The Searchers

[stroszeck]

Can anyone please fill me in on detail as to the actual issue regarding the coloring? The DVD looks absolutely stunning to me, but then again I haven't seen the movie in 3 or 4 years, when I watched it on the decent original release DVD.

[kinjitsu]

Can anyone please fill me in on detail as to the actual issue regarding the coloring? The DVD looks absolutely stunning to me, but then again I haven't seen the movie in 3 or 4 years, when I watched it on the decent original release DVD.

What David said. The color of the sky and desert are decidedly off. Although much of it looks spectacular (more information, clarity, detail), but there are some glaring inconsistencies in this transfer, especially the day for night sequences which are much too dark.

[Gregory]

I want to raise a few points about The Searchers by way of trying to explain some of the evaluations of it as a racist film (although not necessarily Metcalf's). I'm NOT attempting to offer my own analysis of it. I certainly believe that at some levels, the film can support more than one interpretation.
I believe it's difficult to say with any certainty whether Ford regarded Ethan as a dispicable racist. It is this ambiguity that make the film one of his most interesting. However, Wayne most definitely did NOT consider him such. He proclaimed his love for the character and named one of his sons after him. In McBride's Searching For John Ford, he quotes Wayne as saying, "The Indians fucked his wife [sic.]. What would you have done?" McBride argued that this was a Freudian slip, and that Wayne's identification with Ethan was so strong that it led him to distort basic facts about the narrative.
In any case, if Ford was attempting to critique Ethan's racism, wouldn't Wayne's unmitigated admiration for the character have created a conflict when Ford was directing him?

Another point is that the interpretation that the film endorses Ethan's views has to be considered in the context of the conventions of the Hollywood western. Those related to Native American themes and characters have long been critiqued by Native scholars and critics, and those are perspectives that should not by any means be left out of any discussion of this topic. Among these is demonization of Indians and, related to this, the drastic distortion of historical fact in order to skew the good-evil axis in favor of the white settlers.
The Searchers can credibly be interpreted to fit both of these, epspecially when allowing for the influence of expectation on the part of the audience. Meaning doesn't exist in a vaccuum. The reason Ethan's desire to kill Debbie is intelligible to viewers is because of the common theme in western films of Indians capturing white women and "raping them into insanty," and the like. For a woman to have sexual contact with Indians, consentual or not, was a fate worse than death, and in some cases so was living with the indelible shame of this for the rest of one's life.
Anyone with the remotest familiarity with the historical basis for the film will know how much distorion of history Ford committed in order to avoid going against these conventions. Regarding a different matter of accuracy, Henry Brandon, the actor who played Scar, summarised Ford's general attitude as, "To hell with historical details. Give them what they expect."
Why wasn't Ford more interested in showing the real story of Cynthia Ann Parker? After being kidnapped in 1836 by Comanches, Kiowas, and Caddoes at the age of nine she matured in one of the tribes and married a war chief. Her white family finally found the village where she lived in 1860, attacked (killing many members of the tribe including her husband), and returned her to white society against her will. Held under guard, she tried repeatedly to escape to return those she considered her people. She finally starved herself to death in protest. Of course, such a story would have been unthinkable as the subject of a Hollywood film.
Ford also had a choice in which novel was to serve as the basis for the film. Will Cook's Comanche Captives was superior in every way to Alan LeMay's The Searchers, which was lurid, trashy, fanciful, and grotesquely racist. What reasons could Ford have had for choosing it? There are many of these kinds of questions that figure into many of the more informed critical interpretations of The Searchers as a text about racism.

[tryavna]

Gregory, you present some really interesting thoughts. I wonder what you thought/would think of Joseph McBride's commentary for Cheyenne Autumn (or the film itself, if you haven't seen it)? For all its flaws, I think Cheyenne Autumn is Ford's most complex and interesting treatment of the plight of Native Americans -- if for no other reason than it's his most sustained depiction of their POV. Yet it suffers from typically Fordian flaws: non-Native American actors playing the lead Indian roles, the wrong tribe cast as the tribe depicted in the film, a somewhat paternalistic resolution, etc.

