John Wayne starred in dozens of Westerns during his lengthy career, but he very rarely played the bad guy. One of his darkest roles came in "The Searchers," his 14th and greatest collaboration with John Ford, the director who helped the Hollywood icon make his name in "Stagecoach." It was a film that inverted Wayne's heroic screen persona by casting him as Ethan Edwards, a bitterly racist former soldier who spends many years on an obsessive quest to track down his niece after she is abducted by Comanches.
For a director-star combo that had often portrayed Native Americans as a faceless marauding horde in many of their earlier pictures, "The Searchers" is a soulful and sometimes awkward attempt to reckon with that past and, in turn, America's legacy of genocide and Manifest Destiny. While its comedic moments seem to belong to another film and its use of Redface is cringe-inducing,...
For a director-star combo that had often portrayed Native Americans as a faceless marauding horde in many of their earlier pictures, "The Searchers" is a soulful and sometimes awkward attempt to reckon with that past and, in turn, America's legacy of genocide and Manifest Destiny. While its comedic moments seem to belong to another film and its use of Redface is cringe-inducing,...
- 1/1/2023
- by Lee Adams
- Slash Film
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