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The Searchers — 4K

by Glenn Erickson Dec 28, 2024

The Warner Archive Collection’s first 4K Ultra HD release is a glowing digital restoration of John Ford’s unequalled western classic, considered to also have one of John Wayne’s best performances. The movie is remarkable in that it embraces so many different tones: tragic drama, buffoonish comedy, and a full examination of racial hatred as a tribal force … It’s the story of America, in a way, rooted in Ford’s worship of Family.


The Searchers 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1956 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 119 min. / Street Date December 20, 2024 / Available at MovieZyng / 29.99
Starring: John Wayne. Vera Miles, Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter, Ward Bond, John Qualen, Dorothy Jordan, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey Jr., Olive Carey, Henry Brandon, Antonio Moreno, Hank Worden, Lana Wood, Pat Wayne, Cliff Lyons, Mae Marsh, Jack Pennick, Chuck Roberson.
Cinematography: Winton C. Hoch
Art Directors: James Basevi, Frank Hotaling
Costumes: Charles Arrico
Film Editor: Jack Murray
Music by: Max Steiner
Second Unit director: Wingate Smith
Script Supervisor: Robert Gary
Screenplay Written by Frank S. Nugent from the novel by Alan LeMay, originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post as The Avenging Texans
Executive Producer: Merian C. Cooper
Producer: C.V. Whitney
Directed by
John Ford

In 1972 the UCLA film school arranged the loan of a 35mm Technicolor print of The Searchers. The critical studies people showed it three times in the department’s state-of-the-art theater, then known only as ‘Melnitz 1409.’  We John Ford fans were crazy about Ford’s formalism and ease with storytelling, a style that retained the grace of silent filmmaking. Ford was the establishment but also something of a rebel, especially when it came to anything about Ireland.

The Searchers took our heads off — it made sense of a lot of scrambled undergraduate thinking. This was the Generation Gap in a nutshell. John Wayne and John Ford’s worldview were the real deal, the image of America that our conservative parents more or less subscribed to. Some student peers recognized the poetry and political truth-telling beyond the already-dated ’50s cowboy aspects. The singing Sons of the Pioneers weren’t exactly Crosby, Stills & Nash; making peace with that music is a prerequisite to understanding Ford’s elegiac  Wagon Master.

 

Like it or not The Searchers is Establishment America.
 

Ford’s movie was a key picture for the hot young film school directors — John Milius quoted it almost as frequently as Schrader & De Palma quoted Hitchcock’s  Vertigo. Steven Spielberg liked to quote its dialogue — his favorite movies were mainstream audience-pleasers. Ford’s westerns were the backbone of the genre. Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist westerns comment constantly on Ford. Even when Peckinpah subverts Ford’s original intention, he conveys a genuine awe for the master.

First-time viewers are impressed by the power of The Searchers, even with elements that brand it as a ‘movie for grandpa.’ Ford’s idea of entertainment was often ‘just stuff he liked’: square dances with frontier folk in colorful new western duds; a reverence for an idealized past, boistrous lowbrow humor. Ford’s idea of heaven was finding new ways for Winton Hoch to film Monument Valley in VistaVision and Technicolor. He would also stage random scenes on artificial sets barely good enough for TV work.

We found The Searchers to be as personal a statement as any film by ’70s director. It has a subversive (for Ford) racial subtext that gets to the heart of tribal warfare. The story arc is a blood feud that leaves behind a warrior unredeemed. Parts of it hark back to crude slapstick and others are a cinematic mystery. Ford didn’t normally venture artistic opinions about his movies. But for this one he was quoted as saying something like, “I wanted to make a tragedy that became a comedy.”  That makes sense only if we decide that Ford was ‘printing the legend’ of the conquest of the West, while at the same time undercutting it with a moral disapproval.

 

What we see as Racism, Ethan sees as an unavoidable Race War.
 

Ethan Edwards (Wayne) and his brother Aaron (Walter Coy) homesteaded a corner of Texas, along with the Swedish settlers the Jorgensons. But Ethan left to fight in the Civil War, and didn’t return when it ended. He shows up back home three years late, unsure if he has a place there, and is warmly greeted by Aaron’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan). Comanche War Chief Scar (Henry Brandon) tricks Ethan and the Texas Rangers into leaving the homesteads unprotected, and then massacres Ethan’s entire family save for 9 year-old Debbie (Lana Wood), who he kidnaps. Ethan guides the Texas Rangers on a mission to recover her. The leader is the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton (Ward Bond). Also following is the Edwards’ adoptee Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who Ethan criticizes for having ‘Indian blood.’ When the mission ends in failure, Ethan and Martin continue to search for Debbie all across the West. Martin’s girlfriend Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) waits for him to return … until she reads that he’s married an Indian squaw.

