04.01 Alan Le May, John Ford, and THE SEARCHERS (1954/1956)

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner concluded his speech on “TheSignificance of the Frontier in American History” with these words:“What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and tothe nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”This season on the Projectionist’s Lending Library we turn our eyes westward and look at a definitively American genre—the Western. For America, the Western is our Iliad, our Odyssey. It’s the founding myth to which we look in order to derive meaning for ourselves. Here all the conflicts central to literature and human existence play out: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself. And in it, too, are all the complexities and contradictions of America itself: kindness, bravery, hope—anger, murder, genocide.And how better to begin such a season than by looking at the prototypical director of Westerns, John Ford, working with his recurring star, John Wayne.Today on The Projectionist’s Lending Library, it’s The Searchers.Ford adapts a novel by Alan Le May about two men searching for a girl captured by a band of Comanche in post-Civil War Texas. Their quest is a long one, its outcome ambiguous and unforgiving as the landscape they travel. At the end of both the novel and the movie we are left with a question: who really triumphed, and at what cost? Welcome as we explore these questions and more in the inaugural episode of our new season, all about that most American of myths—the Western.For more about The Searchers, check out Glenn Frankel's The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend.