Maybe for a hundred more

The Searchers

(1956)

OK, look, here's the thing: call 'em "Comanche" or "Vietcong" or "insurgents," it doesn't matter whether we have any business being there in the first place. If we've been told that we need to be there, and the Others think we don't belong there, they're going to to everything they can to keep us from staying there, including murder, rape, and whatever else we define as "savagery" when it's done to us, as "warfare" when we do it to others.

And that means that once those rules are established, it doesn't matter whether we belong there or not; if we want to live, we answer savagery with savagery; we answer kill with kill.

One other lesson from this film is that what we (which is to say we men, because we with cocks get to decide who the enemy is) fear most is the cock, and the spunk, of the Other, because their cock threatens the supremacy of our cock, and their spunk dilutes ours. Why else would we resist so the military aptitude of you the cockless?

And that is why this is a great film: not because it shows that Ford can film Monument Valley as magnificently in color as in black and white; not because it shows that John Wayne really is capable of something that we can reasonably call acting; but because more than a half-century ago, someone was able to make sense of Fallujah.