The Searchers

as far as the american utopian dream i think it goes back to the puritans - the "fine good place to be" as it is called in the film. creating a new eden out in the frontier.

Donovan's Reef (1963) (as Frank Nugent)
Two Rode Together (1961) (as Frank Nugent)
Last Hurrah, The (1958) (as Frank Nugent)
Rising of the Moon, The (1957)
Searchers, The (1956) (screenplay)
Mister Roberts (1955) (as Frank Nugent)
Angel Face (1952) (as Frank Nugent)
Quiet Man, The (1952)
Wagon Master (1950)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) (as Frank Nugent)
Tulsa (1949) (as Frank Nugent)
3 Godfathers (1948)
Fort Apache (1948)

Well, 'Rio Bravo' 'Kiss Me Deadly' and 'Bigger Than Life' are at least as good. 'Rio Bravo' is particularly topical.

he ranks "high noon" above "rio bravo" (if am reading him right) and quite correctly, i think.

people who know me know i think how green was my valley is the greatest film ever. i think the mix of tones in that film is even more seamless and beguiling and moving.

the mexican scene i could do without.

No he doesn't, not by a trillion miles!
'High Noon' has no human emotion anyone can relate to. It's puffed up tosh.

(he disapproved of its bleakness!)

LA wuvved 'My Darling Clementine' didn't he? Cf Peter Wollen: 'Ford > Hawks' because Ford chaged his position over course of career. Cue Busta-style 'Hmmm'.

the film was "rehabilitated" in the '70s largely as part of the first big wave of american auterism. taking the cue of the cahiers critics (for whom this was an important film, but one among many).

the fims that built ford's rep before this new wave were things like "the grapes of wrath" and "how green was my valley" and "the long voyage home"...which might be a little underappreciated today in fact.

the "progression" in ford's work is rough and hard to trace and full of contradictions, although it routinely gets a an auterist gloss.

the song "man who shot..." doesn't appear in the film, ford hated it.

The comedy felt like a necessary element. You'd think it would be out of place in a revenge story w/a v dark central performance at the heart of it but I thought it worked well because it would be come in and out of the action, quite smartly placed, no sngle bit of comedy overstayed its welcome.

otoh, couldn't make up my mind whether the untidy chronology was bad scriptwriting or what.

Then there is the v excellent photography and the melodramatic music is effective. With all the other themes bandied around this is a film that does a lot of work.

i finally saw this on the big screen and it ruined my weekend, i seriously hated every second of this piece of shit.

Let's go home, Matt.

haha i should really just stop posting for the rest of the day.

damn mat. why u hate it

i can think of a couple of scenes that looked cool and obviously the locations and photography are great. but it was completely up its own ass in a thematically-minded way and then didn't even deliver with histrionics but just sort of got lazy and fell flat, like, you know, john wayne. it's basically a morality play that might as well be set in glendale in 1954. every single American settlement myth/theme it "treats" is wildly offensive and the treatment itself is about as complex or ambiguous as saying "it's a small world after all."

nice

It's okay -- I don't like it either.

I can watch My Darling Clementine anytime though.

there's a lot of ford films better than this one, yeah.

OH and the scene where john wayne and the kid are SHOOTING AT A HERD OF BISON made me cry anger tears! xp

i think i saw a bit of my darling clementine in college and didn't hate it but i gotta be honest i'm not rushing out to see any of his other movies any time soon.

OH and the scene where john wayne and the kid are SHOOTING AT A HERD OF BISON made me cry anger tears! xp

it is supposed to. wayne's character is picking off bison because he wants indians to starve.

A book review by Hoberman somewhat undermines the idea that this was ignored, or at least shrugged off as just another western, upon release (which was my own understanding):

However misunderstood, “The Searchers” was hardly unappreciated. 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,” and The Los Angeles Times would note the actor’s unusually favorable reviews in the Eastern press. The movie was a hit, tied with “Rebel Without a Cause” as the year’s 11th top box-office attraction.

Scorsese:

"First, apart from being an American epic, The Searchers also is a John Wayne Western; for many, even at this late date in film history, that's still an excuse to ignore it. Secondly, it doesn't go down quite as easily as the pictures mentioned above. Like all great works of art, it's uncomfortable. The core of the movie is deeply painful. Every time I watch it—and I've seen it many, many times since its first run in 1956—it haunts and troubles me. The character of Ethan Edwards is one of the most unsettling in American cinema. In a sense, he's of a piece with Wayne's persona and his body of work with Ford and other directors like Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. It's the greatest performance of a great American actor. (Not everyone shares this opinion. For me, Wayne has only become more impressive over time.)"

