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The Searchers Reviews
…like it or not, cinema history is littered with a dozen great John Wayne movies, and John Ford's The Searchers is surely up there with the very best of them...
Even with its deeply uncomfortable racial politics, The Searchers remains one of cinema’s most important Westerns—a film whose artistry and legacy endure, even as its darker themes continue to spark debate.
The Searchers isn’t just the greatest Western ever to hit screens. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made.
A visually majestic celebration of our nation’s splendor & a eulogy for the way all of our hope is flattened over time into common denominators of despair. The generations whom we believe will see the apex of our national potential never do & never will.
It is indeed great although not perfect.
It is in keeping alive this seemingly endless [quest] that Ford's genius asserts Itself. He has landscape to work with, and colored film and a Vista-Vision camera. With these he can achieve miracles and, to the picture's great advantage, he does.
The story is appealing, the action is exciting and the expanse of scenery in VistaVision and Technicolor is truly awe-inspiring.
John Ford symbolizes an age of Hollywood, the one when good health prevailed over intelligence, craftiness over sincerity. This age has gone; Elia Kazan's and Nicholas Ray's movies make more money than John Ford's, poetry triumphs over entertainment.
Ford has achieved an extraordinary effect. There is the sense of time passing, yet the picture never drags. There is continued action, yet the picture conveys in almost leisurely fashion the life of isolated families in the remote early West.
The Searchers is one of the great ones -- one of the greatest of the great pictures of the American West.
[John Ford] has taken an episodic but rather slim story and, with his well known talent for freshening up routine materials, has developed it into a sweeping sort of saga which might be labeled a Western in the grand manner.
The Searchers is full of landscapes so framed as to make one start with pleasure. But John Ford goes further. He establishes a relationship between man and landscape which is emotional as well as spatial.
[The Searchers] is undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For sheer scope, guts and beauty I can think of no picture... to compare with it. In it John Wayne delivers a performance that tops his great performance in The High and the Mighty.
The Searchers is a gripping bit of Americana that should appeal to all movie-goers.
[John Wayne's] performance lacks either complexity or consistency. Instead of complexity, we get occasional nastiness alternating with guarded but essentially genial humour. The moods of the film are equally uneven.
Natalie Wood, Olive Carey and Harry Carey, Jr., standout in important roles well handled. But it's Wayne and Hunter who rate most of the footage and character build up.
Wayne's behavior is presented as the heroic stuff out of which the West was made. In fact, the ex-soldier he portrays is a psychotic with homicidal tendencies which he is given almost almost unlimited opportunities to indulge.
That more excitement has not found its way into the film as a whole results from a prevailing haziness of narrative, character, and purpose.
The Searchers is not really a "big Western." Despite some of the finest scenic shots to be brought to the screen, it is just a "long" Western. Much too long.
The Searchers, wherein Director John Ford again visits Arizona's Monument Valley, seeks but never completely captures an epic sweep. Frank Nugent's screen play... somehow fails to be consistently interesting.