Search - The Searchers on DVD

Content Advisory: Mild Violence, Western Violence Movie Release: 1956 DVD Release: 10/29/1997 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV,Pan and Scan Audio Tracks: English, French, Spanish Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 59 mins Studio: Warner Home Video Members Wishing: 8 Genres: Western, Epic Western, Revisionist Western See Also: The Searchers [50th Anniversary Special Edition], The Searchers [Ultimate Collector's Edition], The Searchers [HD DVD], The Searchers [Blu-ray], The Searchers

If John Ford is the greatest Western director, The Searchers is arguably his greatest film, at once a grand outdoor spectacle like such Ford classics as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) and a film about one man's troubling moral codes, a big-screen adventure of the 1950s that anticipated the complex themes and characters that would dominate the 1970s. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to his brother Aaron's frontier cabin three years after the end of the Civil War. Ethan still has his rebel uniform and weapons, a large stash of Yankee gold, and no explanations as to where he's been since Lee's surrender. A loner not comfortable in the bosom of his family, Ethan also harbors a bitter hatred of Indians (though he knows their lore and language well) and trusts no one but himself. Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Aaron's adopted son, join a makeshift band of Texas Rangers fending off an assault by renegade Comanches. Before they can run off the Indians, several homes are attacked, and Ethan returns to discover his brother and sister-in-law dead and their two daughters kidnapped. While they soon learn that one of the girls is dead, the other, Debbie, is still alive, and with obsessive determination, Ethan and Martin spend the next five years in a relentless search for Debbie -- and for Scar (Henry Brandon), the fearsome Comanche chief who abducted her. But while Martin wants to save his sister and bring her home, Ethan seems primarily motivated by his hatred of the Comanches; it's hard to say if he wants to rescue Debbie or murder the girl who has lived with Indians too long to be considered "white." John Wayne gives perhaps his finest performance in a role that predated screen antiheroes of the 1970s; by the film's conclusion, his single-minded obsession seems less like heroism and more like madness. Wayne bravely refuses to soft-pedal Ethan's ugly side, and the result is a remarkable portrait of a man incapable of answering to anyone but himself, who ultimately has more in common with his despised Indians than with his more "civilized" brethren. Natalie Wood is striking in her brief role as the 16-year-old Debbie, lost between two worlds, and Winton C. Hoch's Technicolor photography captures Monument Valley's savage beauty with subtle grace. The Searchers paved the way for such revisionist Westerns as The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and its influence on movies from Taxi Driver (1976) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Wars (1977) testifies to its lasting importance. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

John Wayne - Ethan Edwards
Jeffrey Hunter - Martin Pawley
Vera Miles - Laurie Jorgensen
Ward Bond - Capt. Reverend Clayton
Natalie Wood - Debbie Edwards, older

This acknowledged classic of American cinema has been given first-rate treatment on this DVD, which is pretty much a straight conversion of the early '90s laserdisc. Mastered from the restored edition of the movie, the digital disc is a significant improvement over the laser, with none of the intermittent anomalies that afflicted the laserdisc playback. With a complete stable image, this disc is a delight to watch, even for those familiar with the 12-inch disc. Warner Bros. obviously put a lot of effort into this disc, not surprisingly, since the studio also financed the restoration of the movie. It's been given 44 chapter breaks, plus a trailer and multiple supplements derived from the Warner Bros. Presents television series. It isn't as ambitious as the treatment that Giant would receive for its 2003 Special Edition DVD release, but no one knew how viable the format was going to be in 1997 when this release was prepared. The image clarity on the movie is amazingly good, which, strangely enough, isn't always an advantage -- the restoration of the film and the sharpness of the transfer only bring out the sharp contrast between the actual exterior shots and the studio shots in the same scenes (and even between two adjoining shots of the same sequence: in the fight scene at the wedding, in which clouds of dust vanish and then reappear). The rough, dusty images from Monument Valley suddenly give way to shots that are so clean, sterile, and artificial that they look like they were made in Macy's window. There are also hints of some digital artifacts here and there (and they might be more evident on a big-screen monitor), as when the camera pans quickly past a stream following Jeffrey Hunter's running figure, but none of those instances are remotely as intrusive or annoying as the flaws that used to crop up on laser playback or on some early DVD releases. Amid all of that, the sound is clean and well balanced, less "hot" than some recent releases, but smooth and sharp. The movie starts up automatically on playback, and the menu appears at the end. It is easy to maneuver around, and the extras are the same as on the laserdisc: the original trailer plus two segments from the 1956 television series Warner Bros. Presents. The latter include some silly time-filler (and a patronizing profile of the Navajo) from Gig Young and a not very informative interview with Natalie Wood. The behind-the-scenes shots of the Ford company at work, however, are invaluable. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide