Searchers, The (4K UHD Review)

• Reviewed by: Bill Hunt
• Review Date: Dec 30, 2024
• Format: 4K Ultra HD
• 

Director

John Ford

Release Date(s)

1956 (December 17, 2024)

Studio(s)

C.V. Whitney Pictures/Warner Bros. (The Warner Archive Collection/Studio Distribution Services)

• Film/Program Grade: A+
• Video Grade: A+
• Audio Grade: A
• Extras Grade: B

Review

The year is 1868, and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) has finally returned home after serving as a sergeant in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Home in this case is the hardscrabble Texas ranch his brother Aaron and sister-in-law Martha (Walter Coy and Dorothy Jordan) run with their three children—Lucy, Ben, and Debbie. It’s also the home of young Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a part-Comanche orphan—now a teenager—who Ethan found years earlier and who the Edwards family adopted after his parents were killed in a Comanche raid.

But the day after Ethan’s return, a party of Texas Rangers led by his old friend and captain, the Reverend Samuel Clayton (Ward Bond), shows up unexpectedly to deputize the Edwards men. It seems that someone has driven off a neighbor’s cattle, so the local Rangers are mounting an armed force to investigate. Ethan and Martin quickly join them, leaving Aaron to defend his home and family just in case. But what the party soon discovers is that the cattle were driven off and killed as a diversion, so that a Comanche raiding party can attack homesteads in the area instead.

Ethan and Martin return home to find the Edwards farm burning, and Aaron, Martha, and Ben murdered. Worse still, Lucy and Debbie have been taken by the Comanche. So with rage in his heart and revenge on his mind, Ethan sets out with Martin, Clayton, and some of the neighbor men—all deputized as Rangers—to track the Comanche and rescue Lucy and Debbie. But their search will not be easy, as this particular band of Comanche are led by a vengeance-hardened chief named Scar (Henry Brandon). And their trail will cover many years and miles, from Texas north to Montana, south to Mexico and back again, all with no guarantee that the girls remain alive.

Directed by the legendary John Ford, it’s certainly fair to argue that The Searchers is not only the best Western film of the classic Hollywood era, it’s also Ford’s most essential work and it offers one of the finest performances of John Wayne’s career. This film is as influential as any in cinema history. David Lean studied it closely before leading his production crew into the Jordanian desert to shoot Lawrence of Arabia. Akira Kurosawa, a life-long student of Ford’s work, was certainly inspired by it, as was Sergio Leone and Ford’s peers, among them Welles, Bergman, Hitchcock, Capra, and Howard Hawks. Consider too the number of New Hollywood directors who first saw The Searchers as teenagers, including Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, many of whom speak of that experience the way Generation X talks about Star Wars (1977). And when you finally see The Searchers today in all of its 4K-restored glory, it’s easy to understand why the film made such an impression.

Paramount’s VistaVision format was one of the greatest innovations in film history prior to IMAX, with a frame that was double the size of a regular 35 mm image. This not only resulted in exceptional clarity and a very fine photochemical grain structure for exhibition prints, but it offered extraordinary depth of field. Ford used these attributes to full advantage in capturing the sweeping vistas and towering skies of his Monument Valley locations (plus Alberta, Utah, Colorado, etc), not to mention interior scenes (shot on a soundstage) in which long takes and medium shots are employed to enhance both the naturalism of the characters’ actions and every detail of the actors’ performances. And Technicolor made sure that the lush and varied color palette Ford captured in-camera was perfectly preserved in theaters.

But here’s the thing: You really need to see The Searchers multiple times to fully appreciate it. This I think is why newcomers—particularly those who’ve only seen it on DVD or Blu-ray—are sometimes perplexed as to why others speak of the film so highly. On the small screen, it’s easy to miss little but important details, like the remarkable subtlety in Wayne’s performance or the sheer economy of Ford’s direction—the way he communicates an enormous amount of information without dialogue. Just look at the scene in which the Edwards family emerges from their farmhouse to greet Ethan’s arrival in the film’s opening, with each character introduced visually to take their place in the frame. Look too at the long ‘oner’ as Clayton’s Rangers are welcomed into the Edwards home, and fully a dozen characters move around to interact with one other in every part of the frame. Even if you were fortunate enough to experience The Searchers on the big screen for the first time, it’s so easy to get lost in its grandeur that you miss the significance of these smaller moments.