"(Glenn Frankel's book) starts with Ford, who was in many ways as complex and, apparently, as lonely as Ethan, but then it takes us much further back to early America and the original events that led to the film. The story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted at the age of 9 by Comanches after watching the massacre of her family, once held the nation spellbound -- it was the classic captivity story. Her uncle James, a fascinating character, spent years searching for her. She was raised by a Comanche couple, married a chief, Peta Nocono, and bore him three children. When she was found by Texas Rangers 24 years later, she looked, spoke and behaved like a Comanche and had forgotten all of her English.

Interestingly, Frankel doesn't stop there. He takes us through her return to her white family, her inability to readjust and her early death. Then he tells the story of her son Quanah Parker, who had been a fearsome warrior but went on to become a peacemaker with Washington and with the ranchers, a land baron living in a conventional house, a co-founder of the early Native American Church (where peyote was the sacrament) and a living legend. As the relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples and ways of life shift, Frankel recounts the transformation over time from fact to legend, leading to Alan Le May's novel."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/review-martin-scorsese-searchers-426059

A 1956 display ad of #JohnFord's 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙨 includes names of a dozen #Navajo actors. @oxley264 @chrisyogerst @WesternScholar @WesternLegends @CI_Magazine#Westerns #TCMParty #TCMFF pic.twitter.com/MZhDITxG1n

— Angela Aleiss "Native Americans in the Media" (@ReelNatives) March 27, 2024

this is one of those movies where i wish i watched it pre-social-media-era internet. visually, it's a great watch. but fact i keep hitting the pause button so i can check some dumb baseball score or "hey" make this post doesn't help the film's longevity.

Go see it in a theater - perfect time to do so because it just got a jaw-dropping restoration.

https://www.in70mm.com/presents/1954_vistavision/1956_searchers/restoration/index.htm

Per one of the last questions in that interview:

Q: Will 70mm prints be available for exhibition at 70mm cinemas in Europe?

A: We will be making the 70mm available to exhibition in North America, with plans to roll out to International markets.

They're showing the new 70mm print at the Paramount in Austin for a single screening at the end of August: https://tickets.austintheatre.org/11259?_ga=2.67467857.1192276522.1715620398-2037814962.1713111611

IIRC, the Paramount is the only theatre in Texas with a proper 70mm setup.

just watched this for the first time and i don't really get it. there's so much goofy shit dragging down the plot and i am not convinced that audiences of the time (or john wayne) saw ethan as an antihero (as opposed to a straight-up hero). it does look nice. but why is it canonized as one of the best movies of all time?

I don't think most people viewed Wayne as an antihero either, and it's possible far more people at the time thought The Searchers was a boilerplate Western. That's partly a reflection of why I think it's not just a great film but one of the richest and most complicated films ever made. It always struck me as a racist film that very much reflects its time, but it also comes off as being completely aware of that by interrogating itself in a way that's brutally honest - I would even argue the film says a lot more about racism in America than possibly any other Hollywood film at that time. I don't doubt the most disturbing parts played very differently back then - the nation's history with Native Americans was viewed too differently within the culture - but Ford recognizes the inherent racism against Native Americans that was accepted by virtually everyone in the film. Departing from the source novel and making one of the central characters part Native American (Cherokee) makes a world of a difference in that regard, and I'll even say it's a brilliant way of addressing these issues without seeming anachronistic - you don't see any character stepping out of the 19th century to question what's wrongly part of the moral fabric back then, especially when a lot of those notions were still very much part of American in 1956, but when you're seeing things through Martin's eyes, it becomes impossible for those things not to be questioned by the film's audience, especially now.

And John Wayne's performance as Ethan Edwards is magnificent - I think he's one of the most fascinating and complex characters in cinematic history, and it's possible only John Wayne could've delivered given how much he represented the myth of the American West as it was originally codified in Hollywood movies. It's reportedly Wayne's favorite as well, but it's possible he didn't even realize what he accomplished here. He embodies all the romantic elements of that myth and of manifest destiny that appealed to so many moviegoers across generations, but he also embodies all the ugliness and the horrendous truths about it too.

