THE SEARCHERS: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1956) Warner Archive
Director, John
Ford was in his 62nd year when he chose to tackle what many today
consider his greatest western saga – 1956’s The Searchers, to star his ‘beloved’
John Wayne. Well… ‘beloved’ might be a bit much. For although Ford loved
working with Wayne, and considered him as his greatest discovery, the
relationship between Ford and Wayne was often caustic to a fault and
confrontational at best. Wayne revered Ford, despite the fact his first big
break in the movies had come from director, Raoul Walsh all the way back in
1930. Only that effort, The Big Trail, was a colossal flop, just as Ford had predicted, leaving
Wayne to be re-discovered by Ford nine years later, casting him as the
Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939). Important to note: a year is a lifetime in Hollywood. So,
Wayne’s resilience to kick around Tinsel Town in ‘B’ and ‘C’ grade efforts
until this fateful reconciliation could click, is something of an achievement in and
of itself. And Ford never let Wayne forget it, that without him, stardom might have
remained as elusive as a four-leaf clover stuck to the hoof of a galloping unicorn.
While it was
well received by audiences in its day, The Searchers was never
considered much beyond just another Wayne/Ford western by the critics – albeit,
one tricked out in the spectacular hues of Technicolor and presented in the ‘then’
new-fangled widescreen wonder of VistaVision, licensed from Paramount by Warner
Bros. It would remain something of a tragedy, neither Ford nor the picture
ever received the recognition justly owed during the director’s lifetime,
its longevity since evolved upon further reflection by another generation of critics revisiting great
art perpetuated by an even greater artiste. Ford’s eye for landscapes has never
been equaled, nor his ever-devotion to those stark and awe-inspiring rock
formations in Monument Valley. There are those today who regard The
Searchers with irreverence, as perhaps the single most influential western
of all time. Rather difficult to argue with such an assessment, particularly as
Ford and Wayne are functioning as a well-oiled machine, fueled by two
well-seasoned talents at the apex of their creative symbiosis.
That Wayne and
Ford often clashed behind the scenes, mostly as Ford increasingly came to
resent Wayne – regarding him as the ‘star’ he alone had made with Svengali-like
precision, Wayne, thus owing Ford everything, and, Ford, caustically to claim a
queer and unsettling exclusivity, the Ford/Wayne alliance was nevertheless leaning
in Wayne’s favor by 1956. Conversely, Ford’s brittle manner had managed to burn
a lot of bridges with studio exec’s Ford merely considered as a necessarily
evil to get his vision up there on the screen. But the ‘understanding’ between Ford
and Wayne has never been entirely quantified.
Wayne’s unerring – if slightly misguided – loyalties to Ford made it
increasingly difficult to comprehend his swallowing of Ford’s
condescension and humiliations long after his own stardom had taken hold. Regardless, Wayne would continue to sign on to Ford pictures, usually at the director’s beckoned call.
Ford undertook a
revisionist’s take on his own view of masculine heroism with The Searchers,
a darkly purposed and brooding saga into one man’s soulless ambition to avenge
the death of his entire family. Ford is undoubtedly the ideal director to take
on this formidable challenge. After all, he practically invented America’s
western mythology, exploiting its arid and starkly surreal backdrop as a
tableau, populated by honorable men, desperadoes, saloon-styled whores wearing
hearts of gold on their sleeves, and, blood-thirsty 'red skins' looking to
exact their pound of flesh in human scalps from the innocent settlers, guiding
their wagon trains across this new frontier. Such, at least, was Hollywood's
concept of 'how the west was won'. And so, it has largely remained as a main
staple of the screen since Ford's time, the legacy of Ford's fabrications
eclipsing the morally ambiguous historical record.
