The Search Party

By Robert Stone

Published: November 11, 2007

''The Searchers'' was shot in 1955, a strange year in the movies, and perhaps only
someone with John Ford's reputation could have made it. The cold war was thriving and
the blacklist survived, but censorship was giving way, at least for directors with prestige.

The movie's psychological insights and the strangeness of its main character mainly
escaped notice, probably because he was played by John Wayne, and maybe to audiences
of the time it looked like regulation cowboys and Indians, although that's hard to believe
now.

The film begins, as it will end, with the opening of a ranch-house door beyond which lies
a Texas desert so fearsome that it sinks the heart. It's really Monument Valley, of course,
a setting whose symbolic resources Ford never exhausted. So brutal and unforgiving
does it appear in ''The Searchers'' that your first thought might well be, Who in God's
name would live in such a place? It's a crazed landscape of immense distances and
asymmetrical peaks whose effect is the opposite to that which the Gothic cathedrals
attempted. They ascend to a void as merciless as the earth beneath them. In color they
terrify.

Ethan Edwards enters his brother's house in the uniform of a Confederate cavalryman,
three years after the surrender. It seems he has been at some kind of postwar guerrilla
banditry we don't want to know about. He sees Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a part-
Indian foundling, joining everyone at supper, and it's plain he doesn't like it much. ''A
fella could mistake you for a half-breed,'' he says. This was the kind of line Hollywood
usually assigned to a doomed villain.

After Wayne leaves with the Texas Rangers, the family is surrounded under a blood red
sky by Comanches. They kill everyone on the ranch except one, a little girl of about 10
called Debbie. Ethan and Martin commence a five-year search, an attempt to return
Debbie to her people. But it becomes plain that the most urgent threat to Debbie's
survival is not ''the savages'' who have taken her in but Ethan, her supposed rescuer, who
seems more and more unclear about whether he is a man saving a child or the wrath of
some granite-hearted god out to punish racial mixing. Racism and the power to
transcend it is the abiding theme of the film, invoking a primal element in the American
story, the captivity narrative. ''The Searchers'' surprises again and again in its subtlety,
brutality and sheer beauty.