The Searchers (1956)
Classic western by John Ford, starring John Wayne. Wayne plays a veteran of the American civil war on the confederate side. After a Comanche war party raided the ranch of his relatives and abducted their daughter, his niece, him and his nephew Martin set out to rescue her and take revenge.
It's a movie whose potential has great premise, although one that feels hamstrung by the conventions of its time. It's easy to imagine one of the more revisionist western film makers, someone like Leone or Eastwood, interpreting this kind of material as the uncomfortable and brutal tale about the unrelenting cycle of revenge that it is, but Ford delivers a formally beautiful but morally and philosophically shallow approach to it.
There are definitely hints towards the inherent moral complexity of the subject. We definitely get a sense of the fact that Wayne's Ethan is a less than sympathetic character, that there is a deep seated resentment and bigotry to him, but it's never quite laid bare and never quite explored, meaning that the vaguely outlined tale of redemption this suggests it would like to be never quite materializes. There are, for sure, some very interesting ideas being implied. Ethan's obsessive anxiety about his niece being "defiled" by a native man so deeply mirrors enduring and enduringly destructive notions about racial purity that plague mankind and Martin, as the secondary protagonist, a man with some native ancestry himself, should act as a foil to him but it's clear that Searchers doesn't want to, or perhaps wasn't able, to explore those.
It's a movie bound by conventions that don't to its subject matter justice. It's resolved in a convenient and undeserved way because it was made in an environment where depicting it truthfully, showing that there is no convenient resolution to any of the issues it presents, wouldn't have been acceptable. So what remains is something that, for better and for worse, mostly shows its period of American history, the winners history, the way they want to see it, at best able to imply that what it's showing is not the whole story.
Ford was, by all means, a brilliant director from a formal perspective, his framing of the wasteland of the American frontier much more poignant than the story playing out in it, the performances very memorable in a larger than life way. Shout-out to Ken Curtis, whose accent and laugh made for some of the best moments in the movie. But for all its virtues, if there ever was a movie that needed a remake, it's this one. It was just not the right subject matter for the time, or the right time for the subject matter.
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