← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 19349 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-07-30
2005-07-30 20:35 | User Profile
The Searchers
A White Nationalist Classic.
In 1953 - a very good year for westerns that are White Nationalist Classics - a movie named "Broken Arrow" appeared which raised a huge favorable buzz among the critics because it painted a sympathetic portrait of the poor Apaches in their wars against Whites.
Broken Arrow marked a major turning point. Hollywood had decided it was time to move the Western movie genre in the direction of portraying the White man as evil and the Indians as the sympathetic victims.
If you hop in your car and drive around central Texas in year 2005, you will see historical markers along the roads where massacres of local farmers by Indians took place in the 1870's and 1880's. By 1953, most White children with first-hand knowledge of these massacres were dying of old age, and so it was time for the Hollywood propaganda machine to move its re- education campaign into high gear.
It was time to make sure that the western movie genre - largely developed by director John Ford - did not keep its product fresh and interesting by producing ever more graphic and extreme images of anti-White brutality. Such a trend would have preserved in Whites a sense of racial threat, thereby making their subsequent subordination through civil rights induced racial preferences, massive non-white immigration and "multiculturalism" that much more difficult.
It was in the above historical context, that John Ford produced his most explicitly racialist western, "The Searchers," in 1956.
A healthy race or tribe will produce a sufficient number of individuals predisposed to patrol its boundaries and keep it safe and separate from the alien.
John Ford has created an artistically masterful and anthropologically correct portrayal of the type in "The Searchers."
John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a Confederate soldier who held out for three years after Lee's surrender, and finally returns to his brother's family in Texas as "Uncle Ethan." His sister in law is wary, and he quickly makes clear his hatred of Indians by confronting Martin, a young male cousin, and remarking that he looks like a half-breed - testing for his racial loyalties.
Martin is one-eighth part Cherokee, and, ironically, was rescued by Ethan as a little boy after his parents were massacred by Indians - hybridism being no protection once group competition escalates to violence.
Indians are burning farm houses and murdering White settlers in the area. Ethan and Martin join a posse to fight the Indians. While drawn away from his brother's house, his brother, sister in law and their son are murdered, and his brother's two daughters are stolen by the Indians.
White girls are always the prize.
Ethan and Martin join a search party, and find his eldest niece raped, murdered and mutilated.
The rest of the movie involves the six year search for Ethan's younger niece, who the Indians plan to raise and keep as a squaw. The movie paints an intense portrait of Ethan's motivation for continuing the search for six long years.
One obvious motive is revenge. A second obvious motive is to prevent this particular band of Indians led by a chief named "Scar" from undertaking additional massacres, and in this second motive Ethan and Martin are successful. The fact of Ethan's pursuit significantly circumscribes Scar's activities and denies him the opportunity to kill more White families.
Ethan's primary motivation is to rescue the girl and get her back to her extended family alive. But the moral tension in this movie is created by Ethan's announced and well understood resolve that if his niece refuses to come back to her people, he will kill her rather than allow her to live in the degraded condition of a squaw.
Ethan's other relatives want the girl back, just as Ethan does. However, if she is unwilling to return, after having lived with the Indians for 6 years, they want Ethan to desist and allow her to live with them as an Indian.
In the end, Ethan is successful and the niece agrees to return to her people.
But "The Searchers" poses a fundamental question. If it is no big deal for the stolen girl to live among the Indians as a squaw, then what would be the motivation for rescuing her?
Would the possibility that her individual preference might be to return to her own people be sufficient to induce others to risk their lives to get her back?
In other words, absent Ethan's view that living as a captive sex object among the alien is a fate worse than death, would her rescue be worth the effort and the risk?
And what else are we giving up, if we allow our women to be stolen by aliens and used for sex? In the 1950's, chastity and pre-marital virginity were still very important, as they certainly were back in 1870. If we allow the alien to steal our women by force and use them as sex objects, are we not granting them a moral indulgence that we deny to males of our own race and faith?
Thus, "The Searchers" poses all the fundamental questions that were never allowed a public airing during the 1950's, as the forces advocating sexual revolution and the dissolution of racial and moral barriers were gathering force.
If our moral laws have no applicability beyond the boundaries of our race, then how can we enforce those moral laws upon our own race once we mix with the alien?
And if the gentle enforcement of those moral laws is essential to our group survival, can we even survive once we mix with the alien?
Ethan Edwards lacks social graces. He is not a pleasant man to be around. But in the end Ethan delivers his niece back to her extended family. And as he walks away into the sunset, he is a hero, and he is happy, as he has fulfilled his purpose in life.
He sacrificed six years of his own life for the good of the group.
And he would do it again.
It is a gem and a White Nationalist Classic.
