This is not your granddaddy’s John Wayne movie. He’s not as noble or in charge. Here, his cowboy archetype is floundering. It’s the anti-Western most people don’t acknowledge happening until Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, only happening decades earlier. Dark, gritty, and featuring Wayne at his most overtly unlikeable onscreen, The Searchers gives an unflinching view of the West hardening a man to the point of inhumanity. Is Wayne’s character an actual shell of a man? Does he learn anything from his desperate quest to “save” his niece from the Comanche tribe that kidnapped her? Check it out in one of the most essential Westerns ever made. – Cat McCarrey
