The Searchers 4K (1956/Warner Archive 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray w/Blu-ray/Review #2)/Winchester '73 4K (1945/Universal/Criterion Ultra HD Blu-ray w/Blu-ray)

4K Picture: A+/A 1080p Picture: B Sound: A/B+ Extras: A/B+ Films: A

Growing up around older men who liked Westerns, TV screens tended to be filled with the faces of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. (If I was at my Italian grandparents' house, that pantheon expanded to include the characters of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and whatever Nick at Nite had in its rotation.) The only time I ever encountered Jimmy Stewart as a cowboy was as Wylie, the literal hangdog sheriff in the animated sequel An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. Back then, I thought it was a funny choice to put the affable everyman of It's a Wonderful Life into that kind of character, but it was undeniable that his voice carried a certain rightness for the role. He could be your buddy, but there was something edgy happening just below the surface.

As my cinematic horizons broadened and I found Westerns from the 1950s and '60s with Stewart in the flesh saddling up as a bounty hunter or a desperado or whatever the frontier required, I found these roles sillier than Wylie. People actually went to see these? And took them seriously? A title like Winchester '73 sounds like a prequel to Airport '75.

Of course that was the take of a complete buffoon. It's impossible to watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) - where, admittedly, Stewart is a good guy pushed to his limits, not a take-no-guff cowboy - and not be completely enthralled by his performance. Yeah, Wayne is there, too, but John Ford's deeply considered reckoning with American history and the role of gun violence in the narrative hinges completely on Stewart holding it, and himself, together. And he does both, brilliantly.

A film like that - indeed, a lot of Ford's postwar Westerns - are impossible to imagine without that movie I so flippantly dismissed way back when. Winchester '73 (1950) is the first of four so-called ''psychological Westerns'' between Stewart and director Anthony Mann, their collaborations making the genre relevant for a world reeling from the horrors and depravity of World War II while grappling with the existential dread of the Cold War and its threat of nuclear armageddon. Winchester is the best of the bunch, tighter and more subversive, and while Mann is playing with genre conventions, it's Stewart's chiseling away of his pre-war persona of America's Everyman, an effort that began with It's a Wonderful Life (1946), that makes this film a masterpiece.

True to the Western, the plot is fairly thin. Former Confederate soldiers Lin McAdam (Stewart) and High Spade Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) ride into Tombstone on July 4, 1873. We soon find out they're on the trail of Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), and just as they encounter him Lin and his quarry are tempted to enter an Independence Day shooting contest. The prize: a special Winchester rifle that's so perfect it turns every man and boy into a salivating idiot. (If this were a Tex Avery cartoon, eyes would ah-oooga out of their sockets whenever the rifle appears.)

Lin wins, of course, and, of course, Dutch and his gang brutally assault him in his hotel room, steal the gun, and ride out of town. Lin and Frankie set off after him, get roped into helping a contingent of federal troops (which includes a very young Tony Curtis) defend camp from a group of marauding Native peoples (led by a similarly very young Rock Hudson), get pulled into some other side quests, but ultimately get their man.

Where Winchester diverges from the formula, though, is in its pathos and psychoses. Dutch, it turns out, is Lin's brother - Lin's hunting him down because Dutch killed their father. An acquaintance of Dutch, Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea, who almost steals the movie out from under Stewart), smiles psychotically as he murders unarmed men and makes deviantly eroticized passes at both the poor, put upon Lola (Shelly Winters) and some of the men (particularly Dutch and Lin). When Lin encounters Johnny at a bar, he takes a not-so-secret thrill in torturing the other man until he gives up Dutch's whereabouts. Lin is dirty, dust and sweat caked; he wears a white hat but he's no hero. Indeed, there are no straight-out good guys here. In a gorgeously black-and-white film, shot by William H. Daniels, gray is solidly the primary color. The 4K in a 1.33 X 1 frame, has no HDR of any kind, but still delivers.

Indeed, this is Western as noir - another genre Stewart unexpectedly slipped into around this time. And like the best noirs, Winchester '73 still crackles with energy and life decades later. The cinematography certainly helps; like Liberty Valance, the black-and-white adds to the intensely intimate nature of the film. But so too does its place as a kind of keystone to the genre surviving into the 21st century. With some exceptions, the Western to this point were shoot-em-up comic books, full of action and adventure and white hat heroes flashing smiles that glint like their six shooters and black hat villains twirling their mustaches as they tie distressed damsels to the train tracks. The Western began in the Silent Era and didn't reach maturity until Mann and Stewart tackled it. When it did, though, there were other filmmakers waiting to take advantage - like John Ford.

Argue all you want about it being problematic (we'll get to that), but The Searchers is an unimpeachable classic, and it's impossible to imagine it existing without Winchester '73.

