THE SEARCHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 15

THE SEARCHERS

(C. V. Whitney-Warner Bros.) G Cert. "\/HAT makes a man to wander?" sing the bass voices in the background as the screen widens from the timbered slot of a ranch-house window to a VistaVision panorama of the John Ford country-empty save for the inevitable solitary horseman. And what does make a man to wander? The Searchers, which keeps John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter wandering for an unconscionable amount of footage (and for most of the time in circles, if the scenery is any guide) doesn’t provide very pleasant answers. Hatred and a lust for vengeance send Ethan Edwards in search of his small

niece, kidnapped when the rest of her family were massacred by Comanches. An anguished affection sends her fosterbrother (Jeffrey Hunter) along too, and, as one might hope, it is affection which prevails in the end-but not before there has been a good deal of unpleasantness en route. Indeed, so far as the story treatment goes, the finer feelings are the minor feelings. Wayne, as the implacable, inexorable Injun-hater, is the heroic figure, the apocalyptic horseman -larger than life and twice as ruthless. In other respects, The Searchers is very much Model T Ford. The faces (Ward Bond, Harry Carey and Co.) are as familiar as the rock buttresses of Monument Valley, and almost as timeworn; and the redskins fall from their cayuses in droves to bite dust churned powder-fine by the passage of earlier Ford vehicles. The photography, technically fine (with the usual accent on the long shot), offers us few new angles on the old terrain, though it still induces something of the old- magic, a magic frequently reinforced by plaintive Western tunes rising behind the jingle of harness and the squeak of saddleleather. I would have enjoyed The Searchers, for its familiarity rather than in spite of it, had it not seemed to celebrate (or at least sympathise with) attitudes and emotions which have invariably bred anguish and bitterness. I have no doubt that the pioneering West was cruel to a degree that none of the oldtime Westerns suggested, and there is evidence that the cult of the strong arm is still popular as far West .as Hollywood, but I’m afraid I’m too old now to have my own attitudes and emotions reoccidented.