John Ford

Foremost in the pantheon of Western directors is John Ford, who has no less than nine films featured in Edward Buscombe's guide to 100 Westerns. Philip French, film critic for The Observer, cited The Searchers as the key film in the Ford canon as long ago as 1973.

Nigel Arthur, bfi Stills Curator

What gives The Searchers its compelling force is the character of Ethan, the most complex of all Wayne's characters. Ethan is an Indian-hater, a man who knows their ways but is implacably hostile. His niece Debbie [Natalie Wood] is captured by the Comanche which makes him bitter and vindictive, almost to the point of madness, so that he prefers to see his niece dead rather than contemplate her as the sexual partner of Scar. His feelings are exacerbated by guilt at the memory that he himself loved his brother's wife; in raping Martha before murdering her, Scar has become a kind of monstrous surrogate for Ethan's own desires. At the end, Ethan confirms this identity by scalping the Comanche Chief, a kind of symbolic castration asserting both Ethan's own savagery and his need to root out his quasi-incestuous desire.

Excerpts from BFI Screen Guide: 100 Westerns by Edward Buscombe