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Dom Robinson reviews
Warner Bros.
The Searchers
=9C15.99, Region 2 DVD,
widescreen/full-frame, Dolby Digital Mono
Tagline: “You don’t understand, you chunkhead!”
It was only a matter of time before The Duke arrived on DVD and now your ‘search’ is over for this particular John Ford western set in Texas, 1858.
John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a civil war veteran who loves to play cowboys and injuns’. His reason to hate them comes from his view that they killed his family. As far as he knows, only his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) has survived, so he teams up with Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) on the trail to find her. Needless to say, she’s alive and well and living in a teepee (the trailer tells you this much), but the question is – how can they bring her back to reality?
It’s the first ever John Wayne film I’ve seen and I can’t fathom out how Spielberg called this one of the best films he’d ever seen. The film is three-quarters complete before Debbie makes an appearance and only then do we get some kind of action as guns win over spears every time. Aside from that, the site of Martin’s other half Laurie (Vera Miles) pining away at home was enough to put me to sleep.
For those wishing to traverse the desert of Arizona or the snowy plains of Canada, whilst ignoring the fact that the state of Utah substitutes itself for the big T, the disc contains an open-matte full-frame version on one side, while an anamorphic 1.85:1 ratio graces the flip-side. The average bitrate is a lowly 4.1Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 7Mb/s. While the print needs to be remastered. There’s more scratches to be seen than in a cat fight along with a very soft-focus
lens being used at times. The Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack does no better than endless muffled gunshots.
With a mammoth 44 chapters and a desert-like menu system, the extras comprise of an anamorphic widescreen trailer and four segments from the cheesy black-and-white “Warner Bros. Presents” TV series – interviews with Mr. Hunter and Ms. Wood and two behind-the-scenes featurettes. In the film, Natalie is stunning, but when she opens her mouth in the extras she
comes across as intelligent as a Miss World contestant.
The Picture: **1/2
The Sound: **
Extras: **
The Movie: *
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.