Well, the Duke’s fans should be a bit more wary of this particular film. There’s a fairly simple reason why The Searchers is so highly rated by critics. Whether by accident or design, it is ultimately a liberal telling of the settling of the western frontier.

Specifically, the film’s theme is race. It portrays the settling of the west as an explicitly racial struggle for dominance between the Indians and the whites. More to the point, it subtly but unmistakably subverts Wayne’s heroic image by making his character’s motivations all about race. Which is exactly why liberals love it. ~Sean Higgins, The American Spectator

So liberals love a movie whose premise is the savage raid and kidnapping of a young white girl by Indians?  They love a movie that valorises family vendetta and violent frontier self-help?  They love a movie where white men with guns seek to exact vengeance for the wrong done to their own?  Well, liberals certainly have changed!  Do they also love Birth of a Nation? 

But Mr. Higgins’ rather baffling interpretation of The Searchers does not stop here.  He goes on, quoting the maestro of PC film criticism:

As Ebert has noted: “Ethan’s redemption is intended to be shown in that dramatic shot of reunion with Debbie, where he takes her in his broad hands…and says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ The shot is famous and beloved, but small counterbalance to his views throughout the film — and indeed, there is no indication that he thinks any differently about Indians.”

It’s because of such unresolved questions that so many film critics — especially, yes, the liberal ones — love the film. How often do you get to see the assumptions of politically correct history played out in a film with a conservative icon like Wayne in the leading role? To create something comparable today Bill Bennett would have to appear dealing drugs in a gangster rap video.

Did it ever occur to anyone that, however forced the ending might be, it is a resolution that respects the importance of blood ties and that Edwards realises, in the end, that his niece is kin and therefore must be protected no matter what else has happened?  The lesson is not that of the bad racist who suddenly mends his ways, but that of the man obsessed who very nearly destroys the reason for his quest in the first place; viewed in this way, the ties of blood between him and his niece are the only things that restrain him. 

And I do hate to burst Mr. Higgins’ bubble, but a PC reading of the history of the West would have omitted the whole savage Indian raid-cum-kidnapping part to begin with.  In the true victimology of the West, Indians never did these sorts of things–or they were provoked into doing them–and the emphasis in history books has been for the last 20 years on the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee to the exclusion of anything else.  The decades of desultory violence between settlers and Indians are thus collapsed into a convenient morality tale of the oppressor stealing from the natives, pure and simple.  This is not to ignore white atrocities, but to recognise that they are hardly the entire story.  In a truly PC version of frontier life, we would be treated instead, Dances With Wolves-style, to the perfidy of the Bluecoats and the simple nobility of the Indians. 

To call The Searchers a liberal or PC telling of frontier history would be like calling Apocalypto a PC recounting of the fall of the Maya.  Though I have only seen snippets of the latter in previews, it is clear enough that Gibson intends to focus on the violent self-immolation of Mayan civilisation, complete with human sacrifice–all of which was something that was only a couple generations ago considered simply impossible, on account of what had to be the benevolent, peaceful nature of all Native American and Mesoamerican peoples.

It may be that liberal film critics adore the film because they themselves misread what it is saying.  That is hardly any reason to validate their interpretation or knock The Searchers simply because it has some notable liberal fans who see the anti-racist morality tale in it that they want to see.