Searchers, The (1956)

I admit to some trouble watching classic "serious Westerns" in this era post-Leone, post-Peckinpah and post-Deadwood. The mythic Wild West image has been so thoroughly shattered that it seems quaint and outmoded even when subtly challenged and twisted.

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother's homestead after years away, but the visit is disrupted by a vicious Comanche attack that leaves most of the family dead and the two daughters, Lucy and Debbie, kidnapped. He and Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), his adopted part-Indian nephew, become the searchers of the title, doggedly tracking the Indian band.

Martin hopes to recover the girls, but as the search drags on -- and on, and on -- it becomes clear that Ethan's motives aren't quite so noble. There's an interesting article in Cinema Journal called "Darkening Ethan", about the multitude of changes that Ford and his screenwriter made to the character as he was written in the original novel. All of them were calculated to make him a less sympathetic and less heroic figure. He's callous; he's extremely, violently racist; he's as like to shoot in a man in the back as not; he may be having an affair with his brother's wife. He performs at least one act that is strongly associated with barbarism.

But even though Ethan Edwards is a brilliant take on the avenging cowboy hero, he's a boy-scout compared to the likes of Tuco or Al Swearengen.