Compare Dances With Wolves (Costner film version) with The Searchers (John Ford film version) - Essay Example

Hence, both the movies enjoy the status of the historical record, which draw out the social, cultural and political scenario generally observed by the inhabitants of the confederate states of America during 1860s. Since the conflict between the Indians and Americans had led the nation to the civil wars, both Ford and Costner had depicted the entire state of clashes, conflicts and abhorrence in their respective movies. The Civil War between 1861 and 1865 was the conflict between the opposing states of the United States, where these three years contained the severest kinds of clashes between the opposite cultures (Muller 2010).

One of the most significant similarities between the movies under discussion includes their focusing concentration upon one and the same era, i.e. mid 1860s, the time when the American Civil War had been witnessing its climax point (Cozzens 2006). The initial scene of the Searchers portrayed Ethan Edwards, the central figure of the movie, belongs to the Confederate army, who had returned to Texas at his brother’s house after rendering a three-year service in the Civil war from the Mexican side.

Soon after his return, Ethan had to get involved into an excursion determined to search out the cattle of his brother’s neighbor Jorgenson. . It adversely infuriates the community, and Ethan appears to be determined to trace the whereabouts of his nieces at any cost. On the other hand, Lieutenant John Dunbar is the protagonist character of the movie Dances with Wolves. He had been appointed at Fort Sedgwick, the area of his choice after his rendering great services for the country against the Confederates in the Civil war.

Consequently, he expressed his joys by stating that “the strangeness of this life cannot be measured: in trying to produce my own death, I was elevated to the status of a living hero” (Costner 1990). Dunbar had to experience the hatred and prejudice of the local Indian Sioux tribe during his stay over there. Somehow his help to one of the young female members of the indigenous Sioux tribe, called Stands with a Fist (the would-be heroine of the film in the later developments), brought remarkable alterations in the behavior of the tribesmen, who developed cordial relations with Dunbar in return to his kindness towards them.

Thus, the same nature of conflict existed between the Americans and Indian tribesmen in Dances with Wolves, as it had been demonstrated by Ford in his the Searchers. The friendship between Dunbar and the Sioux started ripening with the passage of time in such a way that they began entering into interaction on the constant basis. Dunbar learns various words associated to the Sioux tribe and helps them in capturing the herd of buffalo for them. He finds no harm in the Sioux people and observes that he has not “been told nothing about these people is correct, which were neither thieves nor beggars.

Rather, they were polite guests and he enjoyed their humor” (Costner 1990). However, Dunbar had to pay a ransom amount due to his adopting the