The Real Wild West: From The Searchers to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Anonymous College

The Searchers is a western directed by John Ford in the year 1956 and starring John Wayne as the main protagonist of Ethan Edwards, a Civil War veteran who embarks on a long and arduous journey to rescue his kidnapped niece from the Comanche tribe that abducted her. Directed by one of the most iconic directors of westerns at the time, The Searchers incorporates several characteristics of the common western trope: a remote and desolate setting, the individualism and sometimes distant nature of the protagonist, Indians serving as the unequivocally ‘bad guys’ throughout the film, and the overall theme of an individual journey to solve the problems at hand. Set in Monument Valley, a not only iconic, but also heavily sought after setting for many westerns, The Searchers is almost a stereotypical western due to a lot of its derived characteristics from the classic western trope. However, what sets this movie apart from the rest, and, coincidentally, what makes it so comparable to the spaghetti western of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are the techniques used in the creation of this film. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone, and starring Clint Eastwood as the ‘good,’ Lee Van Cleef as the ‘...