It’s also true that The Searchers is a product of its time, and must be viewed as such. In 1956, this meant that the Hays Code restricted the kind of violence that could be depicted on screen. You’ll see guns being shot, and people falling to the ground, but no flowing blood. And while Ford was good about casting actual Native Americans—in this case Navajo—to play his Comanche characters, the film’s chief villain is still undeniably a white actor in red face (though it should be noted that Brandon made quite a career of playing “ethnic” roles on film). What’s more, despite being shot mostly on location, The Searchers still has a classic Hollywood artifice. If you’ve ever known anyone who’s spent a lifetime working the land in a harsh climate—or seen Old West photos, or the work of the great WPA photographers Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange—you’ll know that it takes a genuine toll on people. They age faster, their hands are calloused, their skin grows wrinkled. Yet here’s Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, and Vera Miles looking as pretty as you’ve ever seen them.

But there’s a hardness here that’s unusual for a Hollywood film. The script by Frank S. Nugent is based on a 1954 Saturday Evening Post serial called The Avenging Texans by Alan Le May, who published its story as a novel, The Searchers, that same year. It’s based in part on actual stories of violence between white settlers and a real incident involving the U.S. Cavalry slaughter of a village of Comanche women and children—a scene depicted in the film in Marty’s letter to Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles). But Ford’s telling in no way romanticizes things. The story here is brutal, its leading man is brutal, and this is a genuinely honest examination of the dark side of the American Old West mythos… of its violence and racism. There’s both honor and ugliness here, darkness and innocence. Ethan isn’t a hero, but you can understand him and you may even come to love him in the end. Scar and Ethan are in many ways two sides of the same coin. And the contrast between Wayne’s character and young Martin, who is in many ways the conscience of this film, is part of what makes The Searchers so compelling. (In fact, there are clues throughout the film that lend credence to a popular fan theory that the pair may in fact be related by more than just happenstance.)

And for knowledgable cinephiles, the pleasures here are many. Ford punctuates long periods of tension building with moments of humor that can seem unexpected yet still delight, such as Charlie McCorry’s clumsy fistfight with Martin over Laurie’s hand in marriage, in which biting, kicking, sucker punches, and brief pauses to save an innocent fiddle are not out of place. Ward Bond, a popular Ford company player, is terrific here, as are John Qualen and Harry Carey Jr. (as Lars and Brad Jorgensen) and Hank Worden (as the slow-witted but lovable Mose Harper). You may be surprised to learn that the character of Debbie is played at two ages by real-life sisters Natalie and Lana Wood. And Ken Curtis (who plays McCorry) was in real life not only an actor (who later starred as Festus Haggen on TV’s Gunsmoke in the 1960s), but also the singer for the Sons of the Pioneers, the famed Western group that counted Roy Rogers as one of its first members. (The band actually sings the theme song here and appears in the wedding party scene.)

The Searchers was shot on 35mm photochemical film in 8-perf VistaVision format by cinematographer Winton C. Hoch (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, Robinson Crusoe on Mars) using Mitchell VistaVision cameras and it was released theatrically at the 1.85:1 flat aspect ratio. Warner Motion Picture Imaging has scanned the original VistaVision camera negative in 13K (technically, each half of the negative was scanned in 6.5K and it was stitched together digitally) with all restoration work and grading completed in 6.5K by colorist Jan Yarbrough and approved by the Film Foundation. A new filmed out 65mm negative was created for preservation purposes. The digital presentation was also graded for high dynamic range on Ultra HD, available here in both Dolby Vision and HDR10, and it’s been encoded for a 100 GB disc to ensure the highest possible quality by the fine team at Fidelity in Motion, with data rates ranging from 70 to 100 Mbps.