Yggdrasil-
[url]http://home.ddc.net/ygg/cwar/searcher.htm[/url]
2005-08-02 04:18 | User Profile
I love THE SEARCHERS but I find myself disagreeing with almost all of this review. Part and parcel of the fool's errand of seeking "White Nationalist" content from eras where "White Natonalism", as we understand the term today, did not exist. But like I said, I love the picture anyway. See the widescreen version for fullest impact.
Dunno whether these would qualify as "WN Classics" but these are among my favorite Westerns - three of them John Fords - and all will be shown this week on TCM.
Wed, Aug 3
8pm EST Ride The High Country (1962) Two aging gunslingers sign on to transport gold from a remote mining town. Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley. D: Sam Peckinpah. C 94m. LBX CC
Sat, Aug 7
5:45 PM Red River (1948) A young cowhand rebels against his rancher stepfather during a perilous cattle drive. John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru. D: Howard Hawks. BW 133m.
8:00 PM Fort Apache (1948) An experienced cavalry officer tries to keep his new, by-the-books commander from triggering an Indian war. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple. D: John Ford. BW 128m. CC DVS
10:15 PM She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) An aging Cavalry officer tries to prevent an Indian war in the last days before his retirement. John Wayne, Joanne Dru, Ben Johnson. D: John Ford. C 104m. CC DVS
12:15 AM 3 Godfathers (1948) Three outlaws on the run risk their freedom and their lives to return a newborn to civilization. John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey, Jr. D: John Ford. C 106m. CC
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is often overlooked in favor of Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH but I consider it its equal. Its just-as-overlooked star, Joel McCrea, gives his best-ever performance here as the aging lawman rapidly becoming an anachronism in the changing Old West circa the early 1900s. A great movie full of lyrical touches and quiet power. There are no gory, spectacular climaxes such as Peckinpah later specialized in, but there's real depth of feeling throughout this picture. McCrea capped a 30-year career of underrated, understated work with a turn here that just about embodies the heroic Anglo-Saxon ideal in countless little moments and grace notes. Sadly, this movie was thoughtlessly dumped onto the market as a second feature and the lesson was not lost on Peckinpah: the people he was working for, who held both the pursestrings and the final say over his labors, were the exact sort of people who had made Joel McCrea's character a dusty curio in the very country he'd helped tame and build.
The four Wayne pictures are all iconic titles from his peak period....Wayne was the top box-office star of the 50s and 60s, and these four 40s films were big reasons why. Wayne was a limited actor but one who could be tremendously effective inside those limits - his Nathan Brittles ranks among his best work ever - and of course nobody capitalized on that more successfully than Ford. Ford's own great visual strengths are in full flower in these three films: his ability to not only capture what Olivier called [I]the pictorial beauty of heroism[/I], but to make the physical terrain his sagas took place amidst into characters as central to the drama as any of the actors. YELLOW RIBBON & THREE GODFATHERS both feature his famous outdoor locations viewed through a wonderfully vibrant Technicolor. THREE GODFATHERS' overt religious message is overdone to some, but the movie is so visually gorgeous, the shots so beautifully composed, it's difficult not to get swept up in its goodnatured and sincerely-felt corn.
The two black-and-white pictures, FORT APACHE and Hawks' RED RIVER, both present darker, more complicated stories...and in Wayne's "Tom Dunson", and FORT APACHE costar Henry Fonda's "Col. Thursday", you'll find two stubbornly obsessed precursors to Wayne's most famous role, THE SEARCHERS' Ethan Edwards, a decade later.
2005-08-02 04:26 | User Profile
Good stuff
2005-08-02 04:41 | User Profile
[B]The two black-and-white pictures, FORT APACHE and Hawks' RED RIVER, both present darker, more complicated stories...and in Wayne's "Tom Dunson", and FORT APACHE costar Henry Fonda's "Col. Thursday", you'll find two stubbornly obsessed early precursors to Wayne's most famous role, THE SEARCHERS' Ethan Edwards.[/B]
A great flick indeed, [I]Fort Apache[/I]. Same with the [I]The Searchers[/I]. Saw a good one on TCM last night: [I]The Taking of Pelham One Two Three[/I]. A thriller starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw and a host of fine '70s character actors. There're a few juicy racist scenes as well: Matthau takes a gaggle of Jap subway men on a tour of his Jew Yawk one, and at the end says to one of his co-workers "See these monkeys out, willya? Don't worry: they don't speak a word of English" - after which every one of the riceballs thanks him for the tour in perfect English.
Then there's a scene on the hijacked subway train in which Shaw tells the passengers they won't get hurt if they follow orders: an uppity pimp-skyed coon says "Dat's whut dey tol' me in 'Nam - just before I got muh ass shot off..."
A deranged hijacker responds by growling "Shut up, nigger...." and popping his inner tube lips with the barrel of his submachine gun...... :pimp: :gunsmilie :clap: