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The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is no accident that two out of my top three movies star John Wayne as the rugged individual of American myth. As they say in Olympic gymnastics, he simply nailed the part. On a scale of 1-10 he was a 50. Without John Wayne, the actor, it is quite possible that John Ford would never have achieved such perfectly realized visions of the American myth as Searchers and Liberty Valance.
John Wayne as Tom Doniphon in Liberty Valance is the purist version of the iconic Western character, still rough and rugged, but cleaned up, so to speak, so as to be acceptable in polite society. Kept just below the surface of his civilized veneer, however, is the clear-eyed willingness to recognize and deal with evil in the world, even unto death.
In contrast, Ethan Edwards in Searchers hides nothing.
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Indeed, it is clearly Director John Ford's intention to reveal that the noble passionate thirst for justice rightly praised in men is not so very far from the wild frenzy that can grip the soul with a base desire for death and destruction. All it takes, he seems to say, is for good men to confront one horror too many, and ultimately, even the great American mythic hero can betray human frailty. Ethan Edwards is not just a racist who hates the savage American Indians, he despises them, so much so that he is willing to murder his own niece - the very niece he has dedicated his life to find - because she has "gone native."
In the end, Ethan Edwards does the right thing, redeemed by the simple expedient of seeing his niece, face to face. In loco parentis, Ethan, for all his anger and hatred, cannot forget his humanity nor his duty.
Butch Cassidy is almost post-modern in its handling of the Western, and as a result, just barely made this list. Almost post-modern, but not quite. It deviates from the standard Western in that the rugged individuals pursuing justice in a wild teeming wilderness are all kept off-stage. "Who are those guys?" asks Butch and Sundance. They are Tom Doniphon, Ethan Edwards, Wyatt Earp, and all the rest of America's mythic heroes.
In truth, it is the classic Western told from the perspective of the Outlaws. But not Outlaws as evil, but Outlaws exhibiting another trait essential to the taming of the American West: sheer youthful exuberance at the thrill of it all, living on the cutting edge of life. Butch and Sundance are the Hollywood version of that which drove the popular glorification of Jesse James: they are not immoral, just immature, two wild colts caught up in the joy of just being alive.
In the end, theirs was a life-style nourished by the American West, that ultimately had to give way to the historical necessity of progress. George Roy Hill, the Director, symbolized this impersonal historical demand in an unforgettable way: in the distant thundering hoof-beats of the Posse relentlessly following Butch and Sundance across the vastness of the Wilderness. Their time was over, their friend the Sheriff tells them, while in the real world of Butch and Sundance's time, the U. S. Census of 1890 concludes that, indeed, the American frontier is gone.
Gone but not forgotten. And we have Hollywood, of all things, to thank for that.
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