The Searchers Review

Ford shoots Monument Valley in VistaVision as if it were weather rather than scenery, and Winton Hoch's colour holds those buttes in a hard clean light that makes every interior feel like shelter under siege. The famous doorway framing that opens and closes the film is not a flourish, it is the whole argument, a man who protects the home he can never be inside. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards as a bigot without softening him, and the performance is the best of his career precisely because Ford refuses to redeem it on schedule.

The five year structure is unusual and daring, seasons passing in cuts, and it gives the obsession time to curdle. Jeffrey Hunter is adequate rather than good. The real damage is the comic subplot with the wedding and the mismatched courtship, broad slapstick dropped into a film about attempted murder, and it stops the picture cold every time it returns. Take the comedy out and this is close to perfect. Left in, it is still the American western that most other westerns are answering.