 

The Searchers is a straightforward story but a cultural puzzle. Out in West Texas, the settlers’ relationship to the Indians can only be called a blood feud; healthy children are so precious that the Indians will kidnap whites to raise as their own. Ethan is a racist at the outset, already openly contemptuous of Martin Pawley for being a ‘quarter-breed Cherokee.’  The big shocker for baby boomers is to see Wayne’s character revealed as a murderous racist. Ethan can’t stand the idea that Martha’s daughter should become a wife of his sworn enemy, Scar. His goal becomes not to find his niece, but to kill her.

 

This is DAD … and he wants to KILL YOUR SISTER.
 

John Ford wasn’t big on elaborate camera moves. There are only two dramatic push-ins in The Searchers, once when Lucy Edwards (Pippa Scott) realizes that Indians are attacking, and once when Ethan turns to glare at some freed captives of the Comanches, miserable women and girls. The move emphasizes Ethan’s ingrained hatred. Presuming that the captives have all been violated by Comanche braves, Ethan no longer considers them white. When we finally see Debbie, she has grown to become Natalie Wood (lipstick and all). As far as Ethan is concerned, she is better off dead.

It isn’t just Ethan who thinks this way. Laurie Jorgensen was raised on terror tales about what happens to white girls captured by Comanches … she says of Debbie that “Martha would want Ethan to put a bullet in her brain.”  Laurie proclaims this in full close-up.

But John Ford leaves us to figure it out for ourselves. He has not made an Issue Film; no progressive spokesperson arrives to preach peaceful coexistence. The show is a straight adventure, and a ‘family’ saga that frequently lapses into broad comedy.

John Wayne gave many good performances, but this one is usually noted as his best. The mystery of Ethan Edwards is maintained almost like that of John Carradine’s gambler Hatfield back in Ford’s classic  Stagecoach. Three years after the surrender at Appomatox, Ethan returns with some suspicious gold coins, a Mexican medal, and no explanations. Has he been fighting for Maximillian in Mexico, like the freebooters of  Vera Cruz?  As becomes plainly clear, Ethan and Martha are secretly in love. He seems to have come back just to be with her.

 

It’s Old School discretion: some family truths are not open for discussion.
 

Reviewers often call Ethan’s relationship with Martha ambiguous, when what we see on screen all but makes it explicit. Anyone paying attention can see that Martha loves Ethan in a way she never loved Aaron. The storytelling doesn’t go so far as to suggest that young Debbie could be Ethan’s child. But even the Reverend-Captain Clayton knows that anything is possible. It’s all expressed in the way that he averts his attention from the Ethan-Martha reunion. The Searchers is blunt and obvious one moment, and mysteriously intimate the next.

The Searchers’ story framework sketches an intriguing ‘generational-repeat’ motif.  *  We can theorize about what transpired between Aaron, Ethan and Martha in the past, based on what is happening to Martin Pawley, Laurie and Charlie McCorry in the present. Martin has a bride and a future on the land ready and waiting, but he wanders away to search for Debbie. Ethan absented himself as well, and Martha settled for the dull but steady Aaron. Circumstances compel Laurie to do the exact same thing: marry the man that’s there instead of the man she loves.

 

That’s the reality for women with limited choices. Laurie Jorgenson is a strong woman, not a victim. Her social role is to keep the blood line going — she wants to populate the wilderness with babies. Next to Wayne, Vera Miles is the film’s most vivid performer. She retains an essential dignity, even when Laurie is made the butt of a joke … “How old does he think I AM!?”

Ethan’s quest to regain his home is impossible without Martha. His rage is such that he does not care that his mission to ‘purify’ Debbie will make him a pariah to his own people. He’s doing to himself what he tries to do when he mutilates a dead ‘Comanch,’ to deny a hated enemy his spiritual afterlife: “Ain’t got no eyes, doomed forever to wander between the winds.”  This may be where Ford’s quote about tragedy and comedy comes into play. Ethan knows he will no longer be ‘family’ to the surviving homesteaders. The irony is that doddering old village idiot Mose Harper (Hank Worden) will claim Ethan’s slot, and his dreamed-of rocking chair by the fire. Galahad stumbles, and his reward goes to the court jester.

