Maybe the most interesting thing about John Ford’s The Searchers isn’t even in the movie. It’s an essay about the movie, written by Jonathan Lethem, who spent almost all of his frustrated youth trying to simply watch the film to completion with a group of friends without them either snarking on it or checking out completely, thus denying him the long-sought epiphany he wanted to share with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Not to spoil the climax of his essay, but the epiphany never comes. The Searchers is a good western, and the number of films it has inspired are many. But almost all its descendants are better films (a short list would include Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Paris, Texas) and none of them have John Wayne’s bloviating, repugnant ass ambling all over the frame like a bowlegged bear with shit stuck to his ass and no tree to scrape it on. But if you want to call yourself a student of the masters, The Searchers will never not be on the syllabus. So if you’re coming to the show, ratchet your expectations somewhere between “epiphany” and “hope nobody starts cracking jokes in the theater.” BOBBY ROBERTS