Six Close Encounters 2017 / The Searchers / USA 1956
When I was just 15, I fell in love with classic Hollywood films. Most films that “experts” said were great struck me as such, too, but one did not: The Searchers. At the time, I found Ford’s film slow and confusing and Wayne´s character repugnant. From reading everything I could find about the film, watching it over and over again, something remarkable happened: I came to love The Searchers. I now think it’s as beautiful, layered and powerful as any film ever made in America.
Scott Feinberg
Long before I became The Hollywood Reporter’s awards columnist, back when I was just 15, I fell in love with classic Hollywood films. Most films that “experts” said were great struck me as such, too, but one did not: The Searchers, the ninth of the 14 collaborations between John Ford and John Wayne, is set in the American West shortly after the Civil War. The film follows a group of men as they mount an epic search for the one member of a family they all loved who might have survived a Native American massacre. At the time, I found Ford’s film slow and confusing and Wayne’s character, an unrepentant and tortured Confederate veteran, repugnant, and I couldn’t understand the point of the whole enterprise or why so many others loved the film so much — so I undertook a search of my own to try to find out. From reading everything I could find about the film, watching it over and over again, studying it frame by frame and growing older and hopefully wiser myself, something remarkable happened: I came to love The Searchers. I now think it’s as beautiful, layered and powerful as any film ever made in America, and I look forward to sharing with you why.
Scott Feinberg
114 min / Color, DCP
Director John Ford
/ Screenplay Frank S. Nugent podle románu / based on the novel by Alan LeMay
/ Dir. of Photography Winton C. Hoch
/ Music Max Steiner
/ Editor Jack Murray
/ Art Director James Basevi, Frank Hotaling
/ Producer Merian C. Cooper
/ Production C.V. Whitney Pictures
/ Cast John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood
/ Sales Park Circus Group
John Ford (1894, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA – 1973, Palm Desert, California, USA), American director, screenwriter, and producer of Irish descent. A legend of world cinema, he began in Hollywood in the silent era, and his filmography is highly extensive and varied. As a director he is credited with more than 100 features, many of which are Westerns and adventure flicks, but he also worked on socio-critical topics and adaptations of literary works. In his pictures he often developed a favorite motif: a group of people facing danger. Ford is the only moviemaker to have won four Academy Awards for Best Director. He won Oscars for the psychological drama The Informer (1935), the social dramas The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941), and for the rare romantic comedy The Quiet Man (1952). He also took Academy Awards for the World War II documentaries The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th: The Movie (1943).
Park Circus Group
15 Woodside Crescent, G37UL, Glasgow
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 332 2175
E-mail: [email protected]
Scott Feinberg
Journalist
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