/tv/ - Movies and Television

I hate how pseudo-intellectuals always make it seem like this film is meant to be a commentary on racism, especially racism towards Native Americans in the United States. That's a complete Red Herring. There's nothing about the way racial conflict is portrayed in this film that's unique to the American old west. The fact that the director, John Ford, said in interviews that he didn't believe White people were responsible for wiping out the Natives only hammers this point home. This could just as easily be a story about Greeks and Persians or the English and the Irish. In fact, if you changed the Native Americans into Highland Scots and the Whites into Englishmen and Lowland Scots, the story in this could very well be the plot to a Walter Scott novel.
What the film is really about is a the struggle between the wild frontier and the emergence of civilization in the wild west. Ethan, John Wayne's character embodies this struggle. He is a hardened frontiersman and Civil War veteran who wanders to and fro, never able to fit in with the civilized world, yet he's civilized enough to despise the uncivilized barbarity represented by the Comanche. And this inner conflict within him is what lies at the heart of the entire film. This likely resonated with the WWII veterans who famously struggled to fit in with American society again after coming back from the war.