 

John Ford’s Landscape of the Mind
 

The Searchers ranges all across the West yet seems to spend most of its time in scenic Monument Valley. Worshippers of John Ford assign mystical significance to the Navajo land that straddles Arizona and Utah, but for Ford it was simply a favorite visual background, with 50 sensational calendar-art views. Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen) raises cattle on a vegetation-challenged desert that would have trouble supporting a pair of goats. The movie company may have had to transport water to make that mudhole pool in the Jorgenson yard.

The English critic-director Lindsay Anderson contributed interesting theories about the function of Monument Valley’s beautiful towers of stone. From afar they look like cathedrals, but when we get closer, horrible, dark things happen in confining passages and cave interiors. The Earth is the Mother and those openings in the rock are …. it’s a Freudian interpretation. Fleeing for her life, Debbie runs madly for the darkest, deepest cave of all. When Ethan hoists her aloft, he comes back from the edge of eternity. His niece is a living connection to the lost Martha: she IS Martha, his lost Home. It’s only then that he knows he can’t kill her.

 


Ford and writer Frank Nugent push tragedy and comedy at the same time. Even a sober scene will end with Ethan drawling, “That’ll be the day!  Wayne says it at least three times. It’s a signature line, just like the zingers written for Clint Eastwood’s  Dirty Harry. We’re told that it did indeed inspire  the Buddy Holly song.

The clownish Mose Harper is the film’s official comic relief, but the show’s comedy sentiments become ambiguous with the cruel treatment of Martin Pawley’s ‘accidental’ Comanche bride, the Indian princess ‘Look’ (Beulah Archuletta). Making crude fun of ‘Squaws’ is one of the culture’s rudest insults to Native Americans. Ethan uses the sweet-faced woman to taunt the clueless Martin. Look is the defenseless butt of six broad ‘romance’ jokes and then exits the story on a dark note. Back on the Jorgenson farm Laurie’s suitor Charley McCorry is happy to see his competition disqualified: “So he married a Comanchee Squaw! Haw Haw!”

 

Action in an abstract ‘movie space’ given continuity only through editing.
 

The films dramatic climax, the Rangers’ attack on a Comanche village, unspools in a blast of location discontinuities. The Comanche camp is on a broad, flat plain, but when Debbie runs away, she’s suddenly running down a steep slope and into a dark cave. The vast plain is of course in Monument Valley; the canyon and the cave were filmed in a rocky cleft of Bronson Caverns, less than a mile from downtown Hollywood. When Ethan and Debbie catch each other’s eye, they’re in locations 600 miles apart. The intercutting of plain and canyon is so acute, a film theorist might conclude that John Ford’s intent is to fragment spatial reality, much the same as might  Alain Resnais.

We first thought that perhaps Warners’ star Natalie Wood was too in-demand to ship off to Monument Valley, but she does show up in several scenes there. We think that Ford simply thought the Bronson Caverns cave entrance was ideal, and used the power of the cut to bridge the incongruous locations. A bonus is the stunt double’s dynamic sprint down that steep slope — she falls in the dust, and Ms. Wood rises to finish the shot without a cut.

Ford’s editors remove several frames when Ethan picks Debbie up — making it look as if he swings her aloft in one triumphant gesture. But film students take note!  The power of the cinematic cut is undeniable — eyelines ‘sell’ character interactions between isolated shots taken at different times, in different places.

 

🎶  “What makes a man to wander, what makes a man to roam?”  🎶
 

The Searchers ends with a poetic flourish. Ethan Edwards is shut out just as he seems ready to reclaim his place in The Family. He must turn away from Home and withdraw alone. Redundant song lyrics from the Sons of the Pioneers make sure that ‘we get it.’  Ethan may have found Debbie, but he tried to kill her too. There’s no longer a place for him at the table.

Is it possible to see a film too often?  We haven’t put eyes on The Searchers in years, and this time we found that it is mostly memorized, internalized. Ford’s dramatic compositions are more striking than ever… and some of those artificial stage settings still stick out rather badly. If one’s mood isn’t right, the frequent bouts of corny humor can get sticky. Yet it all seems to fit, even with the holes in Marty’s underwear and Pat Wayne’s Lt. Greenhill jabbing Ward Bond in the butt with a sword. Mose Harper may be a low-comedy loon, but he’s also the one who finds Debbie — twice.