As for the goofy elements, I know what you mean - that's part of John Ford's cinema, and it's not unique to him either. The guy loved his Shakespeare and I think he was inspired by the jarring comic relief that would come up in even Shakespeare's darkest work. (As many have pointed out, the most powerful moment in The Searchers is immediately followed by someone getting something taken out of his ass.) It's not really to my taste and such broad moments can understandably be viewed as flaws, but I don't think Ford was ever a clean and tidy filmmaker - it's just part of his personality as an artist and I'll take idiosyncrasy over "perfect" any day.

Joseph McBride has written to excellent books on Ford (including one co-written with Michael Wilmington) but at minimum I would read Searching for John Ford, probably the definitive biography, and the chapter on The Searchers is essential if anyone wants to know how Ford made it.

*only John Wayne could've realized it so completely given how much he represented the myth of the American West

*written two excellent books

*part of America in 1956

I really need to proofread before I post

As chance would have it I’ve been recently watching some “classic” (read: pre-Sergio Leone) Westerns - all of which I’d never seen before- and the Searchers was the first one I watched. It was followed by Rio Bravo and Red River. At some point I do intend to see some not starring John Wayne. In terms purely of Wayne’s role and screen presence I thought Red River was quite interesting. In terms of the structure of the film his character’s moral standing is more conflicted than in Searchers - at some point he clearly becomes the villain. Also he is noticeably younger and wears a not completely un-mulletlike hairdo. His magnetic screen presence is already there in spades, even an excellent Montgomery Clift is careful not to try to upstage him. But back to the Searchers. It clearly has many fine qualities. I actually thought the digressions and diversions from the main plot actually were one of the stronger aspects that set it apart. They may seem tonally jarring at first - more suitable for romantic comedy- but they added a unique richness to the mise en scene and a distinct sense of time and place.

just watched this for the first time and i don't really get it. there's so much goofy shit dragging down the plot and i am not convinced that audiences of the time (or john wayne) saw ethan as an antihero (as opposed to a straight-up hero). it does look nice. but why is it canonized as one of the best movies of all time?

― na (NA

hear hear

Ford made at least four more complex westerns

Also: The Searchers is straight-up boring for stretches.

For pure entertainment value I think it’s hard to beat Rio Bravo.

Great films, but I've always had a preference for Red River (which matches up well with Hud, too) over The Searchers.

great post bird

Thanks visiting!

I agree with nate about the digressions - I'd have to look through a list of Ford's work to confirm, but I think that happened more and more towards the back end of his career where he broke more and more from Hollywood convention when it came to plot, especially if it meant depicting a larger sense of community as in Wagon Master, The Sun Shines Bright, etc...none of these have a really clean or rigid plot structure (Wagon Master has the barest of plot threads and the latter has a pretty busy and free-flowing plot that goes all over the place). But it does result in richer films - in memory, my sense of Ford's movies involve a wide range of experiences within a vast community, whereas most Westerns I've seen feel very compact in comparison.

I've never found any part of The Searchers boring - even when there's a strange and unexpected digression, I find it interesting in some way. It does have long stretches that I find incredibly moving, which is kind of unexpected given what the film's about. The famous climax/ending is obvious - Godard famously wrote about how he was moved to tears despite being repulsed by Wayne's politics (not just as Ethan Edwards but in real life). McBride often cites one of the opening shots as his favorite in the film. One of the most unexpected for me is "the donut" - I won't give it away if you haven't seen it, but it's always been a beautiful and heartbreaking scene for me. It's astonishing how a guy as brusque and crude as Ford can have such a great sense of poetry in composing a scene, especially when it comes to blocking his actors, and this is a great example of that. One of the choices he makes is pretty mundane when you take it out of context, but it's incredibly brilliant in how organic and unpretentious it plays out on-screen - just have a third character stand there, look blankly in that direction and have him finish his donut. I doubt it's something that usually comes to mind when anyone tries to craft a scene like that, but take that element away and that scene wouldn't have worked nearly as well.