What I like about McBride's commentary is that he offers a defense of Ford and that film (as well as his other Westerns by extention) without excusing everything Ford did as an "artist." For instance, McBride rightly praises Ford's decision to pump money into the Navajo community living at Monument Valley (repeatedly over the years). He also glancingly refers to the fact that the Navajos regularly inserted profanity into their dialogue -- which is a fascinating example of a line of artistic/aesthetic resistance that may run throughout all of Ford's Westerns as well as other Westerns that used real Native Americans. Finally, despite the deus ex machina at the end, Ford seems to stick much more closely to historical reality than in The Searchers: the Cheyennes really suffer and all their suffering is clearly due to the stupidity and duplicity of white characters.

But back to The Searchers more specifically. The one line of your post that really sticks out to me is this one:

In any case, if Ford was attempting to critique Ethan's racism, wouldn't Wayne's unmitigated admiration for the character have created a conflict when Ford was directing him?

I'm really not sure that it would -- for two reasons:

1.) It's well known that, despite all the browbeating Ford regularly directed against Wayne, Wayne always absorbed it -- apparently never directly challenging Ford. And we know that Ford and Wayne often occupied different ends of the political spectrum (Ford was a democrat while Wayne was a republican; Ford openly supported Joseph Mankiewicz and opposed de Mille's call for a loyalty oath while Wayne and Ward Bond were supporting the blacklist), and Wayne must have known Ford's views. So it seems to be a case where Wayne simply deferred to Ford in all the final decisions on set.

2.) I think that it's pretty clear that the power behind-the-camera (whether in the decisions of how to frame a shot or in the decisions made in the editing room) generally overrides the power of actors. I'm thinking specifically of the way that "Reality" TV can transform perfectly normal individuals into bitches, drunks, and dunces simply through selective editing. So I imagine that it's possible for an actor to be working towards different ends than the director withouth realizing it.

And of course, as you point out, the brilliance of the film is precisely that two or more different interpretations can come out of it. Which goes back to Ford, who was an extremely complex man himself, as so many of his films demonstrate.

[Gregory]

tryana:
It's been a while since I saw Cheyenne Autumn. I just got the John Ford set containing it and will watch it soon. I'm open to reevaluating it, but so far at least I have strong misgivings about it for a number of reasons I won't go into here. If you'd care to start a thread on Cheyenne Autumn, I will re-watch it soon and join in. What I'd also like to do is read the Mari Sandoz novel (of which I've only so far read passages) as a way of examining what Ford changed and what he left intact. Unfortunately, I may not be able to find the time to do this very soon.
Back to The Searchers. I should have pointed out before that even if Ford is understood to have considered Ethan a racist (which I think he did, to some degree) there are still questions about whether within the world of The Searchers such attitudes were justified. Were Ethan's actions and views, like those of Leatherstocking, necessary to clear the way for civilization but ultimately too wild to be sustained? Related to this, then, is the question of whether such "excesses" of racism threatened society and thus it was necessary to redeem Ethan but society itself by having him decide mercifully not to kill Debbie. This interpretation, I believe, provides a plausible fit between what takes place at the end and the character of Ethan throughout the remainder of the film -- far more than the interpretation that Ford was presenting a scathing portrait of a sociopathic racist.

Regarding the first point you brought up, it seemed to me from what I've read that Wayne's positive feelings about Ethan were so strong and so tied to his emotional foundations that it would have been impossible for him to simply defer to Ford -- not only to refrain from saying anything to Ford but also to play the character in such a violently different way than his own feelings prescribed.
This leads to your second point. I agree that the influences you describe can have a major effect over single scenes, but it would have taken something drastic to make such a fundamental change in the nature of the lead performance throughout the duration of the film. Additionally, using those influences to change and shape performances is something I think lesser directors do to paper the cracks in the film when something just isn't working. I'm not sure Ford, who had such precise demands of his actors, would make such heavy use of these techniques.
About Ford's politics, it seems to me that they were quite conflicted and changed quite a bit through time (McBride 371ff). Perhaps more importantly, it seems like he made a concerted effort to keep such things from consciously influencing his films and his working relationships as much as possible. But you may be right that it's an example of conflict between Ford and Wayne. I don't know.

[jguitar]

I just got the Wayne/Ford boxset from DDD. The Searchers box has, in addition to the two discs, two packets of printed material, one with a comic book (and promotional materials) and the other--or 't'other, as Ethan Edwards would say--with postcard-sized production photos and reproductions of letters, etc. (I'm light on the details because I don't have it in front of me at the moment).

Anyway, I happened to get two of that latter packet, with the photos. If anyone on the list wants it for some reason, let me know and I'll send it along as I don't need two of those.

