John Ford helped transform the Western from horse-opera to artform, and The Searchers is generally regarded as his masterpiece. To mark its 50th anniversary, the film has been painstakingly restored from original VistaVision film elements. Pavel Barter celebrates with the director's grandson Dan Ford, filmmaker and cinema expert Peter Bogdanovich, and Warner Brothers restoration guru Ned Price.

A frontier cabin door opens to wilderness: a framed introduction to a bitter terrain long romanticised by American literature and film. This is the opening refrain of John Ford's classic Western, The Searchers (1956). Regularly polled as one of the greatest films of all time, The Searchers has influenced movies as diverse as Star Wars and Taxi Driver, and directors such as David Lean, Sam Peckinpah and Steven Spielberg. Time and time again, filmmakers venture across Ford's threshold into the mythical chasms of the American West, a place where codes of honour shatter in the face of moral decline, where civilization teeters on a precipice. An analogy, perhaps, for the American Dream itself: ambition collapsing under the weight of an unattainable goal.

Vengeance served cold
The Searchers tells of a Civil War veteran's five-year search for his young niece, kidnapped by the Comanche Indians who massacred his family. 'Living with the Comanches ain't being alive,' snarls Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in one of the darkest anti-hero roles of his career). As the Duke shoots dead men in the eyes and scalps Injuns, some audiences interpret The Searchers as the type of revenge story that has returned to our screens with Kill Bill; for others it is a nuanced morality play or even a subtle critique of the Western genre. Some people have scant time for the movie, whatever meaning might be prised from its sun-dried plains, and that includes the director's grandson, Dan Ford.

'I think The Searchers is a contrived and deliberately created form of popular entertainment,' he says. 'It fits in well with the Cold War mentality tag. I don't think Ford ever set out to make a great work of art. It was popular entertainment much like Raymond Chandler or Zane Grey... Some of his other Westerns, such as the Cavalry Trilogy [Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950)], and movies like They Were Expendable (1945) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), reveal far more about John Ford than The Searchers.'

Although the characters' persistent hat-throwing hissy fits do seem horribly outdated – especially in a post Sergio Leone world – the iconic actor, director and critic, Peter Bogdanovich, is virulent in defending the film. 'Ford is one of my favourite directors. I knew him for some years, and also knew Wayne, which makes it more personal. I've seen the film many times and it gets better every time.'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 112.