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

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 1 min read

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.

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western #1, 'yojimbo.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 2 min read

The month of westerns is underway, and Mr. Akira Kurosawa kicked things off in style.

There are loads of popular westerns. Some are as popular and famous as the “Man with No Name” trilogy (or the “Dollars” trilogy as it is sometimes called), but there are none more so. Popular culture still offers frequent homages and tips of the cap to Clint Eastwood as the main character in three films which can be understood as the adventures of one lone wanderer, whose name we never learn.

Eastwood obviously starred in more westerns, many of them argued as better than the “Man with No Name” films, but those big three, culminating in the prequel of sorts, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, are the best known.

The first of that trilogy was A Fistful of Dollars, which will be Western #2, and that film is a punch for punch adaptation of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It is just one of many occasions in which some of the most significant films about the American west were directly adapted from Japanese cinema.

Let me tell you folks, Yojimbo is legit. I loved every damned minute of it.

Kurosawa was influenced by Irish American director John Ford, who directed western classics such as The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The first two of those three are on AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list, cataloguing the 100 greatest and most important films of the first 100 years of cinema. He took the western theme and set it in Japan, turning cowboys into samurai.

However, while he was largely influenced by American westerns, it was he who is largely responsible for the trend in westerns to tell the story of one lone man beating the odds and a load of bad guys in the process.

Yojimbo is responsible for that trend.

The main character is fantastic. We never learn his name, although he makes a name up while looking out the window at Mulberry Fields, calling himself “Mulberry Fields, Age 30.” He is the ultimate badass, often to hilarious results.

Every scene is remarkably well shot. The score is great. And as alluded above, Toshirô Mifune, as the mysterious, masterless samurai, is brilliant. If I didn’t have so many westerns to watch this month, I would probably watch this one again pretty soon.

I can’t wait to watch more Kurosawa, and if the rest of the month holds up like day 1, this ridiculous idea will also go down as one of my best.

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