Searchers, The (DVD)

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In "The Searchers", John Wayne plays John Wayne at his very best. He's Ethan Edwards, a postwar Johnny Reb with (as usual) a vaguely ominous past. When his brother and most of his family are massacred by a band of renegade Comanches, Ethan sets off to find the young niece they captured. His sole companion for most of the trip is Martin Pawley, a half-breed youth (Jeffrey Hunter) who had been raised in his late brother's family. As the years pass, it becomes less and less certain what Ethan will do if and when he finds the girl. Martin is a somewhat dimwitted young man who must come of age in Ethan's long shadow and try to protect the girl he thinks of as his sister. Will Ethan treat her like family or like the Comanche she's been raised to be? And will Martin be able to do anything about it?

The movie is equally quintessential Wayne and quintessential John Ford. It's filled with wonderful characters who are archetypes of the Wayne-Ford vision of the American frontier. There's a combination preacher-Texas Ranger (Ward Bond), a little-educated Swedish farmer, and a worldly wise Southwest lunatic. And the whole production is gorgeously photographed in Ford's beloved Monument Valley by Winton C. Hoch in a cropped variant of the VistaVision format. Early video and 16mm pan-and-scan versions were framed too high and revealed microphones and lights in the studio-shot sequences. The standard version on this DVD release eliminates that error. The widescreen version is in the TV anamorphic 1.78:1 format. The proof of the excellence of the cinematography is that the widescreen version feels bigger than the standard version in spite of the black bars. The score by Max Steiner is effective Euro-Comanche with the expected mix of familiar "folk" tunes.