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Beautifully filmed, including several iconic Western cinema images and, of course, the always photogenic Monument Valley and Natalie Wood. John Wayne does a great job playing a character who is unrelentingly racist and, though his violent racism is the dominant theme of the movie and obviously meant to make him an unsympathetic protagonist, one wonders how evident this was to audiences in the mid-Fifties as opposed to how much it may have boosted Wayne’s status as an American icon in the eyes of those who didn’t realize that the character’s hate-filled racism was supposed to be a bad thing.

The stabs at comic relief using the cartoonish Swedish neighbor and the intellectually challenged Mose Harper wear thin after a while. Occasionally the staging, sets, and costuming are anachronistic; more 1950s Western than 1860s Texas – but the only really, truly jarring anachronism was white-girl-living-with-the-Indians Natalie Wood’s very well applied lipstick.

There’s a reason it’s considered the greatest American Western, it’s without a doubt one of the greatest movies ever made in my opinion. It showcases everything that makes John Ford revolutionist he was and John Wayne the legend he was. Taking topics and settings that are now classic, this has everything you could ever need. Not many movies have such a large scale and powerful impact, this is truly a legend of the past.
This uses the idea of cowboys vs. Indians in a very epic way, showing the ugly side of each. While Scar is about as bloodthirsty and evil as villains come, John Wayne’s Ethan shows an equally ugly side. In many ways, the five year story is about changing a man. Racism is shown in full effect and how destructive and horrible it can become. The idea of someone killing their own family because they associated with another culture is scary. The politics of this still ring true today and work as a sort of cautionary tale. However, nothing seems heavy handed or overbearing. It’s more effective in the subtle nature it’s presented in. You see it’s effect only at the tail end of the story. In accordance to this being a story of racism, it’s also a story about family and love. Ethan and Martin’s journey to find and rescue Debbie is so powerful, even after 5 years they never even question giving up or surrendering to the easy way out. Over those five years, their bond together is so strong that they become the father and son that they always should have been. The end result of these stories is completely and utterly breathtaking. The Searchers has the greatest ending sequence of any movie in any genre. It’s power will be forever unmatched.
John Wayne will always be the biggest movie star to ever live whether you love him or hat him. He has the most extensive library and defines the meaning of a true star. His influence and impact on Hollywood is something that everyone has to acknowledge. His performance in this is in a lot of ways his greatest. It takes everything he had done before and shattered it with this honest yet complex performance. Ethan isn’t just the definition of a broken man, he’s an anti-hero in the truest sense. From when he rides up to the screen until the door shuts you can sense that something incredible has taken place.
John Ford is probably always going to be remembered as the greatest American director to ever live, no one else will ever match him in terms of originality or shear brilliance. His movies all show something grand and unforgettable. I feel that The Searchers really brings all of his strengths to one place; great storytelling, characters, and visuals. There really hasn’t been many movies to capture beauty like this does. Some of the shots are almost unbelievable and certainly unforgettable.
I don’t think anyone can truly deny this movie’s impact on the history of film. It defines why people make movies to begin with, very few capture utter brilliance like this. Not only is this a flawless film from a visual standpoint, it has a story and characters to rival anything else. In many ways it resembles human nature and our ability to change and witness love.

John Milius said that the western has an honesty to it when it comes to Americana that other films lack. THE SEARCHERS takes place in Texas, but it was shot in Monument Valley, a place that looks nothing like Texas. But to disparage THE SEARCHERS for choosing such a location is to miss the point. John Ford was capturing the images that were held as the images of the west in the American zeitgeist, and Monument Valley is the quintessential image of the American west. Associating it with Texas seems natural, even if it doesn’t take place in reality. What adds another layer to Ford’s Americana is the performance by John Wayne. The modern liberal sensibilities of film lovers associate John Wayne with a jingoistic worldview, a black & white cowboys versus indians take on the world. Those people have never seen THE SEARCHERS. John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, is a racist ex-Confederate soldier, who seems to be more than willing to kill his niece because of her (unwilling) extended stay with the Comanche warlord Scar, who has no doubt taken her as a wife. The fear that he will do this once he finds her is a specter that casts a shadow of fear over the entire movie, Ethan seems to be a protagonist that the viewer cannot trust to ultimately do the right thing, even if his worldview is one we cannot possibly understand. If it weren’t for the magical breathing corpses that show up on two occasions in this movie, THE SEARCHERS would be a perfect film, but such minor flaws don’t prevent it from being a classic piece of western art, caught in near-perfect motion.

The Searchers is a key step in the evolutionary development of cinema, and not just westerns. Post WWll mores were changing and led to an ability for film artists to present more dimensional characters in the mainstream. Roughly speaking prior to the early fifties in ‘Hollywood’ pictures the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad, so called ‘psychological’ drama was the domain of urban settings like film noir, not westerns. Acting styles were becoming more realistic and all of these factors set the ground for The Searchers. The lines were beginning to blur enabling Ford to create a different kind of work, but still identifiably Fordian of lasting power and beauty, and set in his favourite locale, Monument Valley.

