The Searchers (1956)

 "Fella could mistake you for a half-breed."

When accusing a film of racism one needs to be wary of nuance, historical context and all sorts of factors. Past ages were far less sensitive to racist tropes and assumptions, and while that may not prevent racism being racism it must be taken into account. Past filmmakers can be forgiven, up to a point, for growing up in times where being non-racist took a far greater perceptiveness and strength of character than it does today.

Nevertheless, there are times a film is just racist by any standards, and it’s a shame that it has to be this one. The film is gorgeously shot by John Ford, with achingly epic vistas of Arizona standing in for Texas. The script is extraordinarily acute its psychology. And John Wayne gives a superlative performance.

And yet the protagonist, Ethan, is both a colossal racist and a total dick, a bully possessing not an ounce of charm or decent principle. Not long after we first meet him he utters the extraordinary line quoted above to Marty, who is fated to spend much of the film as his sidekick. He remains, three years after the end of the American Civil War, loyal to the Confrderacy, an ideal based entirely on race-based slavery, whatever Southern apologists may have spend much of the twentieth century trying to gaslight us with. He is therefore stubborn in his beliefs but with absolutely zero ethical foundation.

Lots of Westerns are not overtly racist as they don’t centre on the opposition between “whites” and the Native Americans whom said “whites” are in the process of slowly exterminating. It’s I arguable that the story of the American West is a story of genocide, but it would be pointless to dismiss much of a whole genre because of this. The American West was full of people born there just trying to live their often very hard lives and survive and, although they were all complicit in this genocide, well, I’m sure you and I have both worn clothes made by slave labour, and are complicit in the climate catastrophe. We are all born into the societies we are, and few of us are so virtuous as to not share some of that society’s guilt.

All of which is to say that I do not condemn the Western genre on the grounds of this genocide, not even necessarily where Native Americans are portrayed as an antagonist. But The Searchers absolutely leans into this. The central plot is when a bunch of Comanche destroy a home and murder its inhabitants, taking little Debbie to raise as their own. Yet everyone in the film, barring Marty, seems to be of the opinion that she is now tainted, made “not white any more” by her adoption of another culture, and should therefore be killed. This is not a film about Ethan the racist; it is a racist film.

And yes, the film ends with Ethan relenting, and generously allowing that a white girl who sleeps with a non-white man and adopts elements of non-white culture may not, perhaps, deserve to be slaughtered. So miscegenation is bad and so is non-white culture, but perhaps it shouldn’t quite be a capital offence. That seems to be the message here.

The Searchers is a very good film, perhaps even an excellent one. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly racist.