[zedz]

Regarding the first point you brought up, it seemed to me from what I've read that Wayne's positive feelings about Ethan were so strong and so tied to his emotional foundations that it would have been impossible for him to simply defer to Ford -- not only to refrain from saying anything to Ford but also to play the character in such a violently different way than his own feelings prescribed.

I don't understand your point here. If Ford is portraying Ethan as a racist, and he's getting a racist to play him in a positive light, how would that subvert Ford's depiction? Wouldn't it just make the character more persuasive? And regardless of the racial and thematic undertones of the saving of Debbie, there's no way that Wayne would think that cutting Natalie Wood's throat at the end of the film would be the Right White thing to do. Are you suggesting that Wayne would have wanted his character to do this (and would have thought the general public would perceive this as heroic) and was simply reluctantly deferring to his director in following the script?

Anyway, I think the key character in reading this film isn't Wayne, but Hunter, who's clearly the least morally tainted character (regardless of his mixed blood) and is positioned as the man of the future in the narrative structure\

I don't think The Searchers is a visionary analysis of Race in America, but it's much, much richer than most other Hollywood stabs at it, and it's a real surprise coming from that director (and cast), and that genre, at that time. I agree that it shares many of the typical shortcomings of Westerns of the time in its depiction of Native Americans, but it's a film about racism rather than one about race relations: the focus is squarely on what's going on in the hearts and minds of the white characters. I actually think it's rather intriguing that Ford doesn't take the traditional (and arguably patronising) Kramer route of Humanizing the Other. Racism is not excused simply because Scar does ghastly things: this is not a fairy-tale world in which a saintly Sidney Poitier dissipates racism by making it inconceivable.

[Gregory]

If Ford is portraying Ethan as a racist, and he's getting a racist to play him in a positive light, how would that subvert Ford's depiction? Wouldn't it just make the character more persuasive?

Maybe, but I hesitate to speculate. It seems like a very unusual strategy: to circumvent the actual acting, in a way, by allowing Wayne to have such illusions about a character that Ford hypothetically considered an anti-hero. It seems to me this would result in conflict as soon as Ford had a specific idea about the character's pathology that he wanted Wayne to include in his performance. Wayne would be unable to do it because he would be unable to see Ethan in remotely the same way that Ford would have needed him to.

And regardless of the racial and thematic undertones of the saving of Debbie, there's no way that Wayne would think that cutting Natalie Wood's throat at the end of the film would be the Right White thing to do. Are you suggesting that Wayne would have wanted his character to do this (and would have thought the general public would perceive this as heroic) and was simply reluctantly deferring to his director in following the script?

Yes, by all accounts I'm aware of, Wayne believed that for a man living in Ethan's time his obsession was justified. I don't know how else to interpret Wayne's indignant defense of Ethan as a hero, saying that if Indians had fucked your wife, "What would you have done?". It is interesting to note that Wayne seemed to have occasion to defend Ethan later, after significant increases in awareness about racial issues and the plight (humanity, existence, etc.) of Native Americans. There's still a long way to go today, I believe, but the way audiences "read" these films back when they were made was far different. To the extent Wayne was an anti-hero, The Searchers was far ahead of its time. Every account I've read of how audiences reacted to genre films in which white settlers/colonialists were at the center suggests that they identified with and rooted for the protagonists every time, no matter what.
Please consider the point I made earlier about how through hundreds of western films (novels, etc.) Indians were built up conventionally as merciless rapists in the minds of people with very little informed understanding of what the historical record shows about the presence/absence of rape in native societies. Mercy killings of women in order to save them from a "fate worse than death" were a matter of course in Hollywood westerns in situations when all hope of holding off the marauding savages was lost. By the 1950s and 60s, female characters in these films already were routinely stating their willingness not only to do themselves in as a last resort but also their own children.
It was not a far leap, then, for audiences to believe that people of the time would do the same after the fact, in order to save them from the unremovable taint of such an experience. This psychosexual matrix of oppression was by no means completely in the past: the correlations between attitudes about race, rape, and the causes and effects of rape have been highly complex and quite interesting throughout different historical periods and contexts. Anyway, go back and read Alan LeMay's original novels of The Searchers and The Unforgiven and I think it'll be fairly clear what his own ideas were about the matter. Again, what Ford's views about Ethan's obsession were far murkier. And while I believe Ford's film intended to show the desire to kill Natalie Wood's character as an excess, this interpretation raises lots of additional questions about the underlying assumptions of the story (and audiences' expected understanding of it) and about what this suggests regarding the redemption of white civilzation through the act of sparing her life.

