The Searchers

Released: May 13, 1956

Studio: Warner Bros.

Genre: Western

Box Office (numbers in millions)

Domestic: 10.90 Worldwide: ?

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: ? Worldwide: ?

Directing: John Ford

Screenwriting: Frank S. Nugent, Alan Le May

Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Natalie Wood, Henry Brandon

Review:

The Searchers, based on the novel by Alan Le May, is “a complex, epic, ‘psychological’ Western story” ^FS set in the Old West in the post-Civil War era. Glenn Frankel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, says the movie “is perhaps the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen.” ^MSN

“Nobody made westerns better than John Ford, and he never made one better than this.” ^TV He “had been making westerns for almost four decades before he acknowledged the racism inherent in cowboys vs. Indians and directed his masterpiece,” ^RS “which is miraculously purified of its racist furies in a final moment of epiphany.” ^T95 It was “beautifully filmed in his most popular locale, Monument Valley.” ^FS

In “the role of his career” ^RS John Wayne “as the flawed hero” ^TV “turns in a deceptively simple performance” ^TV which is “by turns explosive and melancholy,” ^TV that would forever define his swaggering macho style.” ^TV He is Ethan Edwards, an Indian-hating Civil War Confederate veteran, who spends five years in pursuit of his teenage niece, Debbie (Wood).

She was kidnapped by Chief Scar (Brandon) who led a Comanche Indians massacre of a frontier family. On his journey to track down and kill the chief, Edwards “is accompanied by half-breed adopted nephew Martin Pawley (Hunter), who is equally determined to save the girl.” ^FS

The movie is “a pilgrimage into the dark heart of an outsider” ^TV as Edwards is plagued by the thought of his niece being raped by savages and doesn’t know if he wants to rescue or kill her. “Few film images are more haunting than that of Wayne standing alone in a doorway, cut off from his family by torments he can’t define.” ^RS