By 1956, John Ford had already won four Best Director Oscars. He didn’t have anything left to prove as a director. John Wayne and Ford had already collaborated on eight films. There was certainly the assumption that the two would make a good movie. There wasn’t a clue that they would create what is often called the “Definitive Western,” and that the film would be mentioned in the echelon of the best movies of all-time. Warner Archive has released the film in 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray.
Buy The Searchers 4K UHDThe film opens with Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) arriving at the ranch home of his brother (Walter Coyt) and his brother’s wife, Martha (Dorthy Jordan). This is the first of dozens of shots in the film taken through a doorway. We see his arrival as an outsider, while we are with the family inside the home. The Civil War is over, the Old West is coming to an end, and it’s a nod that the Western as a genre has come to its own crossroads. The use of VistaVision is often celebrated for how it is used on long outdoor shots, but here the darkness of the inside with the bright outdoors on Wayne is stark and sets a tone for the rest of the film. The final shot is a perfect bookend to this shot, with Wayne again on the outside while the family and camera are inside. Wayne grabs his left arm with his right (a tribute to Ford’s first muse, Harry Caray) and turns to walk away. Ethan Edwards is not a part of this world; he is the forever outsider.
The film succeeds partially because it is in the hands of a veteran director. Ford spent his youth directing silent films and it shows in his later work. He’s mature enough to allow his actors to tell the story without words. One of the best illustrations of this is a beautiful scene where Ethan is saying good-bye to Martha. Sheriff Clayton (Ward Bond) is in the foreground looking off into space to give the two privacy behind him. Ethan and Martha have a surface conversation while their eyes tell the story of an unrequited love. Ford is know for his eye of camera placement, and this scene illustrates how you can tell a complex story by allowing your cast to act through the shot.
It’s not just John Wayne that gives this film a comfortable feeling for frequent viewers of Ford’s films. Ward Bond, Harry Caray, Jr., Ken Curtis, and Hank Worden, among other smaller bit players are all familiar. They have worked together for Ford and the chemistry is felt immediately in the early scenes. It’s notable that Ford leaned on certain characteristics of their previous characters but none of them feel like direct copies of past films. Ward Bond is still a butt of Wayne’s humor, but he’s also got a more complex role as the voice of the law against Ethan’s bloodlust. My favorite is Ken Curtis as Charlie, who is set to marry Laurie. He’s a necessary comic foil to the seriousness of the story, but he inhabits the character with one of the most unique accents and mannerisms that I’ve ever watched in such a role.
It’s important to consider the comedy in this film. No one would classify this film as a comedy. It’s a serious story about one man’s obsession with finding his kidnapped niece. It’s a ten-year search that is driven by hatred of the Native American as it is love for his niece. There is a subplot of Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) and Laurie’s (Vera Miles) romance. It feels like an afterthought if you consider the weight of the main plot. Ford realizes that you can’t just keep twisting and turning up the tension over two hours or you will lose the audience. Hank Worden plays Mose Harper. He will eventually play a key role in locating Scar and finding Debbie (Natalie Wood). There are iconic scenes where the group is being tracked by the Comanche where the threat of attack is building. In the scene, Mose has some funny comments that seem out of place to the action. What they do is relieve the tension momentarily so the audience can breathe and then there’s the exhilaration of it quickly building again. It’s easy to say that comedy is out of place in this film. The comedic moments don’t soften the message, they allow the viewer to breathe instead of being constantly exhausted from the kidnapping story.
It’s a disservice to talk about the film without talking about the cinematography and setting. This 4K version of the film is light years ahead of the widescreen VHS version that I watched so many times in the ’90s. The VistaVision process creates views of Monument Valley that seem to stretch on forever. Ford had filmed there numerous times, but rarely did it look as good as it does here. The camera remains static for these shots with the actors looking small against the backdrop of the valley. There’s a scene with a dust cloud blowing in on the left side of the screen as the characters occupy the right. It has the feeling of looking from God’s point of view on the action. It is a major part of the storytelling and what puts Ford above his contemporary directors.
The 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray contains a good amount of extras. The commentary by Peter Bogdanovich is interesting. Not only is Bogdanovich the biographer of Ford, but he’s to Ford what Truffaut was to Hitchcock. Both directors were respected but it took another director to take them to the masses of a new generation. A film like The Searchers was “just another Ford Western” for years after release. It is interesting to watch extras like The Searchers: An Appreciation or A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne and The Searchers to hear the love that other directors have for the film. There are other archival entries that make this feel like a complete experience.
This film checks off every box of a top-tier film. It has a great script, with superb actors, beautiful cinematography, and a director with the best instincts of any that ever stepped behind a camera. The Searchers wasn’t made as any reaction to society in the ’50s, but it serves as a valuable reference point. How often can you say that the end of a genre and start of a new revisionist version of the genre is also one of the best entries of the genre. The viewer doesn’t have much to love in Wayne’s racist character. The film allows the viewer to feel satisfied with how the story ends even if the journey was filled with uncomfortable moments. It’s a complicated world both post-Civil War and in the ’50s. Society didn’t know how to handle people like Ethan, and people like Ethan didn’t know how to fit into that society. “He had to find her” is more than just a tagline, it’s a desire to find more than just Debbie. Ford understands that the world around him is changing and future films will become more and more cynical. This film sums up so much of what I love about films and directors. It’s that much better set against the scenery of one of the most beautiful settings in the world.