Based on an incident in 1839, where a young white girl was kidnapped by Indians, Alan LeMay wrote the novel that Ford commisioned Frank Nugent to turn into a screenplay. Rather than focus on the girl (who in real life committed suicide after her return) the film follows the man who searches for her. Ford called it a ‘tragedy of the loner’ and it serves as a metaphor for his own life. Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is a man outside of his own life, the cherished family he holds dear is something he cannot truly connect with as he loses himself in his obsessive chase. Ford’s obsession was his work, and when he wasn’t making movies he was drinking. He repeatedly made films that championed the family as the cultural bedrock of society, yet his own family life was shamefully neglected. Both Ethan and Ford have demons that remove them from the ‘ideal’ of family, and The Searchers is a spotlight that can easily be turned back on it’s creator, showing a dark underbelly and troubled soul.

In a logistical excercise that would have done the Army proud, Ford trekked deep into Monument Valley to set up hundreds of technicians and support crew, dozing roads where there were none and building ranches from scratch. He used his stock crew and company, and they mostly gave some of their best performances, none moreso than Wayne. Howard Hawks had coaxed a multi-layer performance out of him in Red River, and here Ford pushes him even further. Ethan Edwards is a misfit, revered by his family as a kind of mythic frontiersman, he is a mass of contradictions. He returns home from a war long over and it’s clear that he’s been doing things on the edge of the law and maybe even morality, as the unmistakable signals between him and his brothers wife attest to. The timeline makes clear the possibility that Debbie (Natalie Wood) is Ethans daughter. After his brothers family is massacred by marauding bands of Comanche and his two young nieces abducted, Ethan takes Martin Pauley (Jeffrey Hunter), his brothers adopted son and part Indian, along for the search to get them back. Ethan is at once a racist towards the Indians but well acquainted with their ways and admiring of some of their traits. After a long period passes it’s obvious that Ethan would prefer Debbie dead rather than contaminated as an Indian wife. This sets up the tension between him and Martin. The Indian Chief Scar (Henry Brandon) is barely shown, and is therefore much more menacing as a result. Scar, as if summoned from Ethan’s id serves as a mirror of Ethan’s own darkness, someone not about to let conscience get in the way of rough western justice. Ford allows that no side is completely innocent that lives on the edge of civilisation, having one of the women muse that it’ll be ‘100 years’ before it’s any different in these frontier regions. People on both sides are reduced to feudal or tribal modes of surviving, and Ford isn’t championing western civilisation as any better or worse than the Indian one it’s displacing, it’s just what happened.

In these times of ‘political correctness’ it seems fashionable to downgrade Ford, particularly in his attitude to Indians. The Searchers bears the brunt of this revisionist slant, but upon close examination the claims don’t hold up. The Indians are the ‘other’, and serve as a scapegoat for all kinds of prejudices that are laid out in the course of the film. The racist views on display were common views of the time (1868-1873), indeed in the mid-fifties while the film was being made the civil rights struggle was only just starting up in the southern US states. Ford shows the Indians as people both struggling to adapt and fighting back. Ford was well liked by the local Navajo’s whenever he filmed in Utah, and went on to make films that were more interested in the Indian perspective. The history of mankind is one of repeated demonisation of certain minority groups or races, and while that is an uncomfortable fact it is a truth we must face. Ford, apart from lapsing into providing the odd easy sterotype of Indians, Blacks and even Irish (add drunken sailors, martinet military men, stoic mothers et al) is reflecting broader community values and need not be held to a higher accountability than anyone else. The scales are more than balanced by his providing some of the most significant celluloid storytelling and memorable characters that will continue to illuminate the human condition for successive generations. Some feat for someone who continually and disingenuously denied being an artist. The Searchers will endure, not just at the top end of the Ford canon, but in the highest realms of all cinema.

The panoramic vista looking out from the frontier cabin onto the open west. Every time I watch this film, that scene wraps me up and takes me along the five-year, epic journey in search of young Debbie. Ford’s unique ability to create believable characters set in sumptuous surroundings is unparalleled in this film. What a joy to watch. John Wayne at his finest. Read the book by Alan Lemay. Right up there with Stagecoach as one of my favorite westerns.
Highly recommended.

The Searchers (1956) John Ford

In the film The Searchers, John Wayne is on an epic five-year search for a young woman taken by the Comanche Indians. When he finds her, he takes out his rifle to shoot her in the back – one of the most disturbing and unexpected things I have seen in a film – it was to be an act of redemptive violence.
He does not shoot her and therein is the allegorical message Ford sends us: redemptive violence is wrong. Most Westerns have good triumphing over the chaos of the bad. Natalie Wood’s character is an innocent, but an innocent made impure. The fact that she is saved is made more poignant by the subtlety of her situation.
If I had to leave Earth with only one film, The Searchers would be that film: an intimate human struggle, set against a vast and beautiful landscape.

The Searchers, along with Stagecoach and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (my personal favorite) belong in the canon of not only great westerns and Ford’s best films, but the also certainly among the greatest films of all time. With the Searchers, Ford expands on the Wayne persona that was first introduced in Hawks’ Red River, an anti-hero that is more bitter and angry then what we would typically expect from a hollywood idol, a character who by the end has come close to madness. This is perhaps Wayne’s greatest performance and Ford’s most beautiful picture. Leone would demand that he shoot a portion of Once Upon a time in the West in Monument Valley because of this film and the beauty and danger of the West was never more fully realized then in this film. The final embrace of Wayne to his young niece would have been a powerful message of tolerance and acceptance in a still segrated US and this film marks an important turning point in the history of westerns and films in general as Hollywood began to see the studio system breaking down and important social issues began to creep into storylines that would be fully realized in the 60s and 70s.