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While showing "The Searchers" to my class today, it suddenly hit me that January's surprise smash "Taken" is yet another movie that takes many of its cues--narrative and otherwise--from Ford's protean masterpiece.
Remember how back in the '70s "The Searchers" had a rep as "the" movie of the New Hollywood because it inspired so many directors/films (Scorsese, "Taxi Driver;" Spielberg, "Close Encounters;" Milius, "The Wind and the Lion;" Schrader, "Hardcore")?
Glad to know its impact is still being felt today. It is kind of shocking--and a pretty pitiful comment on contemporary film criticism--that nobody (at least nobody that I'm aware of) has made such an obvious comparison/contrast/connection.

They made the comparison with The Missing. I guess the change of setting through people off, but it's a very good one to make.

Throw people off. I shake my fist at the lack of edit function.

movieman: Just last week I cited The Searchers in another forum while discussing Taken. Some posters there were not thrilled by the vigilantism in Taken. And though I really like Taken, I agreed that a couple of the Neeson character's choices are particularly extreme and would have benefited from the kind of treatment you'd find in a more thoughtful film, even one as conflicted as The Searchers. Neeson's goal is pretty straightforward and isn't complicated by the kind of twist that John Wayne faces when he finds Natalie Wood.

Is it fair to say that some of the nastier stuff was edited out of the American release of Taken to bring it down to a PG13? I'm thinking in particular of a shot in the big torture scene that was in the trailer.

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