The original title of this splendid film, in its English version “The Searchers” (The Searchers) defines us very well everything that the film is, a nostalgic search in this case of two women who represent innocence, affection and lost love, cruelly snatched by the Comanche Indians and the almost sickly rage and hatred that they feel the protagonist Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) for them, who shows throughout the hard road full of hardships, in which he is accompanied by Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) who joins this search for what he considers his sisters because he was raised by the family as one more son, taken there by Ethan himself when he was little and whom he now repels because of his mestizo blood, but he will be the only one who will be willing to follow him and whom he will have no choice but to accept. Based on the novel by writer and director Alan Le May “The Searchers” to which screenwriter Frank Nugent and Ford himself made some changes, lending depth and complexity to the protagonist.
The film begins with a beautiful sunset backlight from an open door in which Martha (Dorothy Jordan) sees her brother-in-law Ethan arrive, who returns after long years of struggle that includes the Civil War, it is not known exactly where. he comes, because the war had already ended a few years ago, he enters, greets his sister-in-law with a kiss on the forehead and his brother Aaron and plays with the children who have grown so much in his years of absence that he does not recognize them, he has to leave the next day along with a patrol looking for some cattle stolen by the Indians, which they take advantage of to attack the farm and kill all its members except the two girls who are taken captive and from there begins the long search, with beautiful scenes shot by its great director John Ford in his favorite corner of the universe Monument Valley in Colorado, a large desert formation of land and large rocks molded by the wind into whimsical shapes, is the i An immense stage in which Indians and white settlers move, always crushed by the enormity of the place and put to the test by the inhospitable environment, the homeland of the Navajos where it had been filmed. "The diligence", but this is a Western like never before, in which the good guys and the bad get confused in the dust of the desert and ends with the dark shot of another door, in which you can see how he walks away, not knowing where goes, walking towards the desert that is nothing, embarking on a journey towards nothing and the film takes place between those two doors. Reminding us how important it is in life to know where we are going, and where we come from, when their search ceases in this case they have found and managed to rescue the captive girl married to the Indian Chief Scar, he returns to the starting point where he I found myself wandering in the desert in nothingness, a beautiful reflection and metaphor about life and the way in which we go in it with direction or without direction, it does not matter which way we take if we do not know where we are going.
