Like many of today's undisputed classics, The Searchers was critically misunderstood when it was first released. Many critics cited the film's length as too cumbersome and felt that the story meandered. Others commented on what they perceived to be Ford's racist attitudes. But nearly all negative reactions were largely influenced by the Western genre's poor reputation with the critical elite. Many simply could not see any intellectual depth in a Western. But The Searchers was a new kind of film from the genre's greatest master. Eventually, the critical and intellectual establishment would catch up with The Searchers in the late 1960s when the film underwent a major critical reassessment.

First, the rave reviews:

The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed it "undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made."

The Motion Picture Herald called the film "one of the greatest of the great pictures of the American West."

Look magazine called it a "Homeric odyssey...a Western in the grand manner, the most roisterous since Shane (1952).

The Los Angeles Examiner: "The grandeur, the beauty, the sweep, and the tragic horror...cannot, with justice, be detailed by mere words. Its scope is simply tremendous. Its motivation spine chillingly grim. Its setting the most starkly beautiful ever seen in a Western film. The majestic rock formations of Monument Valley, the panoramas of buttes and mesas, the desert of New Mexico, in Technicolor and VistaVision, are beyond description."

British critics were ecstatic. Leonard Mosely in the Daily Express called The Searchers "the best Western I have seen in ten years." Alan Brien in the Evening Standard wrote of its "breathtaking grandeur" and Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times called it "a Western of the first rank...I could not rest until I had seen it again, and all through."

Andrew Sarris, writing for Film Comment, maintained that John Ford's best film is undoubtedly The Searchers, a film that "manages to sum up stylistically all the best of what Ford had been with all the best of what he was to be."

Don K. Thompson, writing in Magill's Survey of Cinema, said that The Searchers "is unquestionably the masterpiece of America's foremost director, John Ford..." and at its most profound, it is "an archetype of the American experience." Thompson closed his review by claiming that The Searchers "will stand as John Ford's masterpiece and a cinematic achievement that can serve as an example to all future filmmakers of the possibilities of the art form."

In the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 1, Ed Lowry said that The Searchers "manages to be both a rousing adventure movie and a melancholy film poem exploring the American values at the heart of the Western genre."

And now for the negative reactions to The Searchers:

Imminent John Ford champion and critic Lindsay Anderson reviewed The Searchers upon its release and noted that Ethan Edwards "is an unmistakable neurotic, devoured by an irrational hatred of Indians." Anderson also pointed out that Ethan's search for Debbie "seems, indeed, to be inspired less by love or honor than by the obsessive desire to do her to death, as a contaminated creature. Now what is Ford, of all directors, to do with a hero like this?" Anderson never did understand the power of The Searchers, even after the film was critically reappraised as a masterpiece in the late 1960s.

Robert Hatch for The Nation called The Searchers "a picnic for sadists in very beautiful country" and a film that was "long on brutality and short on logic or responsible behavior." Hatch was mainly referring to the film's brutality and the grim anti-hero, Ethan Edwards. He called Edwards "a dangerous lunatic" who conducts his Homeric journey without any method, but with "a good deal of pointless slaughter."

Variety called The Searchers a western "in the tradition of Shane (1952), but that it was ultimately "disappointing" and "overlong and repetitive at 119 minutes."

The New Yorker dismissed The Searchers with a scathing review that could distinguish no difference between it and a B-movie production: "The thing has to do with the search for a couple of maidens some nasty Comanches have abducted shortly after the Civil War, and it certainly contains plenty of action."

Critic Robert Ardrey wrote disdainfully in The Reporter, "The same John Ford who once gave adults The Informer (1935) must now give children The Searchers."

Even the scholarly journal, Cahiers du Cinema gave only a passing notice to the film in an unsigned review published in October 1956: "Nostalgia from Ford for his old Westerns: nostalgia from Fordians for his old skills: Regrets at seeing a good scenario spoiled: annoyance at the everlasting sight of acting in the Irish style, above all by the females." However, to the credit of the Cahiers critics, the film's stature had risen by 1962, having been placed on the journal's poll of the greatest American sound films.

The screen critic with Time noted that the John Ford Stock Company was looking a bit long in the tooth with The Searchers: "Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often."

Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic, called the "horse opera" a "winner" and a "rip-snorting western," but could not refrain from criticizing the length and the indoor sets.

Pauline Kael commented on the film's revival in the seventies when she wrote, "What made this John Ford Western fascinating to the young directors who hailed it in the 70s as a great work and as a key influence on them is the compulsiveness of Ethan's search for his niece...and his bitter, vengeful racism." But personally, Kael never understood the film's appeal, calling it "peculiarly formal and stilted...You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward, and the line readings worse, and the film is often static."

The usually accurate critic and writer David Thomson admitted that The Searchers was a "riveting, tragic, and complex experience," but held tight to the opinion that Ford is "trite, callow, and evasive," his Westerns "fraudulent."

AWARDS & HONORS

It was not until the late sixties and early 70s that French film critics and young American filmmakers started to champion The Searchers as not only John Ford's best, but also an American masterpiece. By 1972, the critical stature of the film had risen so high, that in a poll of international film critics conducted by Sight and Sound, the film was included in the list of the top twenty films of all time. In the most recent poll, taken in 1992 and at ten year intervals, The Searchers placed fifth, just behind Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). It has a good chance of placing higher in the 2002 poll.

In a glaring example of the shortsightedness of Academy Award voters, The Searchers failed to earn a single Academy Award nomination in 1956. Not surprisingly though, the Best Picture winner for that year, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), is generally considered a dated product of its time with no lasting importance as a film while The Searchers is still being screened and discussed by film scholars and audiences today.

The Searchers was honored by the National Film Registery in 1989 when it was selected for preservation by its voters.

By Scott McGee