ABSTRACT
John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers is a canonical film in the history of American cinema, known and even revered for its formal beauty, restrained pacing, complex hero, and engrossingly elliptical and thematically contradictory plot. As Brian Henderson first pointed out in his 1980 article "The Searchers: An American Dilemma," the film's plot focus on race relations between whites and Indians in 1868 refers to the particular anxieties of white Americans in the mid-1950's over the social implications of desegregation. Ironically, despite Ethan Edwards's motivations, his knowledge of the Indians, and his experience living on the frontier, Ethan is not an effective rescuer. The film disguises their racist motive for rescue by giving Martin Pawley the motive of filial love and Ethan the motive of revenge. The Searchers derives its emotional impact from its status, not as a Western, but as an elegy, for The Searchers is, perhaps first and foremost, a film which says "good-bye.".
