The Searchers

Current IMDB Rating: 8.0/10
My Rating: 6.8/10

The Searchers is a movie I've always wanted to see, but never really made the time or effort to watch. I recently had a few hours free and saw this on my Netflix instant watching service, so I was finally able to view the film. I have to say, after all of the fuss made over the film from what I've read online, I was hardly impressed. The movie seemed to jump around as inconsistently as the characters. The only real thing that seemed to drive anyone in the movie was the idea of trying to save the surviving member of the family.

As the story goes, a group of Native Americans draw the men of a small town out into the desert in order to easily attack the town. When they return, they find one of the homes on fire and the women from the home are either found killed or presumed kidnapped by the "Comanches." This starts the movie as the two surviving men in the family set off with some others from the town to find the missing girls.

As the movie progresses, years pass without any real sense of time or place except for the mentioning of a passing of time (what amounts to five years by the end of the picture). We see several snowfalls, but it is never really said that it is winter as the men are traveling around the western United States and could just as easily be up into the Rockies instead of any new season. As with the inconsistent passage of time comes the inconsistent way the characters act, mostly seen in the character of Debbie: the last surviving female member of the family who is taken in by the Indians and made a wife of their leader Scar. When she is first found she pleads with the men to leave the tribe alone and let her live in peace with the Indians, but when they get to her the second time she is happy as hell to leave "her people" behind. I did not, and still cannot understand the change in her attitude. First she wants to stay with the Indians, then she can't wait to leave.

Looking past all of the strongly inconsistent actions of the characters in the film, I can understand why it is seen as a classic. The real locations of the film alone are enough to watch the movie. It shows the expansive lonely beauty of the west in a way not seen in probably any other movie.

After all of this, there is the realization that you have just seen stereotypes unlike those seen in many other movies. There is a close-knit American family surviving on their own in the middle of a dusty desert, but somehow they find the means to make it until they are attacked by vengeful Indians who attack and kill the family because they are on "their land." It was hard to see the "good guys" in the movie call these people "Comanches" and "Injuns" - terms that are now seen as racist and inappropriate, but were probably commonplace during the setting of the film. This made it impossible to identify with the main characters because you don't want the heroes of a movie to be bigoted men.

Overall, the movie was a decent story of a time in American that has long since disappeared. It does not reach the grandeur of an epic Gone With the Wind film, but it gets pretty close and does not make you feel as though you wasted your time watching the movie.