The Searchers

A marvellous Western which turns Monument Valley into an interior landscape as Wayne pursues his five-year odyssey, a grim quest - to kill both the Indian who abducted his niece and the tainted girl herself - which is miraculously purified of its racist furies in a final moment of epiphany. There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here (forever excluded from home, as the doorway shots at beginning and end suggest), but it hardly matters, given the film's visual splendour and muscular poetry in its celebration of the spirit that vanished with the taming of the American wilderness.