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The 1956 movie masterpiece Quentin Tarantino is adamant is overrated: “I never understood the high pedestal”

Sat 16 May 2026 20:15, UK

If several of the best directors in cinema history call a particular movie one of the greatest ever made, then it stands to reason that the movie is, in fact, one of the greatest ever made. Ever the contrarian, though, Quentin Tarantino disagrees.

While you can’t just point at someone and tell them they’re wrong when their opinion differs from yours, branding a stone-cold masterpiece as an overrated piece of work still stretches the limits of credulity. You don’t necessarily have to like it, but you can’t ignore its seismic legacy and towering influence.

In the endless, unanswerable debate over who can be called the most iconic star in the history of the western genre, Tarantino has always been a Clint Eastwood guy. He utterly adores Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly probably his all-time favourite flick, and he anointed its leading man as the “sexiest motherfucker” in cinema.

The right to earn that title has always been a two-horse race between Eastwood and John Wayne, but the two-time Academy Award-winning scribe has never been the biggest fan of ‘The Duke’. Even at that, you can’t say that John Ford’s The Searchers isn’t the actor’s magnum opus, and if you do, then Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are just two of the filmmakers who’d be very disappointed in you.

“I didn’t like The Searchers for years,” Tarantino explained. “I didn’t appreciate it. I just didn’t get it, like a lot of ’50s melodramas and westerns that I just don’t like, frankly. I never understood the high pedestal that John Milius and Spielberg and Scorsese and Schrader have always put that movie up to.”

It’s on that pedestal for a reason, and Spielberg can’t even start working on a production until he’s rewatched it for what must be close to the thousandth time by now. Tarantino saw it once, decided then and there that it wasn’t for him, and it wasn’t until he revisited years later that his stance began to soften.

“Lo and behold, this time I liked it,” he acknowledged. “It was a thing where, like, this time, I kind of got it. I’m still not as into it as these guys are, but I see a little bit more of what Scorsese is talking about, especially when it comes to the character, especially his breakdown of Ethan Edwards.”

Scorsese penned a famously impassioned assessment of The Searchers, but as much as Tarantino enjoyed it more the second time around, he still can’t understand why so many of his peers and predecessors have elevated it to the almost deified position that he clearly doesn’t think it’s worthy of.

“Nevertheless,” he concluded. “I did find it moving in a way that I was always tone-deaf to.” He still doesn’t get the hype, and at this point, he never will, but he was at least kind enough to give The Searchers more of a passing grade than before, even if it’s hardly undeserving of being called a masterpiece.