Hot Movie Takes: The Searchers
This post may container spoilers for the movie. It’s my hot take while watching or directly after watching the movie. Don’t expect too much from this post.
The Searchers is a classic Western where Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, arrives at his brother’s ranch after being away in the civil war for many years. Everything kicks off when a ranch near by had some of their cattle stolen. Ethan, Ethan’s adopted son Martin Pawley, and the others go off to try and find it while Ethan’s brother, his brother’s wife, and his brother’s other children stay at the ranch. They find the missing cow but discover it dead and Ethan deduces that it was actually a plot to draw them away so that his brother’s ranch could be attacked. When Ethan and Martin arrive back at the ranch, they discover the daughters are missing and everyone else murdered.
This sets the plot into motion and Ethan and Martin set off on a 5 year long adventure to get the daughters back. They quickly find one daughter in a canyon near the house dead. After a while, they come across a trader named Futterman who claimed an Indian named Scar has the other daughter, Debbie. Futterman tries to rob and murder Ethan but he knew that was going to happen all along so he shoots and kills Futterman in the back. Eventually, they come across a fort that has survivors from a raid but none of them are Debbie. The eventually find Scar and discover that Debbie has been living there the whole time. Ethan tries to kill Debbie but gets shot with an arrow instead by an Indian, then they run off without Debbie, then Martin returns home to get married but that didn’t work out. Then they discover where Scar is hiding again so Ethan and a band of other Texas rangers round up and raid the camp and get Debbie back who now wants to be with Ethan (?) and Martin gets married.
This plot is very convoluted and there is a lot of riding horses in the desert scenes. Also, it becomes winter for about 60 seconds twice in the movie then cuts back to being a hot desert again. I’m also confused as to how we went from Debbie wanting to remain with the Indian tribe, hating Ethan, and Ethan wants to (and almost does) kill her, to Debbie excited he came back to get her and Ethan happy she’s back. About half way through the movie, it felt like we were maybe coming to an end but when I checked the time remaining, much to my surprise, there was still about an hour and 45 minutes left. It really felt more like it should have been a 2–3 episode TV series rather than a movie.
Ethan also says ‘That’ll be the day’ about 8 times in this movie and about half of them seem to just be there only for the effect of hearing John Wayne say it. I don’t think I’ve seen any other John Wayne movies so I’m assuming that he probably says that in other movies as well.
I’ve seen a lot of people proclaim this to be ‘one of the best Westerns of all time’. I haven’t seen a lot of Westerns but if that’s true then the bar for these types of movies must be pretty low because I’m giving this a wild 4.9 “that’ll be the day”s out of 10.
