The 100 Best Westerns of All Time

www.slantmagazine.com/features/the-100-best-westerns-of-all-time/





1. The Searchers (John Ford, 1965)

Reflecting on the vast wilderness of the Old West in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy describes it as the final place left on Earth where it was possible to determine “whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will, or if his own heart is not another kind of clay.” The dramatization of the struggle to tame or be tamed by an entirely new land is what gives the western such enduring appeal. And John Ford’s The Searchers has come to define the genre partly because of its unflinching look at how the American psyche was transformed by the process of building a home, in a place that was both indifferent and actively hostile towards its presence. The plot of the film sees a former Confederate soldier, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), embarking on an odyssey to return his kidnapped niece to her family. Uniquely capable of tracking her down due to his fierce determination, motivated by a primal hatred of the girl’s Comanche captors, he embodies the abyss of American colonial expansion gazing back at the country that it founded. As the years go by, it becomes unclear whether memories of bloody territorial violence have left enough of his humanity intact for him to achieve what he set out to do. In its celebrated closing shot, the film shuts the door on the western’s most iconic figure, who shoulders the collective shame and pride of a nation as he walks off into a breathtaking but empty vista, framed by darkness.