The Hate In The Frame

Ethan Edwards rides back from a war he will not discuss to a homestead that is burned within twenty minutes, and spends five years looking for a niece taken by Comanche raiders. The search is not a rescue. It becomes clear early that he intends to kill her for having lived among them, and the film's tension is whether the young man riding with him can prevent it. Ford shoots Monument Valley as something enormous and indifferent, and puts his hero in the one place a Western hero never belongs: outside the door, looking in. The film opens with a door opening onto the desert and closes with the same door closing on a man who cannot be allowed inside, and everything that matters happens between those two shots.