(To be fair, if you break it down, it follows some basic reliable rules that a lot of old school directors know like the back of their hand. For example, there can be a lot more dramatic tension when you simply introduce a third character, usually an observer, into some momentous interaction between two people. It makes a huge impact in how that dynamic works - how it does that depends on the scene, but there's almost endless possibilities there. The other part is that it's just someone who is more or less witnessing something he doesn't want to witness - it's brilliant how Ford plays with that, because in this case the character clearly knows what he's not actually seeing, and we're seeing what he knows.)

I think it's a pendulum swing thing - it's not a totally unexamined goodies vs baddies western, but I think in ppl's eagerness to point this out its supposed sophistication has been a bit overstated, both within Ford's work and the genre in general.

One thing is that Scar being a pretty unambigiously villainous presence kinda pushes it into Heart Of Darkness territory; some of Edward's behaviour is undoubtedly disturbing but there's an implication that this is also the effects of witnessing the atrocities commited by natives rendering him hateful and psychotic. There are other aspects that complicate this, yes, but I think it's still there.

One thing about classic westerns is very few of the highly regarded ones actually portray native americans as the unambigious baddies that popular imagination thinks the genre treated them as - Stagecoach (otherwise a v interesting and enjoyable film!) pretty much does, but mostly it seems the territory of Poverty Row westerns more than of the acclaimed stuff. A much more popular framing I think is the mealy mouthed "naive tribes misled by evil white guys" bit.

Ford can have such a great sense of poetry in composing a scene, especially when it comes to blocking his actors

I agree with this. This is what elevates the scenes of mundane domestic business and light romantic comedy. There is always a lot going on in terms of choreography , almost reminds me of musicals like Meet Me in St Louis.

some of Edward's behaviour is undoubtedly disturbing but there's an implication that this is also the effects of witnessing the atrocities commited by natives rendering him hateful and psychotic. There are other aspects that complicate this, yes, but I think it's still there

I don't think Edwards is really transformed by the atrocities of the first act. It catalyzed or prompted him on his search, but I don't think it made any dramatic changes in his worldview. When he first appears, we find out he's a former Confederate soldier that still remains loyal even though the Civil War has been over for years. (Complicating matters is how shady his recent past turned out to be - it's likely those warrants for arrest were indeed for Edwards.) And his hateful relationship with Native Americans plays out like something that's been developed over a lifetime of experience, which is probably the most frightening aspect about him. In the days after 9/11, back before I really got into this film, this guy who was like an uncle to me was telling us how much it disturbed him that the terrorists could live like Americans - learning and becoming very familiar with the people and the culture as they immersed themselves here over an extended amount of time - and apparently not develop any doubts or any hesitations about doing what they did that day. Basically, he got the sense that any understanding of different people or a different culture failed to produce any empathy, and that they were warped by prejudices so deep, any knowledge of familiarity gained merely facilitated a horrendous deed in more convincing fashion. That's pretty much a description of Edwards, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it flips around Wayne's character, Captain York, in Ford's 1948 film Fort Apache.

re: how very few of the highly regarded Westerns actually portray Native Americans as unambiguously evil, that's no accident - most film critics who first championed what are now considered masterpieces (in France, later here in the States) were a bit more progressive minded in that regard. By contrast, it wasn't unusual to see them criticize lesser films for their more xenophobic views. It extends beyond Westerns as well - even The Birth of a Nation's historical importance didn't keep critics (at least the important ones) of the latter half of the 20th century from lamenting its politics.

*or familiarity gained

thanks all for discussing! i mostly feel like i don't have the cinematic or sociopolitical context to fully understand/appreciate the movie. i'm reasonably well-versed in movies of the '50s and later westerns but this first big run of westerns from the '40s/'50s is a big blind spot for me.

n/a, if you haven't yet, watch Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

Good posts, birdistheword.

Thanks Alfred!

Ford made at least four more complex westerns

Welles made at least four more formally dazzling train sets than Kane, also, but what're ya gonna do?

‘my darling clementine’ is also great. very moody and low-key

fort apache and wagon master are the ford westerns i liked the most on my recent run through them

Ford movies I def rate above The Searchers:

7 Women
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
My Darling Clementine
How Green Was My Valley
The Grapes of Wrath

He's still among my bigger blind spots tho tbqh

same

Great posts here! All are making me want to rewatch “The Searchers” for the umpteenth time.
I’m in the “It’s great yet very flawed camp” and will ride (sorry) for “…Clementine” as my favorite of his Westerns.

