Seek Out The Searchers

By Max Scheinin.

Look at the picture planted next to these words. It's a portrait of a grinning John Wayne, his chin covered in bristles, his eyes a-gleamin', ready to take to the open range. What is it you'd imagine from the film that this box seems to claim The Searchers to be? Singing cowboys, shrieking Indians, buffalo roaming across the desert.

Well, forget everything you think you know about The Searchers, for this is John Ford's masterpiece, and it can't be reduced to cliches. In fact, it can't be reduced to anything less then what it is -- a dark, uncompromising story of frontiersmen acting out in blind hatred, with Wayne playing the inherently flawed Ethan Edwards, a man torn away from his family by recklessness, and his deeply embedded fear of all that is different from himself. The Searchers is great entertainment, certainly, but it shouldn't be forgotten that at it's core, it's a tale of a human soul and all its contradictory impulses. There is, in the end, only one searcher -- Edwards. If he is referred to in plural, it's because he doesn't know what he's going to do with what he finds -- his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood) stolen by Indians as an infant. As years pass and he continues his odyssey, he finds himself torn between saving her or killing her, and (it is implied) this inability of his to put an end to her internal conflictions is what has torn his family apart.

'Nuff said about the man at the heart of the film. What makes The Searchers a masterpiece -- why did it place number five in the most recent Sight & Sound critics' poll of The Greatest Films of All Time (following on the heels of such stiff competition as Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story and Vertigo)? Quite simply -- it is an American epic about the loss of innocence, the fight for freedom, and the eternal struggles faced by the human soul. Director John Ford and Wayne made many other great films together -- notably Stagecoach in 1939 -- but never before had they acknowledged the racism inherent and the sadness deeply existent in the Western. At the end of The Searchers, Wayne strides forwards and looks out the door of a cabin, drawn back to the open range that is his home and his limitation. It's a heart-breaking image, and one that conjures up the feeling of whistfullness at the heart of all the best Westerns (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Rio Bravo, Stagecoach, The Wild Bunch) at its most palpable. The surface of The Searchers may look dated, but a time will never come that we will (or should) be able to observe that moment and not feel deeply stirred, not feel a shiver of goose-bumps running down our spine. It makes you wonder if there's any way that one can ever reach the worlds that films aspire to bring us to. If not, no matter, for there may be no film as purely transporting as The Searchers.