[tryavna]

Anyway, I think the key character in reading this film isn't Wayne, but Hunter, who's clearly the least morally tainted character (regardless of his mixed blood) and is positioned as the man of the future in the narrative structure\

I don't think The Searchers is a visionary analysis of Race in America, but it's much, much richer than most other Hollywood stabs at it, and it's a real surprise coming from that director (and cast), and that genre, at that time. I agree that it shares many of the typical shortcomings of Westerns of the time in its depiction of Native Americans, but it's a film about racism rather than one about race relations: the focus is squarely on what's going on in the hearts and minds of the white characters.

I agree with both of Zedz's points above, and with regard to the first one, I think it's important to point out that Hunter's character was not "1/8 Cherokee" in the original novel, as he is in the film. Ford and Nugent decided to transform him into a mixed-race character, which I think says volumes about what Ford is trying to do subtly here. (And the key word is "subtly." I don't think Ford is anywhere near standing on a soapbox. He's working with a genre that he loved, with its own specific conventions that he didn't challenge directly until the 1960s: Sergeant Rutledge, Two Rode Together, Liberty Valence, and Cheyenne Autumn.) And of course, I think it's pretty clear that the real hero of the film is Martin, not Ethan -- at least in the sense that Martin provides a sort of moral compass for the film and good angel for Ethan.

A few other points:

1.) Going back to what Gregory and I were discussing yesterday, based on every source of information I've come across, Wayne always deferred to Ford. Even when Ford showed up unannounced and unwanted on the set of The Alamo, Wayne gave Ford some second-unit stuff to direct rather than asking him to leave altogether.

2.) More to the point at hand, I think it's entirely possible that Wayne's own views about the character changed with time. Perhaps he believed one thing at the time he was making the film and grew to believe something else -- or entirely misremembered his original performance. (This seems to have happened all the time before the days of home video. One that comes to mind is Orson Welles' own internalization of blame for the failure of Lady from Shanghai, which ran over-schedule and over-budget because of Rita Hayworth's health not just because of Welles' re-shoots. Bogdanovich reports that Welles' "completely forgot" about that aspect of the shoot.)

3.) This seems like such an interesting topic that I think it's incredibly important to bring in some discussion of Ford's later films about Native Americans, namely Cheyenne Autumn and Two Rode Together. Both of these later films are flawed in various ways but amount to much clearer approximations of a mea culpa on Ford's part for his own contribution to American perceptions of Native American history and culture. Gregory has suggested that I open another thread for that -- though I'm not sure to what extent other forum members are familiar with those two films.

[Gregory]

Good points, tryana. I now see that I need to reconsider the relevance of Wayne's remarks. (I think what I discussed in the second part of my first post and the first part of my second still bear consideration.)

I will watch Cheyenne Autumn again in the next few days and start a thread on it, if no one has by then already.

[Andre Jurieu]

Ethan not ambiguous? He's nothing but. On a narrative level, there are questions like what did he do for three years after the war ended and what exactly happened to make him hate Native Americans so much.

Yeah, that's certainly true to an extent, but that's kind of an ambiguity created through omission of information about the character. It's not really ambiguity created from what Ford and Wayne actually present to us about the character. I guess it comes down to perspective, but for some reason I'm less concerned as a viewer with how a character becomes racist before the film than I am with what their actions are during the film and whether we can determine those actions to be racist - essentially the presentation of racism. Of course, in real life, the causes for racism have much more importance.

On a thematic level, there's ambiguity about such things as the nature of his racism: he knows a hell of a lot about Indian language and customs for one who's so thoroughly racist. What does this imply?

That's very true as well, but I guess his knowledge of another culture doesn't really tie that well to his racism in my mind. The idea that getting to know a culture's customs somehow automatically influencing someone's prejudice towards that culture never really translates very well. As much as this is an interesting aspect about Ethan, it could just as well be dismissed as a "know your enemy" type of behavior.

And even though his action at the end of the film really isn't ambiguous, his thoughts certainly are. Here's a man who seems to think in very black and white terms, yet he's able to realize how his style of life is outdated. The look on Wayne's face is what: angry? Sad? Understanding? All of those things, I would argue. There's a depth in this understanding that's profound, but it's also mysterious, given the type of person he is. In fact, that may be the most ambiguous thing about him.

