaging film, or any art, we need to view it within the lens of its time, understanding that it was a product of a different era. That’s just not really what I am interested in doing here. I certainly want to learn about film history through all of this, but at the end of the day I am also hoping to find movies I love watching. This movie just made me sad most of the time, especially pertaining to the depiction, unsurprisingly, of Native Americans.

It wasn’t enough that we killed off entire civilizations of people, taking every part of their homeland. We also had to turn them into punch lines and story props. A Native American character didn’t have a single line of dialogue. Wait, except for the wife of a Mexican character they meet along the way, she sings in perfect spanish (inexplicably), and she is Apache.

A cheap, insincere way to pay lip service to the idea that not all ‘Indians’ are bad right? Wrong, she took off in the night and stole her husbands horse to warn Geronimo about the Stagecoach. As it would turn out, all Indians are bad. The only hope the white man has is using their tribal divisions to get them to work for you. Sort of like the Cheyenne from the opening scene who stands around like so much set dressing, while a white guy reports on his behalf that he found out Geronimo is going to attack soon. They choose to trust him, not because he is actually trustworthy, but because the Cheyenne “hate the Apaches even more than we do.”

Then, there is the climactic stagecoach chase scene where a bunch of natives chase after them shooting rifles and bows, clearly just malicious for malice’s sake. I guess we are supposed to cheer as John Wayne sits atop the coach and picks off Apache after Apache. How dare they defend their own fucking land, we’re white, we should be allowed to take a stagecoach wherever we damned well please.

It would have been a little easier to swallow if the film offered even the slightest bit of ambiguity, the slightest hint that perhaps they understood that maybe this wasn’t all ok. As it stands, I just couldn’t enjoy it. The attitudes on display are just too shameful and tragic for that.

western #6, 'the searchers.' [another day, another movie.]

western #3, 'stagecoach.' [another day, another movie.]