The Searchers (1956)

Nora's Nite

Time Magazine, June 1956:

The Searchers (C. V. Whitney; Warner) is another excursion into the patented Old West of Director John Ford. The place is Texas, three years after the Civil War, and the lone figure moving across the vast plain is none other than lean, leathery, disenchanted John Wayne, still wearing bits of his Confederate uniform, still looking for trouble. Trouble finds him. One day, while John's back is turned, Chief Scar and his wild Comanches swoop down and massacre his relatives, carrying off two young girls for their own fell purposes.

Wayne promptly fills his trusty horse with hay and sets off on a fiveyear, Technicolor, VistaVision search for the girls. His itinerary sounds like that of Lewis & Clark, but the camera never seems to get outside Arizona and Utah's beautiful Monument Valley. Tagging along is Jeffrey Hunter, who spends nearly as much time trying to soften Wayne's vindictiveness as he does hunting Indians. Though the film runs for two hours, it nevertheless races through its individual scenes at so breakneck a pace that moviegoers may be uncertain just what is going on. Director Ford indulges his Homeric appetite for violence of spirit and action. Coming on the corpse of a hated Comanche, Wayne shoots out the dead man's eyes on the debatable theological principle that the Indian's blinded ghost cannot find its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

One of the kidnaped girls is raped by four braves and killed off early in the picture. The other (Natalie Wood), when finally found, proves to be a contented member of Chief Scar's harem. Wayne is so annoyed that he tries to shoot her dead and is only thwarted by an Indian attack.

The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle. The Searchers is rousingly played by what Hollywood calls the "John Ford Stock Company"—a group made up of Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, a half-dozen bit players, seven stunt men who are repeatedly shot off horses, and many of the same Navajo Indians who have been losing battles in John Ford pictures since 1938. By now, all of them perform with practiced ease: the women know just where to stand on the cabin porch as they peer off anxiously into the haze and mesa-filled distances; the men automatically fall into line for a barn dance or a posse. In fact, they may be getting too practiced and familiar. Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized, end-of-film departure into the sunset.

Screenplay structure guru Syd Field gropes for meaning in a cruel, indifferent universe:

While I was watching The Searchers, I tried to relate Campbell's concepts to Ethan's journey. Though Ethan is placed in a situation where he confronts a series of obstacles in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness, he refuses to bend his principles, or his beliefs, to the issue at hand. His journey is both a physical as well as spiritual one, because it takes place inside his head as well as outside in the obstacles he confronts. In Campbell's work, the hero in his journey experiences a symbolic transformation of death and resurrection as he casts off the old parts of his life; he needs to be re-born and emerge into the "birth" of his new self. In mythological terms, Campbell says, the heroes' journey is one of acceptance; the hero must accept his fate, his destiny, no matter whether it is life or death.

This is not the case in The Searchers.
he first thing I noticed is that John Wayne's character doesn't change. There is no transformation in his character; he's exactly the same at the end of the movie as he was at the beginning. Wayne's image, as a man of action, is heroic precisely because he does not change; he refuses to give up, bend or alter his ways until his mission is accomplished; to find and rescue the kidnapped girl. And when he does find her, we don't know whether he's going to kill, or embrace her. Finally, in a dramatic scene, he relents and embraces her. At the end, when the family enters the house to celebrate their return, Wayne remains outside the doorway, a desolate, homeless drifter doomed to wander "between the winds."
In Campbell's analysis, the hero weathers every obstacle but returns home a wiser and better person, sharing his newfound awareness with his fellow man. That certainly doesn't happen in The Searchers. At the end of The Searchers, it is his very strength of character that leads to his isolation and loneliness. In comparing it to other films of the period, this is the start of the "anti-hero," the character who goes his own way even though it may be against the laws of society.

What makes this film a classic, I think, is that the traditional moral lines of good and bad, or right and wrong, and black and white, are blurred. It's is a tribute to Ford's genius that he could combine both the look and feel of an epic Western, as well as reflect the social nature of the times and the very ambiguity of the changing times.

Tim Dirks via Filmsite.org:

The Searchers (1956) is considered by many to be a true American masterpiece of filmmaking, and the best, most influential, and perhaps most-admired film of director John Ford. It was his 115th feature film, and he was already a four-time Best Director Oscar winner (The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)) - all for his pictures of social comment rather than his quintessential westerns. The film's complex, deeply-nuanced themes included racism, individuality, the American character, and the opposition between civilization (exemplified by homes, caves, and other domestic interiors) and the untamed frontier wilderness.

With dazzling on-location, gorgeous VistaVision cinematography (including the stunning red sandstone rock formations of Monument Valley) by Winton C. Hoch in Ford's most beloved locale, the film handsomely captures the beauty and isolating danger of the frontier. It was even a better film than Ford's previous Best Picture-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). However, at its time, the sophisticated, modern, visually-striking film was unappreciated, misunderstood, and unrecognized by critics. It did not receive a single Academy Award nomination, and was overwhelmed by the all-star power and glamour of the Best Picture winner of the year, Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

The film's screenplay was adapted by Frank S. Nugent (director Ford's son-in-law) from Alan Le May's 1954 novel of the same name, that was first serialized as a short story in late fall 1954 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, and first titled The Avenging Texans. Various similarities existed between the film's script and an actual Comanche kidnapping of a young white girl in Texas in 1936. The film's producer was C.V. Whitney - a descendant of Eli Whitney, who was a pioneer in the mass production of muskets in the first firearms assembly factory in New Haven, CT.

Ten to fifteen years after the film's debut, and after reassessing it as a cinematic milestone, a generation of "New Hollywood" film directors, French film critics and others, including Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and George Lucas, praised the film. They traced their own fascination with film to this mythic John Ford western, and in reverence, reflected his work in their own films (e.g., Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968), and Mean Streets (1973), Lucas' Star Wars (1977), Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), and Schrader's Hardcore (1979)). Even rock musician Buddy Holly wrote a song based on John Wayne's trademark line: "That'll Be The Day," popularized by the Beatles.
The Searchers tells the emotionally complex story of a perilous, hate-ridden quest and Homeric-style odyssey of self-discovery after a Comanche massacre, while also exploring the themes of racial prejudice and sexism. Its meandering tale examines the inner psychological turmoil of a fiercely independent, crusading man obsessed with revenge and hatred, who searches for his two nieces (Pippa Scott and Natalie Wood) among the "savages" over a five-year period. The film's major tagline echoed the search: "he had to find her...he had to find her."