I'm not so sure about that point. It's certainly surprising that Ethan changes his thinking at the end, but I've never believed his thoughts were really ambiguous at the conclusion, and I'm sure that's due to the fact I don't find him to be all that ambiguous throughout the film. I guess that's also partly due to the fact that I always find black & white thinking to be very stubborn, but also very determined regardless of the concept being embraced. Hence when that person realizes their error, they often embrace the opposite position wholeheartedly. To a greater extent, I think it's because Ethan's final decision isn't all that difficult for a racist white-man to make, considering he simply has to choose to save a white female relative who has been kidnapped and victimized by the culture he despises. Maybe I just don't believe Ethan has enough at stake during this decision. It's not like Ethan spares the life of any Native Americans. However, I do agree that the final scene is incredible, though I credit a great deal of this to Ford, rather than Wayne.

The Searchers is one of Hollywood's boldest considerations of racism, and it's all wrapped up in Wayne's character. Great as so many of Ford's films are, for me The Searchers is deeper and darker than any of them, one of the most troubling and thought-provoking Hollywood films of the 50s.

Take the conventional Liberal platitude (see just about any Kramer of the time) that racism is simply the consequence of ignorance: if these guys could only meet and understand the Other, they'd see the light. The character of Ethan Edwards demolishes this immediately: he's the person who has the deepest understanding of (and, in a perverted way, respect for) the culture of the Indians (demonstrated by his shooting out the eyes of the dead guy), yet he's the most virulent in his hatred of them.

Ok, it's obvious that The Searchers isn't just a liberal knee-jerk solution to racism, but just because the film doesn't purport the same ol' simplistic line of thinking regarding racism, doesn't really prove that it's central character displays a complex conception of racism. Again, I don't really find that "knowing your enemy" offers a nuanced demonstration of racist attitudes or makes a character more intricate.

What I find more interesting about the film is the family dynamics that Ford creates, including the casual racism that other characters often display. I also agree that the most important action Ethan takes is walking away from the family home after finally realizing his values have become slightly obsolete or archaic. However, I would attribute this more to Ford's talents in structuring the film than I would to Ford or Wayne's specific characterization of Ethan.

[tryavna]

(I think what I discussed in the second part of my first post and the first part of my second still bear consideration.)

Oh, I agree. I wasn't opposing all of your assertions. I think that Zedz and I view The Searchers as probably leaning more towards the liberal/progressive end of Ford's thinking whereas it seems you and perhaps Andre view it as more conservative at heart. I doubt that the ideological distance between our interpretations of the film is great; the nature of Ford's thinking (his continuing love of military ritual and his paternalistic attitude towards Native Americans, for example) makes it difficult to argue for too radical of an agenda behind this -- or just about any -- Ford movie.

To be honest, I've just enjoyed discovering that the movie offers such fertile ground for this sort of discussion. I've become too used to simply trying to defend its greatness against the recent trend of referring to it dismissively as "overrated" (as embodied in Metcalf's article).

[Ishmael]

I guess it comes down to perspective...

Very true. So doesn't the fact that you and I have completely different opinions about Ethan's psychology prove that he is, in fact, a highly ambiguous character?

[HerrSchreck]

I think Ford, in using Wayne-- especially if Wayne was unapologetic about Ethan-- was doing precisely what was necessary to get his film on celluloid in the most compelling and convincing manner. Approaching a film concerning the lives, world and mindsets of 1800's frontier folk, and expecting from the mouths of the protagonists anything besides a hard-bitten, life-or-death, kill or be killed lightning bolts of utter detestation for the Other is, quite frankly, a bit overcivilized on the part of the viewer.

