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The SearchersRating:
Release Date: 29 October, 1997 Retail Price: $14.97 OUR Price: $11.23 You SAVE: $3.74! Cast: Complete Cast (11 total) |
The Searchers Reviews
Searchers!!
Ethan Edwards, (John Wayne), finds his way home after the civil war to his brothers homestead. Some cattle are rustled and he and a few men track them only to discover it's a Comanche trick to lure them away while they kill out the folks left behind which is Ethan's brother, wife, and kids. They arrive back too late, all are dead except Ethan's niece who was taken captive. Ethan sets out to find his niece accompanied by Martin Pauley, (Jeffrey Hunter), who Ethan found as a baby years earlier after another Indian raid. Ethan loved his brother's wife which is clear in the book by Lemay but very lightly alluded to in the film. This helps to explain his rage because everything he cared for in the world is gone. He will pursue the Comanche that have his niece until hell freezes over. Along the way he finds that he is still a human being. This film is widely considered the greatest western of all time and a favorite film of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg if that means anything to you, I thought I would toss it in anyway.
STILL SEARCHING FOR AN ADEQUATE TRANSFER
John Ford was a master craftsman of the American cinema. Though he dabbled in melodrama and action during his directorial career, his everlasting contribution to the movies remains in those galvanic distillations of the old west put forth by an unparalleled series of legendary films. "The Searchers" ranks among his most finely wrought and meticulously hand crafted projects. Indeed it seems to be the film in which the culmination of Ford's own commitment to the power, beauty and frailty of the western frontier tragically come together in a revisionist perspective that exposes both its grandeur and its flaws. The film stars the iconic John Wayne as Ethan Edwards - a strangely majestic antihero who vows bloody revenge after his cousin and family are slaughtered by marauding Comanches. But Ethan's search for his surviving niece (Natalie Wood) becomes a sinister and all-consuming obsession when he learns that she - having been abducted while still a child - has now adopted the ways of her captors and, at least in Ethan's mind, has become one of them. The film tackles racism in the form of Ethan's distrust of one time family friend (Jeffrey Hunter) who is part Cherokee and the sweep and spectacle of Death Valley has never been quite so poignantly captured on film.
THE TRANSFER: While Warner Home Video has made "The Searchers" available in anamorphic widescreen in a print that is light years ahead of anything the film has looked like before for the home film enthusiast, compared to more current DVD releases, the visual splendor of the transfer falls short of expectations. Though colors are rich there's something of a muddiness and lack of balance to them in many of the indoor scenes. Also, several scenes appear to be suffering slightly from color shrinkage, creating a slightly out of focus image quality that is distracting. Age related artifacts are present but do not distract so much as the digital anomalies of pixelization and edge enhancement which greatly plague the background information in most of the long shots. A slight shimmering is inherent in all of the scenes. Black and contrast levels can be solid at times, while sometimes appearing slightly pasty. Ditto for the unnatural flesh tones which are either overly pink or a ruddy orange. The audio has been remastered and delivers a nice expansive presentation which is in keeping with the vintage of the original sound elements.
EXTRAS: Not this time around. Sadly, this film deserves a documentary.
BOTTOM LINE: "The Searchers" is a masterful western, on par with "Stagecoach" and "High Noon". Definitely one to add to your film library.
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