Put simply, the resulting 4K image is as gorgeous as any I’ve seen on this format to date for a classic film. The resolution here is truly remarkable, approaching what you’d expect from a modern IMAX presentation. Texturing and fine detailing are exquisite, with a striking dimensionality that results from the VistaVision format’s unique depth of field. Photochemical grain is present and natural at all times, but also incredibly subtle. And the wide gamut of HDR lends depth and detail to truly black shadows and naturally bold highlights, even as it expands the film’s stunningly broad and nuanced color palette. Seemingly thousands of different shades of tan, brown, orange, ochre, and gold are apparent in the desert sands and rocky peaks of Monument Valley, not to mention the blue skies, fiery sunsets, skin tones, and fabrics. This is a jaw-dropping image that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen. And it’s a truly massive improvement over Warner’s previous Blu-ray release, which—though fine for its day—is now almost unwatchable by comparison.

The film’s original English mono audio mix has been remastered by Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services as well (with Doug Mountain as project lead and assistance from Matt Vowles). It’s been encoded in 2.0 mono in DTS-HD Master Audio format. The lossless mix too is terrific, clean and well balanced, with pleasingly full tonality and a medium wide soundstage up front. The track is free from hiss and other age-related defects. Dialogue is clear at all times, sound effects are well staged, and the Max Steiner score has never sounded better. Optional English SDH subtitles are available.

The new Warner Archive Collection release is a 2-disc set that includes the remastered film in both 4K on UHD and also 1080p HD on Blu-ray (to make that fully clear, this is 100% a new remastered BD disc). Each includes the following bonus feature, originally produced for the film’s early 2006 50th Anniversary DVD release:

• Archival Audio Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich

The commentary is a good listen. Bogdanovich began his cinema career as a student and historian of Ford’s work (as well as that of Welles, Hitchcock, and Hawks) but later became a trusted friend, so he’s got plenty of interesting stories and anecdotes about the director to share. To this, the Blu-ray adds the following additional legacy content:

• Original Theatrical Trailer (Upsampled SD – 2:46)
• 1996 Introduction by Patrick Wayne (Upsampled SD – 1:53)
• The Searchers: An Appreciation (Upsampled SD – 31:02)
• A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne and The Searchers (Upsampled SD – 33:12)
• The Searchers World Premiere in Chicago Newsreel (Upsampled SD – :44)
• Outtakes (Upsampled SD – 11:42)
• Behind the Cameras (Warner Brothers Presents)
  • Meet Jeffrey Hunter (Upsampled SD – 3:57)
  • Meet Monument Valley (Upsampled SD – 5:57)
  • Meet Natalie Wood (Upsampled SD – 6:17)
  • Setting Up Production (Upsampled SD – 6:06)

Some of these features appeared on the original 1999 DVD release, while others were created for the 2006 DVD. (All appeared on the late 2006 Blu-ray as well, and they’ve all been upsampled from SD to HD here.) They begin with An Appreciation, produced by Sparkhill, which features Hanson, Scorsese, and Milius sharing their first experiences of seeing the film and their admiration for Ford’s work as a whole. A series of outtakes is also included—most of them from the wedding fight scene—as well as a set of Warner Brothers Presents TV segments originally shown on ABC in 1955 to promote the film. (Gig Young: “I hope you enjoyed our picture!”) But the highlight of these features surely remains Nick Redman’s Turning of the Earth, a modest but great production documentary that includes additional outtake footage, further comments by Milius, and anecdotes by actors Pippa Scott, Harry Carry Jr., and others. There’s a modesty to these extras, an early DVD-era raw quality if you will, yet they’re perfect and exactly what this film needs.

Examined from almost any angle, The Searchers is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking and a genuine landmark of the Hollywood cinema. Speaking personally, it’s not my favorite of John Ford’s films—that would be the poetic simplicity his B&W classic My Darling Clementine (1946)—but the director’s less-is-more approach is on full display here in a work that both refined and cemented the grammar of the Western genre. Trust me when I say that its final shot is as perfect a moment as any you’ll see on film. And I’m pleased to report that Warner’s 4K restoration is a marvel… and that Warner Archive’s first ever Ultra HD release is arguably the Disc of the Year. It belongs in the collection of any self-respecting cinephile and is absolutely not to be missed.

Here’s to many more Warner Archive 4K releases to come!

- Bill Hunt

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