That all being said, I think The Searchers is pretty underrated by American cinephiles at this point

Eric, dear, this is Alfred.

It won't play!

They’re screening a 70mm print of this in Portland in late June. Thinking about attending

I think it's important to mention Buddy Holly at least once in this thread.

That’ll be the day, pilgrim

here is lindsay anderson's sourpuss review: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/lindsay-anderson-reviews-searchers-1956

tl;dr it's no my darling clementine!!

lol

Missed the 70mm version at MoMI, but did see the 4K Restoration at the Film Forum.

Racking my brain to remember which interesting actress I just read was an extra in this film, possibly her first screen appearance. The imdb full cast listing does not turn up the answer... ?

Really?

Truth be told, the 70mm looked simply okay. Not bad, but surprisingly inferior to the vintage 35mm print I saw years before. From what I can tell from Ford experts, it's not surprising due to a few reasons, the biggest being that it's a digital restoration with a digital output printed on film, so it's not going to have that "magic" of a vintage photochemical print from relatively still-fresh film elements.

It's even possible the DCP looked much better. To put it in perspective, you know how Memoria had the much-hyped 35mm prints traveling around the country? I saw that, but also the DCP twice beforehand, and I thought the 35mm print was surprisingly and substantially inferior, even though the movie was indeed shot in 35mm film. Tremendous loss of detail, maybe even a little bit of the dynamic range from the looks of it.

Yeah, I was trying to read what they said about the comparison on the link you provided upthread.

So this is maybe the fourth time I’ve seen it, and it’s really staying with me, probably partly from seeing it on a big screen and being about to see in more detail like how John Wayne’s eyes slit up when he is angry, or watching various reveals like John Wayne emerging from the darkness behind Ward Bond in the beginning or the first shot of Natalie Wood. I will refrain a bit from scrolling upthread to read your long posts until I process a bit more.

Racking my brain to remember which interesting actress I just read was an extra in this film, possibly her first screen appearance. The imdb full cast listing does not turn up the answer... ?

Other family connections: Patrick Wayne playing the young Yankee cavalry officer, Olive Carey playing Harry Carey, Jr’s mother.

And Patrick Ford some kind of associate producer.

Henry Brandon a bit scary in this but not nearly as scary as he was as Silas Barnaby in both Babes in Toyland/March of the Wooden Soldiers and Our Gang Follies 1938.

Other notable fact about him s that his partner left him for several months to be Judy Garland's husband for a few months before returning again.

Guess his name Cicatriz/Scar is scary enough.

It wasn't Lana Wood I was thinking of, no. I want to say it was an Italian-born actress, though why they were starting out in a Hollywood film I don't know. Could be mixing up two different stories I read.

Okay, maybe he is a bit scary when he first appears blowing the shofar.(xp to self)

Watching a making-of doc called The Turning of the Earth and keep seeing C.V. Whitney written on the slate which stands for Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney - now there's a Yale name for you - who was the producer.

Whitney was also a major investor in Technicolor and financier for Gone With the Wind

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/review-martin-scorsese-searchers-426059/

donut
"Oh donuts! Thank you, sister. I'm sure fond of them donuts"

Yeah, I was trying to read what they said about the comparison on the link you provided upthread.

I think the color fading they mentioned was the biggest factor. You can restore it, but it's never going to look exactly as it did before. I was told Vertigo (also VistaVision) is best seen in a vintage IB Tech print because it'll do a much better job of capturing and retaining the original color, something the new 70mm prints can never hope to match. I imagine it's the same with The Searchers.

Having said that, the new restoration still looks pretty good given the circumstances and I'll be more than happy to have it on a UHD.

Patrick Wayne was fifteen at the time!

A year younger than Natalie Wood.

Have you read the Glenn Frankel book?

I still await the moment I'll love this film.

Mebbe watch it a few more times.

You seem to eventually have come around on George Harrison guitar solos iirc

Solos are only a few seconds long.

Lol

I knew nothing about Ken Curtis and always find him weird in this: "I'll thank you to unhand my fiancée!" Finally looked him up. He was John Ford's son-in-law and is in some of his other films but was best known for playing Festus on Gunsmoke, which I never really watched although my parents did, so I still retain that kid-listening-to-the-television-from-a different-part-of-the-house memory of the announcer drawing out the word "Gunsmoke!" at the beginning. Also he was in the Sons of the Pioneers for a few years.

