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The world-premiere restoration of The Searchers is debuting at the 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival.
Written by Jenn Thornton
That bastion of oldie but goodie film fare, TCM (Turner Classic Movies), is marking its 30th anniversary year with a full slate of new programming for cinephiles, from the Warner Bros./TCM studio tour, TCM Classic Cruise and Talking Pictures: A Movie Memories Podcast, to the granddaddy of all events, the TCM Classic Film Festival, held April 18-21, 2024, in the heart of Hollywood.
Along with screenings of other classics, such as On the Waterfront (1954) and Rear Window (1954), this year’s festival will debut the world-premiere restoration of John Ford’s opus The Searchers (1956). Ranked #1 on AFI’s Top 10 Westerns, The Searchers screening comes hot on the heels of Warner Bros.’ restoration of another Duke dandy, Rio Bravo (1959), which delighted festival audiences in 2023. Will the sequel be better than the original? Almost never, but in this case… maybe.
Shown in all its arresting glory, the new cut of The Searchers fits the festival theme “Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film” to a T. John Wayne die-hards need no introduction to the film, of course, nor to the character Duke portrayed, Ethan “That’ll be the day” Edwards, a man on an obsessive quest who at the end of the film is famously framed alone in a doorway—a stunning shot by Ford that is seared into the collective memory of moviegoers for all time. As fans, we’d know it anywhere.
The same is true of filmmakers. The Searchers influence on the young-gun American auteurs who followed in Ford’s footsteps is as vast and enduring as the director’s sweeping shots of Monument Valley. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese have all cited the film as formative. Naturally, when viewed today, The Searchers is a much more complicated affair than it was in the 1950s, a cinematic era of clear-cut good guys and bad guys—moral complexity was rare. Scorsese acknowledges as much in an article he wrote about the film in The Hollywood Reporter. Nonetheless, as a plain matter of filmmaking, he states: “For me and for many other directors of my generation, it was a touchstone.”
For Wayne, The Searchers proved no less pivotal. According to the late film aficionado Roger Ebert, the Duke was at his relentless best in the film, and the critic credited Wayne’s performance as one of the actor’s finest.Those who go the TCM Classic Film Festival on a search party of sorts will find many other things to their liking, too. In addition to its screenings, the lineup includes unique fan experiences, guest appearances, and the famed Hand & Footprint ceremony at TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX—a rite of passage that, in 1950, permanently cemented Wayne as a Hollywood icon (this time that honor will go to Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster). Festival passholders, meanwhile, are granted access to Club TCM at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a hub of Hollywood’s Golden Age. There’s more, but you get the picture.