In struggles for survival versus an armed and willing opponent, where the cycle of bitterness and revenge soaks every waking moment through with the blood and guts of butchered loved ones, considerations of mutual humanity are always going to be one step removed from the minds of Ethan-like alpha-males. The impulse is always going to be the biggest asskicker, the biggest creater of corpses, the must unflinching in account-settling. Considerations of mutual humanity are usually a delicacy enjoyed by very few within the front lines of these sorts of land-based conflicts, and when they do take hold to cause a vengeful armed man with dead/raped loved ones to reconsider his next killing mission, to put down his weapon, it usually comes A) late in the process after many bodies have been cultivated, and B) more usually upon waking up to exhaustion with the meaningless cylcle of destruction, a sapping of the will for murder and a realization that more of his kinfolk will be saved by NOT killing (thus halting the vengeance cycle), and has less to do with a mutual humanity of his opponent being recognized. Again, this is a delicacy which over time is fostered by peace and mutual shared experience upon closure of a conflict. And even then it takes years. Don't look for vast learning of lessons in sum in primitives, when in America and the rest of the world today the lust for vengeance and hatred of the Other is cycling with impressively destructive viciousness. We attacked Iraq, why, simply because Arabs attacked the trade center? Israel & Arabs butcher innocent civilians, why? Where's the grand scale dialog of Mutual Humanity, the need to seperate the armed from the uninvolved innocents?

However, epiphanies do occur from time to time, and I believe Ford's desire was to illustrate the beauty of this moment as a distinguishing feature of the best of civilization amid it's usual savagery: the moment when a true believer is stopped in his own tracks by a realization seemingly coming from nowhere, a voice out of the blue telling him "Stop; enough," causing him to lift the girl off her feet telling her "let's go home." These are moments which get mythologized and written down in psalms & scriptures and exaggerated as the hand of god by awed cultures, "he saw god, who spoke to him."

The sense is that Ethan was a man who just stumbled dumbfounded into something to believe in (even if just for that moment, though one doubts it), coming out of a vacuum of mindless preoccuptation with revenge, pure impulse which permeated his whole being-- his defensive upbring, his war disillusionment, his hardbitten lifestyle-- that has been cultivated and sharpened to one end: opponent destruction. The beauty of the moment is that it all seems to come crashing down and seemingly for no reason whatsoever-- it's over and with absolutely no conceivable explanation whatsoever. There are times in life when grown human beings find themselves up against a wall, crushed for no apparent reason whatsoever-- men bursting into tears for no explainable reason while walking down the street doing nothing, walking out on families and never coming back, leaving jobs, countries, armies, etc.

I really believe having a problem with SEARCHERS due to applying a hypercultured progressive mindset virtually nonexistent in this time-place is folly, and to look for it there is equal folly: all it seems to do is draw attention to the 'culture' of the speaker (like Metcalf above) and shows his puny obliviousness to the beauty of moments like Ethan's in the SEARCHERS. This is not a tale about people like us, nor was it made by people like us. Yet out of it comes a message which speaks very clearly to our sensibility, which makes the profundity of the message, particularly at those seemingly inexplicable & mysteriously precious moments that they strike, as as it did Ethan-- a far less cultured, sympathetic man, a man with no education or precursor idea to set up this kind of compassion-- that much more treasured.

[Andre Jurieu]

So doesn't the fact that you and I have completely different opinions about Ethan's psychology prove that he is, in fact, a highly ambiguous character?

It's very possible and our divergence of opinion provides fairly good support of that notion, but I would hesitate to state conclusively that it proves that Ethan is a highly ambiguous character. It may only be evidence that Ford, Wayne, & Co. provided us with only a vague form of characterization. As well, even though a difference of opinion exists, it doesn't necessarily mean that the filmmakers intended for an ambiguity to exist. I mean, my friends and I sometimes debate which is the best hot-dog cart in the city, but I'm doubting that the cart operators intend their smokies to taste all that ambiguous and I doubt they are going for subtle differences (ok, maybe this is a poor example considering we're talking about a Ford movie, but that's just my hunger talking).

I think that Zedz and I view The Searchers as probably leaning more towards the liberal/progressive end of Ford's thinking whereas it seems you and perhaps Andre view it as more conservative at heart.

Actually, I also think the film that Ford created was intended to express more of a liberal/progressive viewpoint, though it is hindered by the archaic perspectives of the era it was created in. I'm just thinking that Ford makes his point by exploiting Ethan's conservative attitude, which I see as presented in a fairly straightforward manner. While many aspects of The Searchers are purposely subtle and ambiguous, I just don't believe Ethan is one of those components. Ford doesn't have to make every aspect of his film be indistinct in order to get his point across regarding established racist ideals becoming outdated.

I doubt that the ideological distance between our interpretations of the film is great; the nature of Ford's thinking (his continuing love of military ritual and his paternalistic attitude towards Native Americans, for example) makes it difficult to argue for too radical of an agenda behind this -- or just about any -- Ford movie.

