“What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam? What makes a man leave bed and board / And turn his back on home?” John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter walk a long, hard road in John Ford’s celebrated, troubling The Searchers, a rare Western classic that ventures to question its hero and even the Western mythos itself, offering no clear-cut answers, even to the question in the theme song. The quest driving the heroes is part rescue mission and part revenge quest, and as to the question of whether the flawed characters have changed and developed, or whether we’ve simply seen more clearly the truth about them—that’s left for the viewer to ponder. – Steven D. Greydanus