(#6 on the S&S list is 2001, which I have seen many times, and talked about a lot in previous discussions.)

So as a kid, I never watched Westerns, not for any real reason, but just because they seemed boring. (This is the same reason I never watched war movies of any sort.) Give me science fiction or fantasy, by gum, I have no truck with these tedious six-shooter horse bros.

So as an adult, I was surprised to learn, from discussions around Firefly, that the Civil War was this whole big undercurrent running through westerns, and the more I read about them, the more they seemed totally awful, and I never wanted to see one.

The Searchers confirms me in my opinion, because if this is the greatest western of all time, then the genre is irredeemable trash.

Basically, the movie is about a horrible racist dude, played by John Wayne. Among other things, he is still avowedly loyal to the Confederacy three years after the end of the Civil War, he derisively calls a sorta-nephew a “half-breed”, and he thinks that a white woman that has spent time in the company of the Comanche Indians who kidnapped her should be killed as an abomination.

And the film pretty much goes along with him, including one particularly awful scene where some rescued white women are trotted out as childish and stupid and John Wayne declares that they’re “not white anymore.” (PS it is not any better on gender issues.)

It’s vile and awful. And APPARENTLY, the big thing if you’re all up in film school in Ye Olden Days is to point to the ending of the movie (SPOILERS HERE) where John Wayne decides that he shouldn’t kill his rescued niece after all as undermining the previous 118 minutes of the movie, or to say that the movie is ambiguous about whether Wayne is meant to be a sort of antihero (which to be fair, it sorta is, and Martin Scorsese gives a good analysis of the film from that perspective, if you want to read a dissenting take), but ennnnnnhhhhhhhh, is what I say to that.

Because beyond that, it’s horrible on the axis of being a movie. The characters in it are obnoxious, with a comically portrayed village idiot, a broad-dialect Swedish rancher dude, a razzin-frazzin Yosemite Sam-style sheriff, and a bumbling young Union soldier. Combine that with nonsense plotting (the two main characters were on this search for FIVE YEARS, which makes no sense in terms of their relationship to each other or to the other characters in the movie; it seriously feels like six months, tops), and this is just an awful movie all around.

A Slate article shares my dim view of the movie, and tries to explain why it’s popular, and it comes up with (besides the admittedly gorgeous vistas of Monument Valley) basically that it’s so poorly made that it’s open to all kinds of interpretation of the sort that is well suited for a film studies class, and goes on to quote Pauline Kael: “You can read a lot into The Searchers, but it isn’t very enjoyable.”

Can’t disagree with that.

On the plus side, I do feel more educated about the genre and cinema historiography, so I feel like I’ve taken my medicine?