As always, tryavna hits it out of the ball-park. I pretty much agree with all of that.

[Ashirg]

The Searchers is coming to HD-DVD. Wonder if it's going to be fixed - probably not.

[HerrSchreck]

Very true-- way to fast for the kind of color correction neccessary. They probably created and and used the same hi-def master, and were already in production on the HDDVD by the time the blizzard of retching came in for the standard dvd, and the cheap bastard said, "O well, can't stop now, I mean we started didn't we?"

Too quick for a corrected trasnfer, but certainly not so quick that they couldn't have held off after the feedback from the primary release. Pure moneygrubbing.

[FilmFanSea]

The R4 PAL Searchers has been released early in a two disc package.

The Film disc is identical to the R1, thus no re-mastering.

If you want to see how the movie SHOULD look sit through the second documentary (narrated by the tedious John Milius) - the grabs are clearly from an IB print which was obviously available then for the producers of this 1999 doco. Deep almost ochre sand, rock solid deep sky blues, strong flesh tones.

The HD is due this week. I await the reviews.

Robert Harris posted at HTF on Sunday that Warner will not be correcting the color timing on the upcoming HD release (or correcting the SD):

On another front, apparently Warner technical services has checked their new restoration and video master of The Searchers against their studio print, and has found that the new master satisfactorily represents the original film.

While I will dispute neither their technical position nor their professionalism, my personal guess is that their sample print may be flawed, and not representative of an original approved answer print.

RAH

HTF Admin Robert Crawford has uncharacteristically slammed Warner for this decision.

Very unfortunate.

[zedz]

Ditto the "new" Stagecoach is in many ways inferior to the old one (Im definitely keeping the latter.)

Hear hear! I watched this last week and was appalled at what bad condition the film was in: constant scratches and several dupey patches. If this is the best the film can look, that's very sad indeed. It looks like no digital clean-up was even attempted.

[thethirdman]

Robert A. Harris interviews Warner's Ned Price on The Searchers

[Matt]

Robert A. Harris interviews Warner's Ned Price on The Searchers

This seems to be the key exchange:

RAH: Have you been reading any of the comments on line, and if so, do you take them seriously.

NP: We absolutely take them seriously. From what I've been able to deduce, people have been using the 1991 transfer as a reference, and it is in no way a reference. Believe me, I was there. We had very limited color correction capabilities.

[tryavna]

So does this mean that we'll never again be able to see what the hell is going on in the day-for-night scenes of The Searchers? If so, that's a real shame.

[Gigi M.]

Two HD-DVD reviews:

Digitallyobsessed

DVDTown

Video:
For their HD-DVD, Warner Bros. used a restored and remastered print, which maintains most the film's original VistaVision dimensions, stretching to a 1.78:1 ratio across my widescreen television. While the standard-definition results were generally superb, the high-definition is even better, the fifty-year-old film looking as good as almost anything made today. There are still a few instances where the picture is a trifle dark, particularly during indoor shots, but mainly the image is sharp and well detailed, with no signs of age whatsoever--no lines, scratches, flecks, or fades. The Technicolor shows up brilliantly, of course, deeper and more vibrant than ever. Given the amount of wide-open expanses of land and sky involved in the shooting, there is relatively little grain in the picture, too, except that which was probably inherent to the original print; nevertheless, high definition shows up a few patches that might not have been so noticeable before. The grain varies from scene to scene, from zero to mild, and I doubt anyone would notice who wasn't specifically looking for it. This is gorgeous cinematography, excellently reproduced.

[denti alligator]

I'm considering getting the new edition through DDD's sale. What's the story on this? Is Warner denying there's a color problem? (I can't make sense of that interview.) Will there be a change? Is it that bad?

[tryavna]

I'm considering getting the new edition through DDD's sale. What's the story on this? Is Warner denying there's a color problem? (I can't make sense of that interview.) Will there be a change? Is it that bad?

This is one of those films that, if you know extremely well, the problems are going to be noticeable and irksome to you. As I mentioned two posts up, the day-for-night has become particularly bad -- so bad that it's difficult for me to make out what's going on. (You'll be able to compare it to what it should look like on some of disc 2's extras.) However, there are plenty of extras that make the two-disc edition worth getting. I bought the whole Ford/Wayne boxset, so I found plenty of consolation in the excellent editions of Long Voyage Home and Fort Apache.