Is ‘The Searchers’ truly one of the greatest films of all time?

What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on home? These words are sung over the title sequence of John Ford’s 1956 movie The Searchers against a plain, grey image of a brick wall. The film’s central dichotomy of the homestead and the frontier is established not with a triumphalist, imperialist scream of patriotism, but with a tired sigh of inevitability. We’re about to witness a story of loneliness, where ghosts of men leave home to isolate themselves in the open wastes.

One such ghostly man is Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Confederate soldier who has yet to surrender. We soon learn that Ethan isn’t a clean-cut cowboy hero. Approaching his brother’s family with bags of suspicious money after years of absence, Ethan resumes his relationship with his relatives by showing bigoted contempt for his adopted part-Cherokee nephew Martin. Ethan is a racist thug and likely serial criminal and we’re going to follow the next five years of his desolate life.

We soon learn that Ethan isn’t a clean-cut cowboy hero

After a brutal Comanche raid sees Ethan’s nieces Debbie and Lucy kidnapped and the rest of the family massacred save for Martin, the die-hard Confederate and the object of his simmering intolerance set off together on a lengthy quest to find the girls and avenge the slaughter. With the hot fury of vengeance freezing into icy determination as Martin and Ethan bicker, bond and scrap, we’re left to wonder if the girls will ever be found and what the increasingly unhinged Ethan will do to them if they are.

In 2012, Sight & Sound ranked The Searchers at number seven in its Greatest Films of All Time poll. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called it “the Great American Film”. In its list of the 1,000 most critically acclaimed films of all time, They Shoot Pictures Don’t They found John Ford’s film to be the ninth most critically celebrated ever made. Film figures as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Kenneth Branagh and Terence Davies have each listed the film as one of their very favourites. Why does this particular western receive unparalleled critical adulation? Does it deserve it?

Some would say no: Guardian critic Xan Brooks describes The Searchers as “overrated” and a “let-down”, advancing the argument that the critical celebration of the film spoiled it for him. A Slate article called ‘The Worst Best Movie’ argues that John Ford’s film is “boring”, “preposterous” and “impossible to enjoy”. A National Review piece describes the film as “mediocre”, with “mostly terrible” acting. A quick scan of the film’s Letterboxd profile reveals a host of popular dissenting reviews pointing out the film’s racism, toxic masculinity and unlikeable lead.

Where do I fit in? I must confess that on my first viewing, I wasn’t overly impressed. John Wayne’s performance seemed like self-parody to me: a beefy, stumbling, mumbling cowboy complete with a corny catchphrase (“that’ll be the day!”). However, I did enjoy the film’s glorious, vibrant visuals and I even got a strange kick out of the quirky cast of side-characters, particularly an incorrigible flamenco dancer. Overall I thought it was a standard, enjoyable western bizarrely overpraised by a critical consensus that I couldn’t begin to understand.

It was the second watch that did it for me. The Searchers revealed itself when I gave it another try. Where before I had seen pretty landscapes, I now saw the fruits of John Ford’s commendable labour. I strongly believe that you can pause the film at any moment and the resulting still image would be good enough to frame and hang on your wall.

You can pause the film at any moment and the resulting still image would be good enough to frame and hang on your wall

The searing, vibrant deserts and scrubland of John Ford’s vision almost resemble the surface of another planet, or a world painted like a postcard. Today, I watch The Searchers rapt by the tactile splendour of its imagery. Visually, its the most enchanting western I’ve ever seen.

What about its unlikable lead? Ethan Edwards isn’t a hero, he’s an anti-hero. From the very beginning his criminality and outsider status is made clear; it was only on re-watch that I picked up on the subtleties that he embodies. It’s easy to miss, but an early scene between Ethan and his sister-in-law brims with sexual tension. As you see that her care of Ethan’s clothing is suspiciously loving, the family dynamic changes completely. Is Ethan an uncle or a father?

Suddenly, the story doesn’t follow John Wayne as a cowboy on a mission, it follows Ethan Edwards, the racist deadbeat dad coiled up not just with hatred, but with guilt too. It was a bold and fascinating decision to have a beloved western icon like Wayne play an isolated, homeless loner, a killer doomed to drift away from his family.

Though it may be flawed and not immediately apparent, John Ford’s film shows us a complex man who allows love and hate to motivate him equally, until he cannot distinguish between the two. He has to be somewhat unlikeable, because that’s who he is, a pathetic man reduced to a ghost by his hate addiction. What a brilliant character he is.

John Ford’s film shows us a complex man who allows love and hate to motivate him equally, until he cannot distinguish between the two

Personally, I see The Searchers as the 1950s western that more than any other looked ahead to the age of revisionist westerns like Heaven’s Gate and McCabe & Mrs Miller. Intentionally or not, Ford’s film is a vital revisionist stepping stone, making an early push in the effort to flip the western image, exposing an underbelly of hegemonic brutality and injustice. Critics love subversion and The Searchers provides heaps of it.

I sympathise with the film’s detractors, but where they see shallowness I can only see gorgeous visuals anchored by an absorbing, subversive character study. Is it going too far to call The Searchers one of the all-time great films?

I wouldn’t say so, because it stands as a 50s heyday western that dared to ask difficult questions about itself. The racism and loneliness of the old west, so often buried by the genre, stand as an ever-present sentinel in John Ford’s classic.

If any old-school western deserves to be seen, this is the one.