So, perhaps it
was Ford’s entitlement – practically to own the copyright on the Hollywood
western – that lent him the chutzpah to mature it now, from the precepts he
alone had made famous. For decades, historians have suggested Frank S. Nugent’s
screenplay was inspired by the 1836 raid and kidnapping of 9-yr.-old, Cynthia
Ann Parker by Comanche warriors. Parker would spend 24-yrs. with the Comanches,
be wed to a war chief and bear him three children, before being ‘rescued’
against her will by the Texas Rangers. The girl’s uncle, James W. Parker, spent
much of his life and fortune in an obsessive search for his niece, mirroring
Ethan Edwards’ unrelenting quest to reclaim the fictional, Debbie (Lana Wood,
as a child, Natalie Wood as an adult) in the movie. But Wayne’s alter-ego in The
Searchers, the Teutonic Ethan Edwards, is a racist with a curious bent for
his brother’s wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan), the girl he left behind in search
of…
Ford and the
Nugent screenplay are deliberately vague about Ethan’s motivations and
perspectives. Ethan is a solitary rover. Ironically, this bitterness will carry
him through the firestorm, arguably onto some sort
of unquantifiable redemption after his brother Aaron’s (Walter Coy) ranch house is burnt to the ground by the villainous Scar (Henry Brandon). Ford
magnificently sets up the family Edward: Aaron, Martha, their son, Ben (Robert
Lyden), and daughters, Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (Lana Wood). Alas, Ethan’s
return home after a lengthy absence is short-lived. When called upon by the Rev.
Capt. Samuel Johnson Clayton (another Ford alumni, Ward Bond) to investigate an
assault by Comanche on a nearby cattle ranch, Ethan returns to Aaron's farm only
to discover the homestead smoldering in ruins with almost everyone massacred.
The pain over
this loss turns rancid when 'half breed', Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), taken
in by the family and reared as their own, decides to accompany Ethan on his
revenge. Now, out for blood, Ethan looks upon Martin with grave uncertainty. Lucy
and Debbie are not among the remains. But
are they still alive? Earlier, Ford revealed to the audience how Aaron set his
youngest upon the land to take refuge at the homestead’s nearby gravesite.
Alas, there, she became the first to encounter Scar. Ethan suspects the Comanche have carried the girls
off. But he cannot shake the feeling both are either dead or suffering a fate much
worse than it at the hands of their captors. This assumption bears itself out
when Ethan discovers Lucy’s raped remains in a nearby canyon, causing her
betrothed, Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey Jr.) to charge into the enemy's encampment, swiftly shot to death for his misguided valor.
The rest of The
Searchers documents Ethan’s descend into the darkness of revenge.
Whatever the outcome, he is hellbent to reclaim Debbie. Hardly noble, Ethan’s
quest is overridden by his all-consuming and unconquerable rage against the Comanche.
Debbie’s abduction has given Ethan carte blanche to exercise his venom – or so
he believes. For years, Martin and Ethan travel lonely trails, visiting trading
outposts in search of Debbie, but to no avail. Martin's girl, Laurie Jorgensen
(Vera Miles) grows weary, fearing Ethan's search will turn Martin into the same
sort of hollow shell of a man. In truth, Laurie is not too far off the mark
where Ethan is concerned. He is burnt through to his core by an unquenchable
hatred, incapable of maintaining any relationship that does not resolve itself
at the point of a gun.
Ford’s
impressions here are sobering reminders of the early lawlessness and incivility
of the American west, until then, as yet unexplored in American movies.
Arguably, Ethan belongs to that vast openness that once typified the ‘new
frontier’ but has already, by the time of this movie, begun to give way to the tug-o-war
anchoring of the land to a new form of justice. Ethan thrives best in untapped
soil. Alas, Martin is not meant for this life. Eventually, Ethan and Martin
meet with Scar. And although the years have matured Debbie into a young woman,
Ethan and Martin clearly identify her among the other Indian women, reared
perhaps, though hardly one of their own. Ethan believes Debbie has been
brainwashed to forget her family. Hence, his more prescient thirst now is to
kill her and devastate the tribe. There is no reprieve for Debbie. Mercifully,
Martin prevents the inevitable from happening. Forced to choose between saving
or murdering the girl, Ethan reaches for his pistol, but cannot bring himself
to commit the act, seizing Debbie in his arms before informing her he has
finally come to take her home. She relents and is returned to the Jorgenson’s
homestead. Martin and Laurie are reunited. But the final shot in The
Searchers remains forever bittersweet. Ethan turns away from the completion
of his singular ambition, lumbering into the distant, uncompromising and sunbaked
horizon. There is no closure for the character, and, no place for his kind in ‘polite’
society. Ethan Edwards is a relic by his own design.