Do you like The Wild Bunch, Alfred?

Ken Curtis was married to Ford’s daughter Barbara.

I do. xpost

Read the Searchers section of Searching for John Ford. Excellent, particularly Henry Brandon.

Thanks for the rec.

You're welcome! Re: Glenn Frankel, do you mean the one titled The Searchers (about the actual story that was more or less the film's inspiration)? Not yet, but I heard it's supposed to be really good. What did you think of it?

FWIW, it's possible this interview with Frankel is where I first heard about it.

I haven’t read the book properly yet but seems good from the dipping in I have done.

Maybe I should also dig into the the Scott Eyman John Wayne bio.

Anyway it didn’t get held over so really glad I went earlier this week

And persevered into city despite a bunch of trains being stopped as discussed on another thread

Apparently due to the death of a subway surfer!

Holy crap! Was this the G? Would've been the boy who died near 4th Avenue 9th-Street station. Pretty sad and crazy how that trend ever came to be and how it's still happening.

There was an incident in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. This was in Queens, the Kew Gardens station.

Not sure exactly what happened tbh

Kew Gardens thing was actually a week ago.

is New York City dead?

Having a horrible compulsion to say something about a subway surfer now having to “wander forever between the winds.”

There's a wicked curve on the 7 between Queensboro Plaza and 33rd, which a rider can easily feel while INSIDE the train, and one time (a year or two ago) I was walking by that area and saw a bunch of riders on the train, about two stops away from that curve. I think at least one person by me called 911, but it was really too late and you just had to hope for the best. Unfortunately a subway surfer death was reported soon after and I'm pretty sure it was one of those kids. So sad and incredibly insane, the risk is even abstract - when something is so blatantly against common sense, what else can you say to someone who keeps on doing it?

Anyway, glad you made it to the movie. One of my biggest grudges against the MTA was making me miss Orson Welles's The Deep at MoMA. It's "unfinished" but apparently it looks very close to finished and someone I know who was there said it was pretty great. It was an extremely rare screening to celebrate his centennial so who knows when I'll get another chance?

(FWIW, no death was involved, it was just that the MTA closed and re-routed a lot of things for construction and the resulting delay wound up being ridiculous.)

(For construction? At that time of day?)

fun fact from John Wayne bio:

The Searchers was previewed in San Francisco on December 3, 1955, on a double bill with Rebel Without a Cause (there were giants in those days . . . ).

Eyman, Scott. John Wayne: The Life and Legend (p. 274). Simon & Schuster

J. Hoberman review of the Glenn Frankel book; https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/books/review/the-searchers-by-glenn-frankel.html

I did read and enjoy a book about the true events that the film is ultimately based on entitled Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne, although some people prefer The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hamalainen.

This paper looks pretty good: PARANOID PROJECTIONS: SELF AND SOCIETY IN THE SEARCHERS AND PSYCHO, by David Boyd

Weekend-long track maintenance, "construction" was a poor choice of words.

4K/Remastered Blu coming in December:

The Warner Archive Collection proudly announces its first 4K UHD release -
John Ford’s “THE SEARCHERS”
(Newly Remastered and Restored from the Original VistaVision Negative)

Available as a 4K UHD/Blu-ray Combo and as a remastered Blu-ray disc December 17th from the Warner Archive Collection

Perhaps the greatest collaboration between the legendary director John Ford and his famed leading man John Wayne, the 1956 Warner Bros. classic The Searchers will be arriving on 4K UHD Blu-ray disc, meticulously restored and newly remastered from its original VistaVision camera negative.

The film will be available as either a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc combo pack, including a newly remastered Blu-ray disc, or as a stand-alone Blu-ray disc. SRP for the 4K/Blu-ray combo pack will be $29.99. with sleeve packaging, and the remastered Blu-ray will have an SRP of $21.99. Both iterations will contain over an hour of special features in HD on the Blu-ray disc, with the feature itself having an archival commentary from the late Peter Bogdanovich.
The Searchers will release on December 17th, and is available for pre-order at leading online media retailers.

The new 4K UHD Blu-ray presentation of the feature will be available with Dolby Vision and HDR10. Both the 4K and Blu-ray discs will contain the feature’s original monaural audio track which was restored from the best available source materials to provide a clean and dynamic audio presentation.

