The Searchers - Westerns not my thing I guess

Writing this in April 2020 - the age of lock-down - it seems completely natural that I would get back to my film-watching roots and watch all of the films.  Got enough time for it whatever else is happening in the world.  Hunting around for film genres I'm not even slightly abreast of usually involves getting very obscure these days, however there is one major genre I never really got into.  Or understood.  Or watched.

The Western is a genre that seems to have arisen out of a very specific set of circumstances surrounding the creation of the nation state that is the USA.  The pioneers that created that nation are lauded; be they religious extremists from Western Europe settling on the Eastern seaboard or astronauts setting foot on the moon, in amongst them are the intrepid explorers who set off over the Appalachian mountains to colonise a land already occupied by more people than some versions of history want us to remember.  They took weapons with them into a hostile land, and so the USA's 2nd amendment was born.  They colonised a land of considerable mineral wealth and gave the modern USA a backyard of endless resources with which to build a superpower.  And hence the Western was born of a lionisation of those individuals.  Their crimes against native peoples were brushed over.  The hardships endured were recast as a forging of a nation.

Hence The Searchers.  If you hunt around for not very long at all on the internet you'll be told by more than one source that The Searcher is one of the greatest Westerns ever made - if not the greatest.

Hmmm...

Watching The Searchers is an odd experience.  Like any art created in a different era, it is always important to understand its contemporary impact.  From a modern standpoint The Searchers is racist, and The Searchers is sexist.  It is hard to understand how that could have been different in a 1950s setting.  America was a very different place, but it is hard to understand how anyone could see any good in the character portrayed by John Wayne - Ethan Edwards.  Edwards is a veteran of war and returns to his family shortly before local Comanches attack their residence and kill his brother's family, kidnapping his niece.  Edwards then spends the next several years hunting down the kidnappers, more out of rage and revenge than any real desire to save her.  In fact Edwards even resolves to kill her if she has gone 'too far' and turned Comanche.  Better to be dead than a Comanche.  Is this what happens in Westerns?

And so it is that we follow Edwards and several companions trailing the Comanche.  Occasionally they chance upon a bar and ask questions, one time they arrive back at the ranch and Edwards' companion tries to reignite a romance, at the end they turn up at her wedding and start a fight for some reason to prove some point of idiotic masculinity.  If the film is a critique of Westerns, it isn't strong enough.  If the film is celebrating individuals like Edwards, then it's zigzagging tone makes it feel extremely unsure of itself.  The female characters do nothing except wait for the men folk to turn up and save / marry them.  The Comanche characters do nothing except growl and shoot guns.  The male characters do nothing but look bedraggled and gaze hopelessly towards the horizon.  The film is at best a loose critique of a world thankfully behind us, and at worst it is a shameful document reminding us that world isn't as far behind us as we'd wish.  Or maybe Westerns just aren't for me.  Probably wont be watching any more John Wayne films - not unless the lock-down goes on for a loooong time...