 

Even the cartoonish humor is oddly inconsistent. When riding with the Texas Rangers, Ken Curtis’s Charlie McCorry is an able hand, and talks normally. When romancing Laurie, he transforms into a slack-jawed rube, with an exaggerated drawl. Transforming once more, he then reveals a professional, sensitive singing voice, ready for Prime Time on The Lawrence Welk Show. Go figure.

Several earlier John Ford westerns were scored by music composer Richard Hageman, who made liberal use of existing tunes. Composer Max Steiner’s score begins with a title theme that blasts out a blood challenge we can’t ignore. Steiner then binds together what is often a fragmented continuity, especially Ethan and Martin’s five-year Odyssey, with its disconnected landscapes that illustrate Laurie’s reading of a letter.

As the film become darker in tone, the music begins to spin scenes in contradictory directions. Steiner uses the sentimental tune  Lorena to represent Ethan’s yearning to restore Martha, a theme that conflicts with his desire to destroy Debbie. Even as Ethan and Martin cruelly disrespect the Indian princess ‘Look,’ Steiner’s music embraces her with a gentle theme tune, one every bit as tender as the melody he wrote for the beloved  Johnny Belinda.

 

Ford places the U.S. Cavalry and the Texas Rangers in a negative light, but Steiner’s accompanying military themes sound as positive as ever. The discovery of a massacre in an Indian village is followed by the sight of Army horses crossing a freezing brook.  Cripes that looks cold.  As one of Ford’s favorite Irish marches plays, the scene cuts to a shot of Indian women and children being herded through the cold, like sheep. The scene signals a change of attitude by Ford — his subsequent westerns will associate the Cavalry with  racial prejudice and  the persecution of Native Americans.

The role of the Cavalry / Rangers has changed. We remember the demonized Indians in Ford’s previous Cavalry picture  Rio Grande. Apaches were equated with Communist North Koreans, ducking across a national boundary to evade justice. But when Captain Clayton’s Texas Rangers attack War Chief Scar’s Comanche camp, shooting everyone in sight, Ford only offers a few cutaways to Indians shooting back. Max Steiner’s frantic battle music says ‘Daring Exploit,’ but the feared bloodthirsty savages are mostly absent. What stands out most is the sight of a brave running for cover with a child in his arms, and a Ranger knocking down a female as she flees on foot. Ethan is shown brandishing a wicked knife, to scalp a Comanche enemy. The upbeat Cavalry charge music continues. It doesn’t feel like retribution for Aaron, Martha, Ben and Lucy; it feels like an expression of blind genocide.

After sending mixed signals about race hatred and white dominance, the show ends on the idea that the unforgiving white supremacist will lose his place at the family hearth. To Ford, that is the ultimate damnation.

Postscript: Four years later came a filmic reworking of The Searchers, with a much more explicit statement of racial hate. John Huston’s excellent  The Unforgiven is from another book by Alan LeMay, but the character orchestration is almost the same. Audrey Hepburn is thought to be a white captive, rescued from the Indians. The strong male lead is Burt Lancaster, who fights to keep a Kiowa brave from reclaiming her. There is no chance of reconciliation: Lilian Gish’s fierce frontier grandmother calls the Kiowas ‘red niggers.’ The Ethan Edwards figure is almost a ghost. Joseph Wiseman plays Abe Kelsey, a ragged vagrant who wears an old military uniform. He calls himself ‘the Sword of God,’ and he knows the dark secret about Hepburn’s character.

 


 

The Warner Archive Collection 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Searchers is a major restoration effort for this audience-pleasing western epic that appeals to viewers across the political spectrum. Enormously successful, it was not nominated for a single Academy Award in 1956. Perhaps pigeonholed as just ‘a John Wayne movie,’ it is much more than boozy brawls with Wayne punching out guys who don’t salute the flag.

We have vibrant memories of how stunning the film was on a big screen, in Technicolor and VistaVision. Warners’ 4K remaster frequently achieves the same impact. VistaVision is a camera format with twice the image area as normal 35mm; screenings were invariably accompanied by audible ‘ahhs’ for some of cameraman Winton Hoch’s beautiful images.

The video encoding is unusually sharp and detailed; we can read facial details in many wide shots, and see the weave and texture of the frontier costumes. Now we can really see an assistant director wave down a 1950s truck in the background of a snowbound scene (and Craig Reardon has spotted a Native American woman wearing sunglasses).

