“Until the 50s, Westerns generally sought to unequivocally glorify the cowboy and the saga of the Old West. With John Ford's The Searchers we witness a dramatic departure from that tradition and a move towards the skeletal foundations of the ‘psychological' and ‘anti-Western' formulas. The Searchers recounts the five-year odyssey of two men, one motivated by love of family and the other driven by hatred of Indians, in search of a nine-year-old girl abducted by Comanches.
“Tampering with the sanctity of this distinctly American myth, Ford explores hitherto neglected tenets of pioneer identity: the implicit anarchy of individualism, the inherent violence and brutality of frontier life, the self-righteous compulsion to dominate nature and cultures which conflict with the Protestant ethic. John Wayne's Ethan Edwards is, in many respects, an aberration of the classic cowboy hero. Fraught with ambiguous motives, psychotic obsessions, and a viciously racist temperament, Edwards exists as a marginal yet essential component of his white society.
“Shot in Vista-Vision Technicolor, this cult Western forces us to critically reexamine previously unchallenged precepts which are as intricately linked to the identity of contemporary America as to the identity of its past.” --L.A.T.