Searchers, The

Screen Western made in the USA in 1956, directed by John Ford and based on a novel by Alan Le May (1899–1964). It concerns a bitter Civil War veteran, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne), who embarks on a five-year odyssey to track down his niece (played by Natalie Wood) who was abducted by Comanches.

Belonging neither to the tenuous world of civilization, hanging on to a barren existence in Monument Valley, nor to the American Indians that he both hates and respects, Ethan is the quintessential outsider, as the opening and closing scenes framing him in the homestead doorway suggest.

With its obsessive, violent protagonist and quest structure, The Searchers was highly influential on a later generation of film-makers, informing the content of such films as the screenwriter Paul Schrader and the director Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).