Your opinion sought. "The Searchers": why do people think it's so great?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I've seen it about three times. Never in the theater, which might make a difference, but always on TV. I just turned in the DVD at the library. The copy had a small glitch in it (at one point, the color was "wobbling around" a bit) but that's not the issue. That was artifact of the translation from film to DVD.

"The Searchers" keeps turning up on lists of the greatest movies ever made:

The Searchers

The Searchers is a 1956 American Technicolor VistaVision Western film directed by John Ford, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, set during the Texas–Indian wars, and starring John Wayne as a middle-aged Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his abducted niece (Natalie Wood), accompanied by his adoptive nephew (Jeffrey Hunter). Critic Roger Ebert found Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, "one of the most compelling characters Ford and Wayne ever created".

The film was a commercial success. Since its release it has come to be considered a masterpiece and one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. It was named the greatest American western by the American Film Institute in 2008, and it placed 12th on the same organization's 2007 list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time. Entertainment Weekly also named it the best western. The British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine ranked it as the seventh best film of all time based on a 2012 international survey of film critics and in 2008, the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma ranked The Searchers number 10 in their list of the 100 best films ever made.

In 1989, The Searchers was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry; it was one of the first 25 films selected for the registry.

The Searchers was the first major film to have a purpose-filmed making-of, requested by John Ford. It deals with most aspects of making the movie, including preparation of the site, construction of props, and filming techniques.
....

Later assessments

The Searchers has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time, such as in the BFI's decennial Sight & Sound polls. In 1972, The Searchers was ranked 18th; in 1992, fifth; in 2002, 11th; in 2012, 7th. In a 1959 Cahiers du Cinema essay, Godard compared the movie's ending with that of the reuniting of Odysseus with Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. In 1963, he ranked The Searchers as the fourth-greatest American movie of the sound era, after Scarface (1932), The Great Dictator (1940), and Vertigo (1958). The 2007 American Film Institute 100 greatest American films list ranked The Searchers in 12th place. In 1998, TV Guide ranked it 18th. In 2008, the American Film Institute named The Searchers as the greatest Western of all time. In 2010, Richard Corliss noted the film was "now widely regarded as the greatest western of the 1950s, the genre's greatest decade" and characterized it as a "darkly profound study of obsession, racism and heroic solitude." The film also maintains a perfect 100% rating on review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes.

The film has been recognized multiple times by the American Film Institute:

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies – No. 96
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – No. 12
• AFI's 10 Top 10 – No. 1 Western Film

On "They Shoot Pictures Don't They," a site which numerically calculates critical reception for any given film, The Searchers has been recognized as the ninth most acclaimed movie ever made. Members of the Western Writers of America chose its title song as one of the top 100 Western songs of all time.

Scott McGee noted that "...more than just making a social statement like other Westerns of the period were apt to do, Ford instills in The Searchers a visual poetry and a sense of melancholy that is rare in American films and rarer still to Westerns.

Glenn Frankel's 2013 study of the film calls it "the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen."

I don't get it. It's not a bad movie, but there's about that makes me think I've seen some cinematic masterpiece. I watched it last weekend specifically to see if I had been missing something. Nope, I didn't get the vibe last weekend either.

I've seen westerns that do leave me thinking I've seen something special. The Wild Bunch and, especially, Once Upon a Time in the West stand out.

I'm not interested in hearing about John Wayne's politics. I'm not in has fan club, but it's because he never seems to become his character. When I see John Wayne in a movie, it's John Wayne I'm seeing, not (in The Searchers) "Ethan Edwards [returning] after an eight-year absence to the home of his brother Aaron in the wilderness of West Texas."

All I want to know, from people who have seen it, is, what's your take on it?

What is it I'm not understanding?

Thanks.

[CatMor]

1. I saw it years ago and did not think it was great at all ..

I am not a fan of westerns or John Wayne as he was the same bad actor in all his films. I too can't figure out what everyone saw as being great. It did have good cinematography but that's about it .Mayybe there was some deep hidden message in the story, that I missed.

[lame54]

3. you don't like westerns - enough said

[CatMor]

4. But I would give praise if I thought it was deserved ...

I actually did like High Noon and the new 3:10 to Yuma. Of course can't forget the greatest one Blazing Saddles

[lame54]

2. I really liked it...

wouldn't put it on that list but
I wouldn't put Citizen Kane on there either

[cemaphonic]

5. I'm not really a fan either, but I've watched enough movies, and read enough ...

that I understand its reputation.

Probably the biggest thing is that there has been a big reevaluation of the myths of the Wild West in the 60 years since "The Searchers" was released, both in cinema, and in the larger culture. In older westerns, American settlers/cowboys/lawmen are unabashedly the heroes, and Natives are one of the many dangers and obstacles they face. Ford's other Westerns are a little more complex than this, but they still follow in this tradition. But in "The Searchers", Wayne's character is more of an antihero with some very ugly sides (playing very much against type for Wayne). And the Comanche characters and culture are also more complex than the screaming barbarian horde that they are depicted as in earlier Westerns. Later movies, including the so-called revisionist Westerns of Leone and Peckinpaugh that you mentioned take a lot of those themes, and take them even farther, and people today have a more balanced view on the conflict between American settlers and the Native peoples that occupied those lands. But "The Searchers" was one of the first big movies to address these themes.

The other thing is that the comic relief stuff is in a very old-fashioned vaudeville-related style that looks really forced and awkward to modern audiences. But leaving that stuff out of a John Ford Western is like leaving explosions out of a Michael Bay movie.

Also, the meat-and-potatoes aspects of the film (dialog, complex character relationships, cinematography, etc. are all really top-notch for the era).