The Searchers, a cinematic masterpiece directed by John Ford, stands as a quintessential example of the Western genre. However, the film’s underlying premise and its racist undertones have its origins in aninfluential Victorian productionproduced half a century earlier.The Searchershas inspired many Western moviesafter it.
Kidnapping By Indians, produced in 1899, is often cited as the first Western film.Kidnapping By Indiansis not an Americanbut a British film, shot in Blackburn, England, features a group of cowboys rescuing a young girl from a Native American raid. Far from a realistic portrayal of the American frontier,The Searchershas been called"just ridiculous"by a historian. However, itignited an audience’s appetite for such stories.
John Wayne’s The Searchers Follows The Same Basic Premise As Kidnapping By Indians
The Premise Uses A Trope Dramatized In The First Western Movie
The Searchersis lauded as a cinematic masterpiece and a cornerstone of the Western genre. Directed by John Ford and adapted from Alan Le May’s novel, the plot follows Ethan Edwards, a grizzled former Confederate soldier, on a relentless quest torescue his niece from a Comanche tribe. TheWestern icon John Waynedelivers plays a troubled anti-hero. The film’s critical acclaim and commercial success solidified its status as one of the greatest Westerns ever made.
Its basic premise goes back to the true origins of both the Western genre and an unfortunate trope. The first Western movie was a British filmKidnapping By Indians,filmed in Blackburn, Lancashire. The plot centers around a brutal Native American raid on a white settlement. The attackers torch the camp and abduct a young girl. A group of cowboys intervenes, leading to a gunfight. The captured girl is eventually rescued by the cowboys. Its runtime was under two minutes.Its themes reflected an appetite for Wild West stories at the time.
Is Kidnapping By Indians Really The First Western Movie Ever Made?
Far From The Wild Frontier, Kidnapping By Indians Was Filmed In The UK
While the notion of a British-made film pioneering the Western genre may seem laughable, the origins ofKidnapping by Indianscan be traced to co-director James Kenyon’s youthful encounters with Americans. These interactions kindled hisfascination with the mythology of the Wild West, and coupled with the hungry public interest in such stories, led to the creation of this early Western film. The Blackburn production had a local cast. Overall, it is far from the authentic American frontier it sought to portray, whereasThe Searchersis has partial real-life inspiration.
Fiction of this period is characterized by escapism and world-weariness…
Following the American Civil War, numerous cotton workers from Blackburn migrated to America, drawn by the promise of a new life. Their return to England was accompanied bytales of the untamed frontier, igniting a sense of curiosity and adventure among the local population. The release ofKidnapping By Indiansin 1899 was part of a widerfin de siécleculture – fiction of this period is characterized by escapism and world-weariness, as well as decadence. The perceived exoticism of the film’s plot fits perfectly.
Other Western Movies That Follow The Kidnapping By Indians Story Formula
The Trope Has Persisted In Movies Right Through To This Decade
The decidedly racistKidnapping By Indiansabduction trope has been influential on a number of film plotlines, some of them surprisingly recent. However, it was not invented by the 1899 film – ithas its roots in folk talespredating even the printing press and is known as the“Captivity Narrative”(TV Tropes). This makes the trope much more deeply rooted and persistent.The Searchers,with its 1950s social mores, was the ideal movie for the stereotype to play out.Against a Crooked Sky(1975) also uses the trope.
The premise has been reworked in some more modern titles – for instance, inThe Missing(2003), Mexicans replace Native Americans as the kidnappers. A recent example of using the original trope is thePaul Greengrass movieNews of the World,released in 2020. The movie follows the journey of an aging Civil War veteran tasked withreturning a young girl, raised among the Kiowa tribe, to her sole surviving relative. The girl, torn between her birth family and her adopted Kiowa family, faces the difficult prospect of leaving her only known home.
