The Searchers

Plot

In 1868, Ethan Edwards returns after an eight-year absence to the home of his brother Aaron in West Texas. Ethan fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. In the three years since that war ended, he also apparently fought in the Second Franco–Mexican War. He has in his possession many gold coins of uncertain origin. He also has a medal from the Mexican campaign, which he gives to his eight-year-old niece, Debbie. As a former Confederate soldier, when he is asked to take an oath of allegiance to the Texas Rangers, he refuses.

Shortly after Ethan's arrival, cattle belonging to his neighbor Lars Jorgensen are stolen, by Indians they believe, and Rev. Captain Samuel Clayton leads Ethan and a group of Rangers to recover them. After discovering that the theft was a Comanche ploy to draw the men away from their families, they race back, to find the Edwards homestead in flames. Aaron, his wife Martha, and their son Ben have all been killed, while Debbie and her older sister Lucy have been abducted.

After a brief funeral, the men set out in pursuit. When they find the Comanche camp, Ethan recommends a frontal attack, but Clayton insists on a stealth approach to avoid killing the hostages. The camp turns out to be deserted. Further along the trail, the men ride into an ambush. Despite fending off the attack, the Rangers are left with too few men to fight the Comanche effectively.

They return to their base, but Ethan insists on continuing his search for the girls, joined by Lucy's fiancé, Brad Jorgensen, and Debbie's adoptive brother Martin Pawley, who is part Cherokee. Ethan finds Lucy murdered (and, it is implied, raped) in a canyon near the Comanche camp. In a blind rage, Brad rides directly into the camp to attack the warriors and is killed. Ethan and Martin continue.

When winter arrives, Ethan and Martin lose the trail and return to the Jorgensen ranch. Martin is enthusiastically welcomed by the Jorgensens' daughter Laurie, and Ethan finds a letter waiting for him from a trader named Futterman, who claims to have information about Debbie. Ethan, who would rather travel alone, leaves without Martin the next morning, but Laurie reluctantly provides Martin with a horse to catch up. At Futterman's trading post, Ethan and Martin learn that Debbie has been taken by Scar, the chief of the Nawyecka band of Comanche.

Production

The film was shot in the VistaVision widescreen process.

Filming locations

While the film was primarily set in the staked plains (Llano Estacado) of northwestern Texas, it was actually filmed in Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah. Additional scenes were filmed in Mexican Hat, Utah, in Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, and in Elk Island National Park.

Casting

Ford originally wanted to cast Fess Parker, whose performance as Davy Crockett on television had helped spark a national craze, for the Martin Pawley role, but Walt Disney, to whom Parker was under contract, refused to allow it and did not tell Parker about the offer, according to Parker's videotaped interview for the Archive of American Television. Parker has said retrospectively that this was easily his worst career reversal.

Producers and film crew

The Searchers was the first production from "distinguished turfman" Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney; it was directed by John Ford and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Behind the camera film crew included cinematographer Winton C. Hoch and editor Jack Murray.

The Searchers is the first of only three films produced by Whitney's company C.V. Whitney Pictures; the second was The Missouri Traveler in 1958 with Brandon deWilde and Lee Marvin, and the third was The Young Land in 1959 with Wayne's son Patrick Wayne and Dennis Hopper.

Promotion

As part of its promotion of The Searchers in 1956, Warner Bros. produced and broadcast one of the first behind-the-scenes, "making-of" programs in movie history, which aired in 1956 as an episode of its Warner Bros. Presents TV series.

Historical background

Author Alan Le May's surviving research notes indicate that the two characters who go in search of a missing girl were inspired by Britton Johnson, an African-American teamster who ransomed his captured wife and children from the Comanches in 1865. Afterward, Johnson made at least three trips to Indian Territory and Kansas, relentlessly searching for another kidnapped girl, Millie Durgan (or Durkin), until Kiowa raiders killed him in 1871.

Several film critics have suggested that The Searchers was inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors, who raided her family's home at Fort Parker, Texas. She spent 24 years with the Comanches, married a war chief, and had three children (one of whom was the famous Comanche Chief Quanah Parker), only to be rescued against her will by Texas Rangers. James W. Parker, Cynthia Ann's uncle, spent much of his life and fortune in what became an obsessive search for his niece, much like Ethan Edwards in the film.

In addition, the rescue of Cynthia Ann, during a Texas Ranger attack known as the Battle of Pease River, resembles the rescue of Debbie Edwards when the Texas Rangers attack Scar's village. Parker's story was only one of 64 real-life cases of 19th-century child abductions in Texas in which author Alan Le May studied the captivity narratives while researching the novel on which the film was based.

The ending of Le May's novel contrasts to the film's, with Debbie running from the white men and the Native Americans. Marty, in one final leg of his search, finds her days later, only after she has fainted from exhaustion.