The film underwent an extensive restoration earlier this year, at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging and Warner Bros. Archival Mastering (for audio). The restoration was undertaken in collaboration with The Film Foundation, and made its public premiere earlier this year at the TCM Film Festival.

Compression and authoring for Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray were performed by Fidelity in Motion. To maintain the highest possible image and sound quality for home viewing, these optimized encodes fully utilize the available bandwidth and disc space on the BD100 and BD50 formats.

The Searchers was filmed using the 8-perf 35mm VistaVision process, where the negative went through the camera horizontally with double the frame size of traditional 35mm film, thus yielding incredible clarity with greater depth of field. The original camera negative along with yellow separation protection masters were used for this new presentation, to fully restore the film’s original color palette capturing the masterful cinematography of Winton C. Hoch, a frequent Ford collaborator. The result is a revelatory presentation which is a testament to the artistry that went into creating this beloved motion picture.
Special Features on the 4K UHD disc and the Blu-ray disc:

• Archival Commentary by Director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?) on both the 4K and Blu-ray discs.

On the Blu-ray disc:
• Original Theatrical trailer (HD)
• 1996 Introduction to the feature by Patrick Wayne (HD)
• The Searchers: An Appreciation (HD)
• A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne and The Searchers (HD)
• Newsreel coverage of the film’s world premiere (HD)
• Outtakes (HD)
• Behind the Cameras (segments from the 1956 Warner Bros. Presents TV series): (HD)
o Meet Jeffrey Hunter
o Monument Valley
o Meet Natalie Wood
o Setting Up Production

Running time: 119 Minutes-COLOR-NOT RATED-DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
Aspect ratio 16x9 1.85:1
Subtitles: English SDH
For the 4k UHD Blu-ray: Dolby Vision, HDR10, BD100
For the Blu-ray: BD50
4K UHD Blu-ray/Blu-ray 2-Disc combo-$29.99 SRP
Blu-ray-$21.99
Street date-December 17, 2024

if this is the same 4k resto that was playing in theatres I seem to remember there was some commentary about the addition of sound effects, which the restorers assumed were mistakenly left out originally. anyway, still a masterpiece but there are at least ten better ford films.

the addition of sound effects

Am imagining dishes breaking, train whistles, boi-oi-oing boner sounds.

• Alternative 'Slide Whistle' audio track available on both the 4k and Blu-ray Discs..

boi-oi-oing boner sounds.

The "Let's go home Debbie" scene got way more awkward...

The new 70mm prints struck from the 6K restoration are stunning

Still haven't seen that, keep missing.

Saw this at the cinema last night. It looked jaw-dropping in places, of course, and Wayne's depth grows on me with each viewing. His reactions to the wreck of the house and whatever horrors have been visited on Lucy are devastating. But whether I was just in the wrong mood or something, the goofy humour took me out of it. I sort of love Mose, but a little Mose sure goes a long way.

I know I'm gonna get pushback for this but Ford has the corniest sense of humour out of all the big classic hollywood guys.

I doubt you will. What you wrote is description, not criticism.

For me it's both.

Both what?

His humor so often has to do with humiliation, which I find difficult to take. Someone always gets spanked, or thrown in the mud, or has their clothes ruined. I also saw The Searchers in a cinema recently and recoiled at the "humor" in it.

I'm assuming alfred meant description & criticism?

I'd forgotten how much humour is threaded through this in general, and how clumsy it is in place. For instance, Wayne's 'that'll be the day' line, by its fifth iteration, slips from wry and cynical to something else, which detracts from its role of building character.

Yeah.

icymi Pippa Scott, who played the elder abducted sister Lucy, passed away in May at age 90. The Searchers was her film debut.

As this thread records, I'll always like five more Fords over The Searchers.

I do mean it as criticism, though I'm sure I love lots of corny comedy. Ford just seems leaden with it, tho tbf I haven't seen any of his actual comedies.

His humor so often has to do with humiliation

From the stories I heard, Ford kinda had a thing for humiliating people on the set, so this tracks.

That said, the drama and the cringe go hand in hand with me in the film, so even when it gets silly it never feels atonal. It's not my favourite Ford Western by any stretch--not when The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence exists--but I like it a lot.

I guess what I'm saying, and it feels odd saying it, is that a filmmaker who didn't get off on humiliation would've made a weaker film.