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

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.