In the film, Scar's Comanche group is referred to as the Nawyecka, correctly the Noyʉhka or Nokoni, the same band that kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker. Some film critics have speculated that the historical model for the cavalry attack on a Comanche village, resulting in Look's death and the taking of Comanche prisoners to a military post, was the Battle of the Washita River, November 27, 1868, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Cheyenne camp on the Washita River (near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma). The sequence also resembles the 1872 Battle of the North Fork of the Red River, in which the 4th Cavalry captured 124 Comanche women and children and imprisoned them at Fort Concho.

Reception

Contemporaneous reviews

Upon the film's release, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a "ripsnorting Western" (in spite of the "excessive language in its ads"); he credits Ford's "familiar corps of actors, writers, etc., [who help] to give the gusto to this film. From Frank S. Nugent, whose screenplay from the novel of Alan LeMay is a pungent thing, right on through the cast and technicians, it is the honest achievement of a well-knit team." Crowther noted "two faults of minor moment":

"Episode is piled upon episode, climax upon climax, and corpse upon corpse... The justification for it is that it certainly conveys the lengthiness of the hunt, but it leaves one a mite exhausted, especially with the speed at which it goes.

"The director has permitted too many outdoor scenes to be set in the obviously synthetic surroundings of the studio stage... some of those campfire scenes could have been shot in a sporting-goods store window."

Variety called it "handsomely mounted and in the tradition of Shane", yet "somewhat disappointing" due to its length and repetitiveness; "The John Ford directorial stamp is unmistakable. It concentrates on the characters and establishes a definite mood. It's not sufficient, however, to overcome many of the weaknesses of the story."

The New York Herald Tribune termed the movie "distinguished"; Newsweek deemed it "remarkable". Look described The Searchers as a "Homeric odyssey". The New York Times praised Wayne's performance as "uncommonly commanding". The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Though it does not consistently achieve the highest Ford standards, The Searchers is surely the best Western since Shane."

The film earned rentals of $4.8 million in the US and Canada during its first year of release.

The film helped revive the career of Jeffrey Hunter.

Later assessments

In 2001, critic Roger Ebert found Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, "one of the most compelling characters Ford and Wayne ever created". Ebert writes: "The Searchers indeed seems to be two films. The Ethan Edwards story is stark and lonely, a portrait of obsession, and in it we can see Schrader's inspiration for Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver. [...] The film within this film involves the silly romantic subplot and characters hauled in for comic relief, including the Swedish neighbor Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen), who uses a vaudeville accent, and Mose Harper (Hank Worden), a half-wit treated like a mascot. [...] This second strand is without interest, and those who value The Searchers filter it out, patiently waiting for a return to the main story line."

The Searchers has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time, such as in the BFI's decennial Sight & Sound polls. In 1972, The Searchers was ranked 18th; in 1992, 5th; in 2002, 11th; in 2012, 7th. In a 1959 Cahiers du Cinéma essay, Jean-Luc Godard compared the movie's ending to the reuniting of Odysseus with Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey and wrote: How can I hate […] John Wayne, who supports Goldwater, and love him tenderly when he suddenly takes Natalie Wood in his arms in the penultimate reel of The Searchers?In 1963, he ranked The Searchers as the fourth-greatest American movie of the sound era, after Scarface (1932), The Great Dictator (1940), and Vertigo (1958). The 1998 American Film Institute 100 greatest American films list ranked The Searchers in 96th place, and the 2007 iteration of the list ranked it in 12th place. In 1998, TV Guide ranked it 18th. In 2008, the American Film Institute named The Searchers as the greatest Western of all time. In 2010, Richard Corliss noted the film was "now widely regarded as the greatest Western of the 1950s, the genre's greatest decade" and characterized it as a "darkly profound study of obsession, racism, and heroic solitude".

The film currently maintains an 87% rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes based on 98 reviews, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The site's critics' consensus reads: "The Searchers is an epic John Wayne Western that introduces dark ambivalence to the genre that remains fashionable today." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 94 out of 100 based on reviews from 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

The film has been recognized multiple times by the American Film Institute:

Critical interpretations

Race relations

A major theme of the film is the historical attitude of white settlers toward Native Americans. Ford was not the first to attempt this examination cinematically, but his depiction of harshness toward Native Americans was startling, particularly to later generations of viewers; Roger Ebert wrote, "I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide." At the heart of The Searchers is Wayne's performance as the angry, vengeful Ethan Edwards. From the beginning of his quest, he is quite clearly less interested in rescuing Debbie than in wreaking vengeance on the Comanches for the slaughter of his brother's family.

In a 1964 interview with Cosmopolitan, Ford said,

There's some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn't been portrayed accurately or fairly in the Western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair. The Indian didn't welcome the white man ... and he wasn't diplomatic ... If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life. There was much racial prejudice in the West.

