The Searchers (1956)

Film: The Searchers (1956)
Stars: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: I don't know how, but somehow in the year Around the World in 80 Days was deemed the best movie of the year, The Searchers wasn't good enough to be nominated in one single category (though weirdly Patrick Wayne's pipsqueak of a cavalryman managed to win the Best Newcomer Golden Globe)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

As some of you who follow this blog are aware, 2018 was the year I got into "retro screenings" of classic films, pictures that play as retrospectives at actual movie theaters.  In 2018, I caught On the Waterfront, one of my all-time favorite movies, at a "secret movie night" (where you don't know what movie you're buying the ticket for until it starts), and I didn't think I'd luck out by having a movie I somehow loved even more come up in 2019, but first screening out the gate, I saw the title cards to The Searchers scroll across the screen and I think I might have squealed to my friend sitting next to me "this is one of my favorite movies!"  The Searchers, the finest hour of both John Ford and his longtime muse John Wayne, is a spellbinding western, frequently playing with the cinematic trope that these two men invented, inserting realism and pessimism into the western story, making way for a new series of films in the genre (it's impossible to imagine movies like Once Upon a Time in the West or Unforgiven existing were it not for The Searchers).

(Spoilers Ahead...but, come on, you've never seen The Searchers?!?  Get on it!) The movie takes place in Texas (but is clearly filmed in Arizona & Utah), starting in 1868, and follows Ethan Edwards (Wayne), a confederate soldier who is returning home from the war to his brother and sister-in-law's house.  It's obvious he has at least some criminal background, and from the opening scenes is hostile to the adopted son of the couple, Martin Pawley (Hunter), who is part Cherokee Indian.  Chasing after Native Americans who have taken some of the cattle from a neighboring farm, Ethan & Martin trek off after the cows, not realizing that this is a trap, and soon we learn that the Native Americans have killed Ethan's brother and sister-in-law, and kidnapped their two daughters.

The film follows Ethan and Martin as they track these girls seemingly for years, first one of them dying (and the film, as heavily as can be indicated in 1956, saying she was raped by her captors) but the other, younger daughter Debbie (played as a teenager by Wood), still being in the Native American camp.  As the years go by, we come to realize that Ethan has less interest in saving Debbie and is more intent on killing her as retribution for the Native Americans kidnapping her, his blind racism no longer seeing his niece but instead just another Indian woman.

It's this observation that gives The Searchers almost all of its power, even when it strays into more traditional western territory for the 1950's.  The film is littered with the occasional comic set pieces that so frequently adorned Wayne's movies.  We see Hunter having a comedic fistfight with someone who is pursuing his on-again-off-again girlfriend Laurie (Miles), as well as a recurring gag about how Martin accidentally marries an Indian woman who follows he and Wayne around for a while, but Ford has something to say here that would be absent from a lot of his pictures with the Duke, and somehow picks one of the most by-the-book stars in film history to do so.

Wayne has never been better (and Hunter more beautiful) than in The Searchers.  Passionately lit by Winton C. Hoch (who would win Oscars for the Wayne pictures She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man), Ethan Edwards is the best thing that Wayne ever did, bringing a humanity to a largely inhuman person.  His Ethan is a cruel, racist, but all-too-real man whose bigotry overshadows any humanity that might lie underneath, a fact we see as he abandons his quest for rescue for one of revenge.  Westerns at their very best show men who are so towering, but incomplete that they can rough it through even the harshest of existences, detached from life due to the impossible hardness that life in a perilous country requires; they are not heroes, but simply people put in impossible times.  Ethan Edwards is arguably the quintessential example of a fearless man who was needed to venture into the west, but then must disappear in order for civilization to have a chance.  The final scenes of the picture encapsulate this ethos, with Laurie, Martin, and Debbie all going back into the house, but in a scene shot through a doorway, we see John Wayne saunter back into the wild, likely never to be seen by any of these people again.  It's a bittersweet ending that would be echoed six years later in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-the hero who must live on past his purpose, forever a ghost of what he used to be.

Ride away, ride away...