Do I just not get certain types of Westerns? What am I missing?

Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Jean-Luc Godard, John Milius and Paul Schrader regard this as one of the films that have most influenced them and have all paid some form of homage to it in their work.

What we got here is... failure to communicate!

Someone who starts two different threads attacking a movie that they have just seen is not expressing an opinion. They are on a crusade. If you already know that you don't like 50's westerns, don't watch them.

I don't know what it means to "get" a movie. I don't "get" any of the "spaghetti westerns" enough to consider any of them as great as their fans consider them. "A Fist Full of Dollars," is interesting to me to compare to Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," but I am not impressed with the plot. It does not translate well from a Japanese sword slinging movie into a western setting. The plot becomes so implausible as to be distracting. But, then along comes "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, etc." and I think Sergio Leone is milking the characters and Clint Eastwood's star power.

I found the "Trinity" series, there were at least four of them released overseas to be fun movies that I could watch one time and throwaway. They were western comedies with a lot of slapstick action.

I find much the same issues with the plot of "The Magnificent Seven" as with "For a Few..." It's absurd, though I will admit that I cannot help enjoying the movie. I can't say the same for Clint Eastwood's other Italian westerns, even though I have a tough time not enjoying his characterizations. These plots work in a Japanese Sengoku Jidai or Tokugawa Shogunate setting, but they are insanely unrealistic in an American western setting.

Most of the hundreds of westerns one can see were true "B" movies. They were made at a time when most theaters were showing two features to draw in more people in the thirties and forties. Some might have even been third featurettes for the kid's matinees on Saturdays. They are pretty thin on plot, character development, and acting.

It may help you with "The Searchers," if you accept that the characters are characterizations. Mr. Ford meant them to be played over-the-top to remind the audience of what's going on and what the relationships are. Martin is going through a coming-of-age process, much like Luke Skywalker. If jeffrey Hunter does not play him over-the-top you will forget that he is a teenager when the story starts.

Watch the subtleties, pick up on the clues that tell you that Ethan is deeply in love with his sister in law and vice versa. Something happened there that we are never told about. Ethan is trying to help Martin come of age and teach him about the cruelty of the world, but he also wants the boy to go back and marry the Jorgenson girl, even if he is an, ugh, half breed.

Many of the 1950's audiences were not ready for miscegenation, adultery (even suppressed), and under age sex. Debbie is only 15 years old at the end of the film, but she has been "living with a buck." And many of them were certainly not ready to have their racism dragged up onto the screen and examined. Over the top characterizations allow the audience to ignore the heavy issues that Mr. Ford is hammering them with.

Sorry to go so long, but the more I wrote the more I thought about "The Searchers" and westerns in general. They made so many that most people won't like most of them, but there are bound to be some that you will like.

The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.

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