Film scholar Ed Lowry writes, "[W]hile the Comanches are depicted as utterly ruthless, Ford ascribes motivations for their actions, and lends them a dignity befitting a proud civilization. Never do we see the Indians commit atrocities more appalling than those perpetrated by the white man." "Wayne is plainly Ahab", wrote cultural critic Greil Marcus. "He is the good American hero driving himself past all known limits and into madness, his commitment to honor and decency burned down to a core of vengeance." For Brenton Priestley, Ford indicates that Scar's cruelty is also motivated by revenge ("Two sons killed by white men. For each son, I take many... scalps.")

The theme of miscegenation also runs through the film. Many critical analyses of The Searchers highlight Ethan's view of Debbie as having been "contaminated" through her abduction and implied rape.

The rape of captive white women by the Comanche is an unspoken theme. No actual rape scene is depicted, but Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in her study of Rape-Revenge Films says, "the abduction, captivity, and implied rape of Debbie (Natalie Wood) ... drives the narrative"; and Edward Buscombe points out a scene in which "[Ethan] turns off the trail to penetrate a narrow crevice in the rocks, and when he emerges, his savage stabbing with his knife seems to mimic a violent sexual act, drawing us 'a picture' of the act of rape which obsesses him." Glenn Frankel writes that in real life, "Rape was a fact of life for many captives, although it was seldom discussed by those women who escaped or were ransomed back to the white world."

Ethan and Martha

An important plot undercurrent is the obvious mutual attraction between Ethan Edwards and his brother's wife, Martha. Although no dialogue alludes to it, many visual references to their relationship are seen throughout the film. Some critics have suggested that this unspoken passion implies that Debbie—who is specifically described as eight years old, as Ethan returns from an eight-year absence—may be Ethan's daughter. Such a situation would add further layers of nuance to Ethan's obsessive search for Debbie, his revulsion at the thought that she might be living as a Native American, and his ultimate decision to bring her home—and then walk away. Beyond the ostensible motivations, it might depict a guilt-ridden father's need to save the daughter he made by cuckolding his brother, then abandoned.

Influence

The Searchers has influenced many films. David Lean watched the film repeatedly while preparing for Lawrence of Arabia to help him get a sense of how to shoot a landscape. The entrance of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, across a vast prairie, is echoed in the across-the-desert entrance of Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia. Sam Peckinpah referenced the aftermath of the massacre and the funeral scene in Major Dundee (1965), and according to a 1974 review by Jay Cocks, Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia contains dialogue with "direct tributes to such classics as John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and John Ford's The Searchers."

Martin Scorsese's 1967 film Who's That Knocking at My Door features a sequence in which the two primary characters discuss The Searchers, and in his 1973 film Mean Streets, three characters attend a screening of The Searchers. In 2012, in a Sight & Sound poll, Scorsese listed The Searchers as one of his all-time favorite films.

Scott McGee, writing for Turner Classic Movies, notes "Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas have all been influenced and paid some form of homage to The Searchers in their work." Wenders' Palme d'Or-winning 1984 film Paris, Texas in particular has been cited for similarities.

The film influenced several aspects of George Lucas' film saga Star Wars. The scene in which Ethan Edwards discovers the flaming wreckage of his family homestead is reflected in 1977's Star Wars, wherein the character Luke Skywalker finds that his homestead has been burned and destroyed by Imperial Stormtroopers. The Searchers was also an influence on the 2002 prequel film in the series, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. In the film, Anakin Skywalker learns that one of his family members has been abducted by a group of Tusken Raiders (though the character's mother is kidnapped, rather than a niece). Anakin massacres the kidnappers in vengeance, much like The Searchers' climactic battle in the Comanche camp. The opening scenes of Rogue One mirror those of The Searchers: the pig-tailed character of Jyn is hidden by her parents when their homestead is attacked in the same way little Debbie is saved by her parents when they are attacked by the Comanches.

Douglas Gordon's 1995 artwork, 5 Year Drive-By, stretches out The Searchers from the original 119-minute runtime to five years (reflecting the events of the movie taking place over a timespan of five years), playing at a speed of one frame every 24 minutes.

Home media

The Searchers was first released on home video on VHS and Betamax in 1980, followed by releases on LaserDisc in 1984 and DVD in 1997. It was released by the Warner Archive Collection on Blu-ray, HD DVD and a remastered DVD in 2006 for the film's 50th anniversary. The film was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray and a remastered Blu-ray on December 17, 2024, by the Warner Archive Collection as the label's first 4K release, featuring a remaster from its original VistaVision camera negative.

Comic book adaptation

Dell Comics published an adaptation of The Searchers in Dell Four Color #709 (June 1956), written by Leo Dorfman and drawn by Mike Roy. The comic book downplays Ethan's racism and omits the final iconic scene of the film.