Review Review - The Worst Best Movie

The Worst Best Movie: Why On Earth Did The Searchers Get Canonized?
Written by Stephen Metcalf
rating: no cravats
online at Slate.com

"A movie made by semiprimitives will submit more docilely to extensive Rorschaching than a self-consciously dark and mature Western like Little Big Man or McCabe and Mrs. Miller."

I wanted a quote from Robert Altman in praise of "The Searchers," but when I couldn't find one I stumbled onto a page recalling (see it for the pictures) the first time Ford's movie screened at a drive-in in Illinois. Before its reputation, "The Searchers" was still a movie, bottom line as full of invention, awe, and spectacle as anything before it.

For Metcalf, the film is famous only because a certain group of people - moviemakers and academics - like to see themselves as open-ended romantics. Better to submit to a little less self-consciousness, blanket-head, and think instead of Ethan shooting out a dead Indian's eyes. The high wind off the desert carries the echoing smoke and sound in an instant, and all that remains is a crowd of silent, intimidated cowboys, heeled by the murderous look in Ethan's peepers.

Or maybe just this: "By what you preach, none. But what that Comanch believes..."