Searchers (Blu-ray) (1956)

"...unquestioned best of [John Wayne's] long and impressive career.  Box Office Magazine
"...[a] beautifully filmed Western.  Find-A-Video
"Superb Western saga...  Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide
"...a true American masterpiece of filmmaking, and the best and perhaps most-admired film of director John Ford.  Tim Dirks, The Greatest Films

Editor's Note A classic Western regarded by many as the best of the genre, John Ford's THE SEARCHERS has been acknowledged by several directors who came into their own in the 1970s, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Paul Schrader, and George Lucas, as a powerful influence on their work. The film stars John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a case-hardened Civil War veteran returning to his brother Aaron's (Walter Coy) Texas home in 1868. When Rev. Samuel Johnson Clayton (Ward Bond) arrives to raise a posse to run down the Comanche who have stolen the cattle of neighbor Lars Jorgenson (John Qualen), Ethan is among those who join him. They return to find the Edwards family slaughtered and the two girls, Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (Natalie Wood), missing. The posse continues to search for the girls but turns back as winter settles in. However, Ethan and his reluctantly accepted companion, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), the girls' part-Cherokee stepbrother, press on for another seven years, with the Indian-hating veteran becoming ever more fanatical as the hard seasons pass. In his epic meditation on racism, obsession, paranoia, and the myth of the West, Ford explores the ugly underside of a genre that he had imbued with optimism in his early career. Wayne gives perhaps his most powerful performance as the embittered Edwards, but it's the visual poetry of what are possibly Ford's most carefully framed, lit, and composed images that shape this masterwork from beginning to end. As Wayne walks through the doorway at the film's end, he grabs his elbow in a tribute to his and Ford's close friend Harry Carey Sr., a Western film icon who had passed away a few years before.

	Jeffrey Hunter
	John Wayne
	Vera Miles
	Ward Bond
	Alan Le May - Based On Novel By
	Frank Hotaling - Art Director
	Frank S. Nugent - Screenplay
	Jack Murray - Editor
	James Basevi - Art Director
	John Ford - Director
	Max Steiner - Original Music By
	Merian C. Cooper - Executive Producer
	Patrick Ford - Producer
	Winton C. Hoch - Cinematographer

An embittered frontiersman engages in an extensive and obsessive search for his niece, abducted years ago by Indians who killed her family in retaliation for a massacre in their village.

"That'll be the day."----Ethan Edwards (John Wayne)

New York Times
"...Heads many a list of all-time cinematic favorites....Stunning..." 05/14/1993 p.C28

USA Today
"...An audience favorite from the beginning -- and a creative influence on a generation of filmmakers..." 09/25/1998 p.7E

Chicago Sun-Times
"...THE SEARCHERS contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances. There are shots that are astonishingly beautiful..." 11/25/2001 p.4

Total Film
"...A masterpiece..." 11/01/2000 p.106

Entertainment Weekly
"...The Western that bowled over a generation of film schoolers, from Lucas to Scorsese to Spielberg..." 01/11/2002 p.30

Total Film
4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]ender and insightful. It will cut you up." 07/01/2006 p.121

Total Film
5 stars out of 5 -- "Ford's picture is relentlessly unpretentious; tackling Big Themes without neon-slicking them or telling us what to think." 07/01/2006 p.122

Ultimate DVD
5 stars out of 5 -- "It's a thoughtful, and rather dark piece....Ford used Monument Valley as a canvas for the breathtaking photography." 07/01/2006 p.117

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
John Ford's ''The Searchers'' contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances. There are shots that are astonishingly beautiful. A cover story in New York magazine called it the most influential movie in American history. And yet at its center is a difficult question, because the Wayne character is racist without apology--and so, in a less outspoken way, are the other white characters. Is the film intended to endorse their attitudes, or to dramatize and regret them? Today we see it through enlightened eyes, but in 1956 many audiences accepted its harsh view of Indians. - Roger Ebert