In this revered Western, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns home to Texas after the Civil War. When members of his brother's family are killed or abducted by Comanches, he vows to track down his surviving relatives and bring them home.
Eventually, Edwards gets word that his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) is alive, and, along with her adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), he embarks on a dangerous mission to find her, journeying deep into Comanche territory.
Samuel Clayton, and a group of Texas Rangers, as they set out to find the kidnapped girls. As the search stretches from weeks to months and finally years, most of the men abandon the cause—except for Ethan and Martin.
Along the way they learn that a chief named Scar was responsible for the raid, though they find out only Debbie has survived early on.
Ethan pushes on relentlessly following their trail, aiming to kill Debbie and her captor, Chief Scar, for violating her; declaring that once Comanches capture a white girl, she is no longer white.
Despite Ethan’s protests that he wants to continue the search alone, Martin tags along with him for years, because Martin knows that he will have to protect Debbie from Ethan if she is ever found.
Therefore, although partners, Ethan and Martin are destined to become enemies once the search is finished. -- DVDverdict.com
Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Henry Brandon, Olive Carey, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey Jr., Antonio Moreno, Hank Worden, Beulah Archuletta, Walter Coy, Dorothy Jordan, Pippa Scott, Patrick Wayne, Lana Wood
*****
If John Ford is the greatest Western director, The Searchers is arguably his greatest film, at once a grand outdoor spectacle like such Ford classics as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) and a film about one man’s troubling moral codes, a big-screen adventure of the 1950s that anticipated the complex themes and characters that would dominate the 1970s.
John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to his brother Aaron’s frontier cabin three years after the end of the Civil War.
Ethan still has his rebel uniform and weapons, a large stash of Yankee gold, and no explanations as to where he’s been since Lee’s surrender.
A loner not comfortable in the bosom of his family, Ethan also harbors a bitter hatred of Indians (though he knows their lore and language well) and trusts no one but himself.
Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Aaron’s adopted son, join a makeshift band of Texas Rangers fending off an assault by renegade Comanches. Before they can run off the Indians, several homes are attacked, and Ethan returns to discover his brother and sister-in-law dead and their two daughters kidnapped.
While they soon learn that one of the girls is dead, the other, Debbie, is still alive, and with obsessive determination, Ethan and Martin spend the next five years in a relentless search for Debbie — and for Scar (Henry Brandon), the fearsome Comanche chief who abducted her.
But while Martin wants to save his sister and bring her home, Ethan seems primarily motivated by his hatred of the Comanches; it’s hard to say if he wants to rescue Debbie or murder the girl who has lived with Indians too long to be considered “white.”
John Wayne gives perhaps his finest performance in a role that predated screen antiheroes of the 1970s; by the film’s conclusion, his single-minded obsession seems less like heroism and more like madness. Wayne bravely refuses to soft-pedal Ethan’s ugly side, and the result is a remarkable portrait of a man incapable of answering to anyone but himself, who ultimately has more in common with his despised Indians than with his more “civilized” brethren.
Natalie Wood is striking in her brief role as the 16-year-old Debbie, lost between two worlds, and Winton C. Hoch’s Technicolor photography captures Monument Valley’s savage beauty with subtle grace. The Searchers paved the way for such revisionist Westerns as The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and its influence on movies from Taxi Driver (1976) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Wars (1977) testifies to its lasting importance. -- allmovie guide
About this movie
Title: The Searchers (1956)
Directed by: John Ford
Date of birth: February 1, 1894, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA
Date of death: August 31, 1973, Palm Desert, California, USA
Writing credits: Frank S. Nugent, Alan Le May
Music: Max Steiner
Year: 1956
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Runtime: 119 min.