The Searchers
Directed by John Ford. US. 1956. NR. 119 min.
Sponsored by Halladay Florist
- Sun, Sep 6, 2:00 pm
Considered by many to be (along with the seminal Stagecoach) the greatest of all the many great westerns created by John Ford, The Searchers is an epic saga of a fanatical hero (played, of course, by John Wayne) and his relentless search for his niece (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped by the renegade Indians that had slaughtered her family. Filled with strong, rugged and often poetic images of the untamed West (and filmed largely in Ford’s favorite location, the Monument Valley of the Painted Desert), this is a film that captures the beauty and the savagery of that time and place. As the CineBooks Movie Guide has stated, “All in all, this is about as good as Hollywood filmmaking gets. A deeply emotional experience that is also a grand entertainment.” (NOTE: John Wayne thought that this was his greatest screen role, and liked the fanatical main character, Ethan Edwards, so much that he named his third child John Ethan Wayne.)