There’s nothing subtle about the visual impact of this 4K remaster — when Martha Edwards opens ‘the door to the West’ and the camera follows her outside, the effect feels like 3-D.

Colors on the disc are stunning throughout, with mostly excellent facial tones at all times, in shade and sun. The only scenes that didn’t look perfect are some Day for Night shots and a couple of interiors near the end, in which shadows looked a little purple. Of course, Monument Valley never looked better.

 

Back on December 3 we were able to attend a Zoom conference hosted by Allied Vaughn’s Blair Zykan, with the WAC’s George Feltenstein and two of the key restoration people at Warner Imaging, Miles Delhoyo and Jan Yarbrough. Yarbrough has been remastering film on video since the Laserdisc days. The Searchers is their newest and biggest effort, a VistaVision project following their recent remaster of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The scanning was done from the original camera negative, half a frame at time, with the halves digitally ‘stitched together’ in a post-scanning phase.

George Feltenstein noted that the previous Blu-ray of Searchers had a yellowish sky, and Jan explained that the cause was a faded blue dye layer in the film emulsion. The restoration accessed the B&W separation masters, and scanned the blue (cyan?) channel to restore blue values throughout the feature.

The restoration experts discussed details of the process — they could tell when the OCN changed to a new batch of Eastman 5248 stock. The digital restoration was done in time for a TCM Fest premiere in April, and was the basis for the 70mm theatrical reissue. The restorers think the 4K disc looks better than the 70mm when seen on a good monitor.

The memorable line of the day was the statement that HDR wasn’t just more pixels, but better Pixels!

Miles noted that they included the original mono mix, along with their digital remixes.

George Feltenstein said that the additional Blu-ray disc in the 4K set carries the new scan and restoration, not some older version. He reminded us that The Searchers is the Warner Archives’ first 4K release. He said that they wouldn’t be coming out on a regular basis … but that the announcement for another would be coming in a couple of months.

With the exception of Peter Bogdanovich’s audio commentary, all of the extras are on the Blu-ray disc only. They are all from the older deluxe Blu-ray. Repeating from the first release are a trailer and a series of Behind the Cameras Warner TV shows from 1956, the ones with Gig Young hosting. Patrick Wayne provides a video introduction (more of a welcome) taped at the Bronson Caverns quarry. The commentary by Peter Bogdanovich is good, if a little laid back.

The extra called ‘An Appreciation’ arranges welcome comments from Martin Scorsese, John Milius and Curtis Hanson. A 1998 piece called A Turning of the Earth is an overlong montage re-edit of scenes from the film and outtake footage. It uses a lot of interesting stage-wait material from the ends of film takes, including some shots with John Ford on camera. It repeats shots we see too often, and replays shots from the Behind the Cameras TV shows. But it also has fascinating remnants of unused scenes. A long shot of Wayne riding may have been originally intended as a background for the main titles.

We also see a newsreel covering the film’s World Premiere in Chicago.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


The Searchers
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Peter Bogdanovich
Intro by Patrick Wayne
An Appreciation by three filmmakers
A Turning of the Earth, a Nick Redman extended collage of scenes and outtake footage
World Premiere newsreel
Original trailer
4 Behind the Cameras TV shows:  Meet Jeffrey Hunter,  Meet Natalie Wood,  Monumnent Valley,  Setting Up Production.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)

Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
December 25, 2024
(7240search)

*  The Generational Repeat Cycle: how often do children repeat the choices (and mistakes) of their parents, without realizing it?  The idea that the same stories play out in succeeding generations is central to some movies by director Jacques Demy. The idea figures touchingly in his early film  Lola, which uses the Robert Bresson masterpiece  Les dames du bois de Boulogne as deep background. Demy even casts a repeat actress from Bois de Boulogne, for continuity.
CINESAVANT

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 6.51.08 PM

Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Chas Speed

I saw this 20 years ago at a Cinemark theater and could tell it desperately need to be remastered and I am thrilled that it finally happened.

Allen Hollis

That was a fantastic review. Thank you for so much insight in to one of my favorite westerns.

Last edited 1 month ago by Allen Hollis
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[…] to order about and abuse, played by none other than the great Antonio Moreno ( The Searchers). A slimy subordinate torturer is played by none other than Jack La Rue, of pre-Code shocker fame […]

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