In search of a classic IS John Ford's The Searchers the most influential film in American cinema? Glenn Frankel allows the question to be posed in the introduction to his new book on "the greatest American western of all time," as it was crowned by the American Film Institute in 2008: Just as Ernest Hemingway noted that "all modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," film critic Stuart Byron once declared, "in the same broad sense in can be said that all recent American cinema derived from John Ford's The Searchers."