The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
THE SEARCHERS US 56

Ethan:         They aint white, anymore. They’re

Comanches. Casualties.

There is a fundamental problem with this film's coherence,
evidenced in its attempt to draw on the two very different
generic categories, the western and the melodrama. What is the
point of such an attempt, in the mid fifties? It seems that
the answer to this question turns on the need to articulate
the 'civilised' in terms which were of immediate relevance to
contemporary American society. But the western convention of
'feminising' the non-white, savage, childlike - the un-
cultured, in short - in order to delineate the more clearly
the culture of the male, white hero standing as he does for
America and the future, works against the conventions of the
family melodrama in which women are typically offered as the
central stabilising force with the prerogative - albeit
expressed in servile terms - of maintaining the fabric of
Civilsation. This generic difference accounts for the
inconsistencies of the central characters Ethan and Debbie,
though their inconsistencies cannot ever be reconciled within
the terms offered in this film.

Female characters in order of appearance, character groups

243

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