The Searchers

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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“The Searchers” may be the best Western movie ever made … starring the greatest cowboy star ever (John Wayne) … directed by the best Western director ever (John Ford).

You can catch a retro showing at Tropic Cinema.

“The Searchers” (Warner Bros, 1956) has been “more or less officially recognized as a great American classic.”

Set in 1868 Texas, you will meet a middle-aged Civil War veteran (Wayne) who along with his adopted nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) spends years looking for his niece (Natalie Wood) who had been abducted as a child by Comanche Indians.

The film has been aptly described as “a darkly profound study of obsession, racism, and heroic solitude.”

At the heart of “The Searchers” is Wayne’s performance as angry, vengeful Ethan Edwards. Many consider this a high point of John Wayne’s work as an actor.

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese notes that “the character of Ethan Edwards is one of the most unsettling in American cinema.” Some have called Edwards a forerunner to Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.”

From the beginning of Ethan’s quest, he is clearly less interested in rescuing his niece Debbie than in wreaking vengeance on the Comanches who slaughtered his brother’s family.

Roger Ebert wrote, “I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide.”

Director John Ford admitted, “There’s some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn’t been portrayed accurately or fairly in the Western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair … If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life. There was much racial prejudice in the West.”

Also, the theme of miscegenation runs like a taut thread through the film. Ethan views Debbie as having been “contaminated” through her abduction. Ethan states he will kill his niece rather than have her live “with a buck.”

“More than just making a social statement like other Westerns of the period were apt to do, Ford instills in ‘The Searchers’ a visual poetry and a sense of melancholy that is rare in American films and rarer still to Westerns.”

American Film Institute named “The Searchers” as the Greatest American Western, and ranked it as 12th on AFI’s 2007 list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.

Entertainment Weekly declared it to be the Best Western ever made.

And “The Searchers” was among the first 25 films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry due to being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

It has an amazing cast. In addition to Wayne, Hunter, and Wood, it includes Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Harry Cary Jr, Ken Curtis, Pippa Scott, Henry Brandon, Natalie’s sister Lana, and John Wayne’s son Patrick.

They are Ford’s “familiar corps of actors” who give “the gusto to this film.”

“The John Ford directorial stamp is unmistakable,” observed Variety. “It concentrates on the characters and establishes a definite mood.”

The scenery is spectacular. Shot in widescreen VistaVision, most of “The Searchers” was filmed in Monument Valley (Arizona and Utah), rather than the Llano Estacado area of northwestern Texas where the story takes place. Many directors chose not to film in Monument Valley for fear of being accused of plagiarizing John Ford.

Based on a novel by Alan LeMay, the story was inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors, who raided her family’s home at Fort Parker, Texas. Cynthia Ann spent 24 years with the Comanches, married a war chief, and had three children (one of whom was the famous Comanche Chief Quanah Parker), only to be rescued against her will by Texas Rangers.

James W. Parker, the girl’s uncle, spent much of his life in an obsessive search for his niece, much like Ethan Edwards in the film. Furthermore, in the film, Scar’s Comanches are referred to as Nawyecka, the same Indian band that kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker.

Newsweek called the movie “remarkable.” Look described it as a “Homeric odyssey.” French director and film critic Jean-Luc Godard compared the movie’s ending to the reuniting of Odysseus with Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey.

“Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas have all been influenced and paid some form of homage to ‘The Searchers’ in their work,” observes historians at Turner Classic Movies.

Wayne’s character’s catchphrase “That’ll be the day” inspired Buddy Holly’s famous song of the same name. And the British pop group, The Searchers, took its name from the film.

When asked about his favorite filmmakers, Orson Welles said, “I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”

But unfortunately, as Glenn Frankel puts it in his study “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend,” “The Searchers” is perhaps “the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen.”

Saddle up and go see it. The doorway scene at the end of the movie is a classic.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com