Review by Roy Frumkes
THE SEARCHERS 4K is available for purchase at MovieZyng.com by clicking the image above.
THE SEARCHERS is one of the most important films of the 1970s.
What?!
It’s true, despite the fact that it was released in 1956. And that’s not the only seeming contradiction the film contains.
But first the plot: It’s 1868. Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) appears at his brother’s pioneer home, unexpected and radiating pent up anger. The Civil War ended three years ago… for most people… but not for him.
He warms up to a little girl whom he assumes is his niece, Lucy, but the Lucy he remembers has grown up during his absence and is flirting with a boy from a neighboring family. He mistook her for nine-year-old Debbie, a younger niece born after he left to join the Confederate army.
There’s a sense of melancholy and discomfort about the reunion, about unfulfilled relationships and unresolved suggestions of what evil Ethan has been up to in all of that lost time. Then, within a day and the changing of a reel, all of the members of Ethan’s family are killed in a Comanche raid except for Ethan, who was on a scouting party, and little Debbie who the Indians, led by Chief Scar (Henry Brandon), have kidnapped. Ethan sets out after her, stoically, deliberately, possessed with vengeance.
Accompanying Ethan is Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who is one eighth native American. Ethan loathes him for it, but lets him tag along.
At first Ethan’s intentions are clear, but as the grueling years pass, the nature of his pursuit mutates. If Debbie is still alive, then she has undoubtedly been indoctrinated into the renegade culture, both in her thinking and sexuality…and neither one is acceptable to Ethan.
Their odyssey covers a lot of territory. And racism is very much the subtext and driving force of the narrative.
The releases of the film in its many forms – LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, 4K – have been profoundly visceral yet lush at the same time, punctuated by director John Ford’s beloved backgrounds in Utah’s Monument Valley. Technicolor and VistaVision were processes made for each other, and this presentation, with its towering natural beauty thrown into the mix, was a perfect ménage à trois. And here’s another seeming contradiction: the most dramatic improvements in the 4K image occur during the first act. All the interior cabin scenes are oozing with detail now. The wood, the clothes, the props. Amazing. One could say that the darkly lit interiors now even match the astounding exteriors in terms of what you’re able to see.
And the chef behind this mouth-watering concoction is George Feltenstein who has toiled behind the scenes at Warner Bros. Archives since 2009, during which time more than 4500 films have been polished into their best form by George and his cadre of dedicated restorationists. I happened to be at the National Board of Review awards ceremony many years ago when he won the William K. Everson award for his ongoing contribution to film presentation.
And now we jump ahead 22 1/2 years, to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977). Where the inhabitants of a UFO kidnap a toddler. An ‘outsider’ (Richard Dreyfuss) follows their trail to ‘rescue’ the little boy, but when he finally extracts the child, he discovers that the kid has been having a great time on board the spacecraft and is eager to stay with his hosts.
Sound familiar?
I’ve read that Steven Spielberg screened THE SEARCHERS twice on location, I assume, to familiarize his cast and crew with an approximation of Ford’s spirit and source material. The Wyoming mesas where the spaceship descends at the end certainly looks like they were plucked from a catalogue of John Ford’s favorite locations.
A year earlier, in February of ‘76, I was teaching college level filmmaking at SUNY Purchase outside of NYC. Columbia Pictures was embarking on its release of TAXI DRIVER and word reached me confidentially that they were worried about the film finding its audience. I had a good friend in the studio’s PR department, and I wangled a visitation to my evening class by Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay. After the screening my guests came up front and sat in chairs facing the students. I moderated, and initially pointed out the film’s ‘noir’ roots. Schrader was quick to latch onto my observation and elaborated. I think it made my guests feel that it wasn’t going to be a waste of their time. And I followed by pointing out the film’s similarities to THE SEARCHERS. Schrader pounced on that observation, too. An underage girl is walking the streets, her pimp (Harvey Keitel) sports an Indian hairdo. A loner (Robert De Niro) becomes obsessed with the girl, and plans to rescue her from her pimp…except that she may not want his form of deliverance. Scorsese & Schrader joined the SEARCHERS club.
And Schrader didn’t stop there. His film HARDCORE (1979) utilized the identical structure, only this time it was members of a religious Michigan community on a field trip, and one of the teenage girls is kidnapped by pornographers. Her father (George C. Scott) comes to Southern California to rescue her, only to discover that she was a runaway, not an abductee. A private detective who Scott hires to help find his daughter refers to him as ‘pilgrim.’ It fits the character’s background, of course, but it’s also a term used by Wayne in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962). Clearly not random.
Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) gives a big nod to the Fordian elements in THE SEARCHERS. Before the attack on the settlers’ cabin we hear a bird call in the distance. Instead of Scar from THE SEARCHERS, it’s Henry Fonda and his henchmen who emerge from the tall grass. And in Leone’s version they kill the boy rather than taking him captive.
Enough? No? Well how about John Milius? He claimed to have seen the film over 60 times, and that DILLINGER, THE WIND AND THE LION and BIG WEDNESDAY all contain THE SEARCHERS references. Plus he named his son Ethan. And so, incidentally, did Wayne, in 1962. (John Ethan Wayne). And his son returned the kindness by creating a line of designer booze called “Duke Spirits.” Duke being his father’s nick name, lifted from a family dog.
There are two well-known sequences that raise serious concerns about Ford’s taste, or at least his judgment. I’m not against using humor as counterpoint to give the viewer a breather before things get worse than ever. (Think Hitchcock times fifty or so, minus the TV episodes.) But one possible misstep involves Pawley (the one-eighth Indian character who, in the movie, kicks a plump female Indian down a hill as Wayne laughs heartily. The other involves shenanigans at a wedding party that turns into a rite of passage between two settlers vying for the hand of the same woman.
Ford was fond of goofy bar room brawls and the like, which mildly-to-majorly tainted quite a few of his otherwise stunning films. Chalk up another one here, but though it is narratively indefensible, it doesn’t ruin the entirety of the experience, it just calls for our indulgence regarding the tonally out-of-synch intrusions. I’ve seen worse, or just as bad, in films that are otherwise brilliant.
In Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS, despite the fact that I think he was the outstanding artist of the 20th century, the early scene with a drunken, suicidal millionaire who the tramp saves from drowning (11:40), goes on too long and isn’t particularly funny. Still it’s just an instance of a major gag in an incandescent piece of work that doesn’t rise to the level of the rest of the narrative’s artistry.
Another example: in William Wyler’s epic Western THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), there’s a really terrible scene where Gregory Peck’s character appears to be getting severely nauseous and even fainting while listening to a story being told by a woman he’s drawn to (Jean Simmons), and the score concocted to go along with this embarrassingly misconceived sequence is genuinely painful as well. Amazing that they couldn’t solve the dilemma, and moreover, Jerome Moross‘s score is otherwise one of the most remarkable in movie history.
One more: THE BLACK CAT (1934) is a satanic art deco masterpiece…save for a mid-film intrusion of inappropriate comic idiocy involving two local gendarmes who deflect us from enjoying Boris Karloff’s & Bela Lugosi’s chess game of death. [Some day I’ll cut out that scene for my private collection.]
Elsewhere in FIR I reviewed a tense, claustrophobic indie film called LOVE BOMB, directed by David Guglielmo. One thing that distinguished the film was its powerful final shot. Finding ways to finish a film on a profound closing frame is exceedingly difficult, and there aren’t that many of them. CITY LIGHTS, of course, comes to mind. As does RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, THE INFORMER (also John Ford), KISS ME DEADLY, THIS ISLAND EARTH…etc. (Short films don’t count, or there would be fifty of them just with TWIGHT ZONE.)
Well, THE SEARCHERS has such a final image. Having returned Debbie to her family, Ethan is framed in darkness as the door to the pioneer home closes him off from civilization. According to what we’ve learned, the screenplay didn’t end that way, but rather on a more hopeful note. Ford came up with this alternative ending during the shoot, and if that is any indication, imagine how many other changes he must have initiated. Not being a chatty guy, I’m sure we’ll never know them all.
So what say we give him a break as concerns the silly slapstick stuff?
And here’s a final, remotely possible ray of insight. Countless viewers have struggled to understand Ethan’s motive at the end when he finally has Debbie in his sites. Outside of the fact that Howard Hawks’ movie RED RIVER, also starring Wayne and released eight years earlier (1948), also depicted two frayed protagonists on an epic journey that led to an almost baffling soft landing.
Well, back in ’56, Dell released a comic book version of THE SEARCHERS for ten cents, and the artists obviously had access either to the screenplay or to a slightly earlier cut of the film – possibly a test screening. The comic book is included as part of the earlier 50th Anniversary DVD release and covers some scenes differently, including the ending. Could be they just had to alter/compress the story to fit into a limited comic book page format. Or, on the other hand, it just might shed some light on this enigma.
But I seriously doubt that John Ford’s contract stipulated that he had final cut on a comic book.
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