I had never made the connection between John Ford’s “The Searchers” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” but found myself saying “of course” after Stewart pointed out that both involve anti-heroes trying to “rescue” women who don’t really feel any such need. Another important insight found in Taxi Searchers is their proximity in time to two important reversals of imperial fortune. Ford’s film was made just two years after the French were defeated in Vietnam and Scorsese’s came out just a year after the Vietnamese kicked the imperialists out once again.
COUNTERPUNCH, JULY 21, 2017
Paraphrasing Norman Mailer, after reading Andrew Stewart’s “Advertisement for Himself” in last weekend’s CounterPunch, I immediately downloaded his “Taxi Searchers: John Wayne, Robert DeNiro, and the Meaning of America” and found it completely absorbing. Although I have a particular interest in the work of John Ford, I can strongly recommend Stewart’s book to everybody as a successful multidisciplinary work that is so hard to find in scholarly treatments of film. With so many film scholars focusing narrowly on auteur theory, mise-en-scène, tracking shots and camera angles, it is a relief to read a young film scholar who makes the connection between film and politics. Since the two films under consideration are deeply immersed in the big questions of race and violence, it is almost impossible to analyze them out of their historical and social context.
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