For this finale,
Wayne’s back is to the camera, framed by the darkened recesses of the entrance
to the Jorgenson’s cabin, the door slowly closing behind him. It is, in fact, a
reverse shot of the film’s opener in which Martha drew back the darkened pane
of the door to the homestead shared with Aaron, to reveal Ethan’s approach at a
distance. But the ambiguity of this bookend leaves much to consider. Has the
experience of liberating Debbie from the tribe drained Ethan of his dinned
prejudice? Or has it prepared a bigoted mind for an even more insidious venom? Ford and Wayne offer no inclination as to what the future may hold,
refusing one last close-up of Wayne to set our minds at ease.
Instead, we weigh the ballast of the man against his inner tumult,
without a sense of altruism or morality brought into play.
In hindsight, The
Searchers is one of those devastating gestalts in American cinema, to
mature the western beyond its time-honored bang-bang, ‘cowboys vs. Indians’
tradition. This departure, was not entirely Ford’s doing, as other filmmakers,
most notably, Anthony Mann, with Winchester ’73 (1950) and Fred
Zinneman’s High Noon (1952) preceded Ford’s reexamination of the
principles he had once held dear. John Wayne is the ideal choice to mark Ford’s
revisionist take – first, because Wayne and Ford have forged an alliance, by
now, familiar to the audience. But second, because the star is, after all, John
Wayne – American, a towering figure with a Teflon-coated reputation, only much later
to be chiseled away for Wayne’s own staunchly conservative values outside of
the picture-making biz. Nevertheless, we can forgive a true ‘star’ almost
anything. And so, it is with Wayne’s steely performance as the irredeemable
Ethan – a man destined to leave this earth with a fervent resentment of Native
Americans.
Wayne’s persona
was, in fact, the archetype all other western heroes that followed had tried to
copy. Now, Ford and Wayne were moving that marker ahead of the pack –
hopefully, yet again, to reestablish Wayne’s preeminence as Hollywood’s
premiere protagonist – with flaws, primal doubts, and, at least in The
Searchers, some fairly repellent character traits, a sobering precursor to
the mid-60’s anti-hero. It is fairly observant to suggest that without Wayne’s
Ethan Edwards, Clint Eastwood’s ‘man with no name’ would not have been
possible. Daring too, that in The Searchers, Wayne becomes the
antithesis of his own cinematic legacy. He inverts our expectations with a
truly unlikable portrait of a man consumed by a very ugly, if passionate
discrimination. In the final analysis, The Searchers remains one of John
Ford’s most prodigious pictures – re-authoring the iconography of a genre he,
almost single-handed created for the movies several generations before it. Is
it the greatest western of all time? Well, it’s definitely in the top five, and
that alone is very high praise indeed.
Warner Archive's new 4K of The Searchers is a stunner. The Blu-ray from 2010 underwent
an extensive photo-chemical and digital restoration. But even that impressive
effort pales now to the magnificent visual splendor on tap in UHD, graded in
both Dolby Vision and HDR10. Fine detail
abounds, at times, with an uncanny dimensional presence. It’s as though we are
looking through an open window pane onto these Monument Valley landscapes. There
is a subtle texture of grain. Shadow delineation is superb. Contrast, exquisite
beyond all measure. And colors are super-saturated. Wow! The original mono has
been sourced to 2.0 mono DTS here and sounds incredible. Warner has included a
newly remastered Blu-ray with this set, derived from the same UHD restored
elements.
On the 4K, we
get an archival commentary from the late Peter Bogdanovich who, in knowing Ford
for the last ten years of his life, has a storefront of apocryphal tales to
tell, and does so masterfully, as only Bogdanovich could. The rest of the extras are housed on the
Blu-ray and include an original trailer, Patrick Wayne’s intro (recorded for
the DVD release in 1996), an appreciation featurette, outtakes and promo
junkets from the period, and finally, A Turning of the Earth: John Ford,
John Wayne and The Searchers a monumentally satisfying reflection
piece made by the late Nick Redman. Bottom line: by any barometer of cinema art
and greatness, The Searchers is a towering achievement. There’s a reason
its reputation has only ripened with time. For those yet exposed to it, time to
indeed unearth the riches on tap for the asking. Very highly recommended.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
4
Comments