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‘The Searchers’ 4K UHD (review)

 

The Searchers is one of the five best films produced by the American studio system during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

It remains, along with fellow John Wayne vehicle Rio Bravo, the most beloved and best remembered of the epic widescreen Technicolor westerns of the 1950’s and the purest distillation of why these films worked.

Set three years after the end of the Civil War, The Searchers is the story of Ethan Edwards (Wayne), a disillusioned former Confederate commander who made a small fortune in the three years since the war and has returned to his brother’s homestead in Texas (but famously shot in Monument Valley, Arizona). Edwards’ is civil, but obviously morose and can barely hold his contempt for Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), a racially mixed adopted nephew that he himself saved.

When Ethan and Martin join a Texas Ranger posse to hunt Comanche who had rustled cattle off of a neighboring plantation, Ethan soon deduces that the theft was cover for a killing raid on his family’s house. Sure enough Ethan returns to find the homestead destroyed and his nieces kidnapped. Ethan and Martin spend five years hunting down Debbie, the youngest girl, who by the time they can locate her no longer wishes to leave.

This is the best John Wayne performance I’ve ever seen, full stop.

Ethan Edwards is an incredible creation; reminiscent of many of Bogart’s best roles in that he’s obviously living with the ghosts of crushed idealism but we’re left to speculate because he obviously will not elaborate in the contemporary practice of long exposition. He was a good soldier for bad causes, well-mannered but governed by his own bigotry. He is great and terrible in a way that recalls that famous, untranslatable Russian word grozny.

He’s supported perfectly by Jeffrey Hunter who holds for him alternately admiration and disgust in almost equal measure. At the beginning, he is a young man who sees in Ethan a kind of ideal in self-sufficiency, but by the end sees the hate that will keep Ethan from ever really joining the family he worked so hard to reunite. Hunter’s Martin is the audience, and The Searchers is the story of his Odyssey into manhood and maturity.

The final shot of this film is one of the greatest moments in the history of American cinema, a moment where non-verbal visual storytelling is so eloquent and powerful that no one can possibly fail to comprehend it. It is self-evidently one of the most powerful shots in our cinematic history.

Upon rewatching the film for this review, I noticed how the final shot is constantly visually foreshadowed throughout the action of the film with John Wayne under foreground wreckage that prefigures the final doorway he can never enter. John Ford had made dozens of classic films before this one and several after, but this is surely the film that canonized him.

Visually, the film has never looked better.  As the first 4K release from the Warner Archive, The Searchers, does not disappoint as the new restoration is flawless.  Extras include archival audio commentary from filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.  On the included Blu-ray additional special features include featurettes, newsreel coverage of the film’s premiere, outtakes, excerpts from the 1956 Warner Bros. Presents TV series Behind the Cameras, and theatrical trailer

The Searchers comes from an era of the Western that hasn’t always aged well, not only in the typical political terms but also just in how films are staged and soundtracks support action but this film feels bracingly contemporary because it presents a frank and downbeat racial politic of the West that any modern film watcher can understand. Wayne’s hero is clearly racist, even within the context of a frontier society that hates Native Americans, but the film (like all great art) compels us to see the nuance in his wounded pride. We’re asked to follow Ethan, but we’re not expected to accept him uncritically, and he is in no way the straight “white hat” that 1950’s westerns are often caricatured as having. Ethan’s search for vengeance for a family that he himself is alienated from almost plays like the detectives from The Wire who see homicides less as a manifestation of evil, but rather as an insult to their abilities.

The Searchers is a banquet for a film fan with an appreciation for the history of the art form and it remains powerful more than 50 years later.

Highest recommendation.

 

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