The Searchers

Some months ago now, an article in the NYRB caught my attention, an article written around the publication of a learned tome about a film I had not previously heard of called 'The Searchers'. 405 pages of learned tome at a modest $28.00, which I was tempted to buy, but decided not to on the grounds that the article had given me enough of the gist. Plus there were quite enough unread books lying about the house as it was.

The core of the gist being two fold. First, that the Comanches of the south west were pretty much as bad as the Texans and others who made it their business to exterminate them. Reasonably well behaved towards their own, but reasonably savage when it came to anybody else. Second, that despite said savagery there was a fair bit of population exchange, in the time honoured way of pinching the other lot's women for breeding and other purposes. One of the various exogenous marriage arrangements which anthropologists tell us about. The film is built around the dubious business of pinching them - what is left of them, what they have become - back.

So off to Amazon to get the film, which turned up after a while, a little slower than usual, in a box labelled 'WESTERNS - THE CLASSIC COLLECTION'. The CD inside did not have the usual label stuck onto one side so deciding which way up was a bit tricky. But we got there after a few attempts, to find that the CD itself was flawed, certainly too much for the DVD player in our holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight, although we did get through most of it in the end.

Tried again yesterday and noticed that instead of the usual label, the CD did have some description on a narrow, annular band around each side of the hole, some description which included the rubrics 'Side A' and 'Side B'. Experiment revealed that the trick was to have side A up and then the DVD player happily played from side B; I have now added a piece of paper to the box reminding me of this fact against an future viewing. Coming to the quality of the playing, a lot better than the Isle of Wight with just the one stutter, near the beginning of the film.

A film which turns out to have worn remarkably well for something which is near 60 years old, although I dare say one could pick plenty of holes in the period detail (something our own costume dramas take a lot of trouble with nowadays). A result as I don't usually get on with films of this vintage. A film which takes considerable liberties with the story from which it is mainly drawn, but not necessarily much the worse for that. A film which is both serious and popular - a trick which is not often pulled off.

One shudders to think what a modern film maker - Mel Gibson for example - might make of the same material. Blood, guts, rape and pillage all over the place, nearly all of which the old film managed without, while still making its points. It was also good to have an old fashioned, orchestral sound track, which also managed to make its points without the insistence, loudness and intrusiveness of many modern film sound tracks.