Like Mann's film, The Searchers (1956) has all the macro-trappings of the classic Western: cowboys, Indians, action, horses, gunplay, a quest to save innocent lives across the wild, untamed and dusty frontier. And this time, we get the larger-than-life genre institution Duke Wayne.

Ethan Edwards (Wayne), a Confederate soldier of fortune, returns to his brother Aaron's (Walter Coy) Texas homestead in 1868 to find Aaron's farm operating well, his nieces and nephews older, his fire for his brother's wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan), still burning. And, when threats of Comanche raids reach the ranch, his racist contempt for the Native people turns out to be as raging as ever. Of course the Comanches attack the ranch, killing everyone (and, it's implied, raping Martha). Everyone, that is, but the young Debbie (Lana Wood, then later Natalie Wood), who is taken by Comanche leader Scar (Henry Brandon) to be one of his wives. Ethan becomes a stone-cold hunter, at first setting out with Aaron's neighbors but ultimately joined only by Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a part-Cherokee adopted nephew, in a years-long quest to find Debbie and kill every Comanche he can along the way.

Those are the pieces, and Ford picks them up and tosses them onto the biggest canvas - literally - he could find. Shot in color (in Technicolor) in Monument Valley with large-frame VistaVision cameras, the director came as close as anyone to painting with cinema. The moments in nature are wide, total, Frederick Remington-like. Interior scenes are both intimate and expansive, as if Vermeer made a movie. The scene leading to the raid at Aaron's home is one of the most beautifully lit in any Western, an amber light suffusing the inside of the home, its warmth in direct contrast with the blood-chilling danger looming and hidden outside.

Westerns had never looked like this. And they were never so raw. If Mann more winked-and-nodded at the psychological undertones, Ford broadcast them as loudly as possible. Wayne, the quintessential square-jawed hero of a generation, is an absolute disgrace of a human in The Searchers. He may convince himself at first he's setting out to save Debbie, but it's clear almost immediately that this a man who is full of hate and spite and will take any pretense to embrace violent revenge. And yet glimmers of humanity peek out - not often, but enough to feel a tinge of sadness for this man who, at the end of the film, is literally shut out of the reestablishment of the family after saving Debbie and avenging his kin.

It's easy to write off Ford, and The Searchers, as bigoted relics of a less enlightened age. That's not only smug and self-serving, it's narrow-minded and incorrect. Like in Liberty Valance six years later, Ford is grappling here with the myth of the Old West and what our collective mythologizing (and resulting legal and social structures) says about America, and Americans. Ethan is a racist, full stop. Ford condemns him, totally. And, in so doing, condemns the cultural apparatus that allows racism and bigotry to be mainlined and accepted, including Hollywood. That Ford does this incredibly inarticulately - the Comanche here are often played by white people in brown face and the characters are shown to be either blood thirsty monsters (Scar) or bumbling buffoons (Look, a Comanche woman who believes she's Martin's wife, played by Beulah Archuletta, has become a prime example of Hollywood's despicable portrayal of Indigenous peoples; never mind that Ford does find some dignity for her in the end) - doesn't undercut this truth. This is clearly a film that wants its viewers to recoil at how these people are treated.

(For its part, Winchester, as much a Hollywood product as The Searchers, has its own issues here. Rock Hudson as a Native war chief? Really? But these characters are less central to the plot, and Mann is less interested in interrogating how they're portrayed.)

We are never meant to sympathize with Ethan. Rather, we're forced to watch in horror as this quintessential American hero carves a path of terror across Texas. That makes it all the more difficult for us, as viewers, when we catch ourselves sympathizing with him. What does that say about Ethan? What does that say about us?

In Winchester '73, Mann lays out a template for a new Western in a film that plays like a miniature. The Searchers fulfills the promise of the reinvigorated genre as a majestic tapestry, woven by Ford as one his most probing examinations of America. Separately these stand as the best the Western has to offer. Together, they serve as a kind of unit that demonstrates what makes cinema the quintessential art form.

And, fortunately, both films now have superlative home video presentations that protect and promote their legacies.

Winchester '73, long only available as a lousy DVD, arrives from the Criterion Collection in a fantastic 4K presentation that is rich and dynamic, supple and balanced. Previous editions have been soft and undernourished. Not so this edition, which was sourced from a 4K digital restoration from Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation. Similarly, the uncompressed mono gives the dialogue plenty of room to breathe and allows us to appreciate the film's robust soundtrack.

The extras, which are found on the included Blu-ray disc, can read as skimpy by Criterion's standards: a documentary on Mann's time at Universal, a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation from 1951, an interview with programmer Adam Piron on the way Native peoples are portrayed in Westerns, and a trailer. But there's also a commentary track with Stewart (moderated by film historian Paul Lindenschmidt) recorded in 1987 for a Laserdisc release of the film. Criterion's first commentary, for its King Kong Laserdisc, was also recorded in 1987, which makes Stewart's one of the earliest examples of a format that has become synonymous with home video discs. It's impossible to overstate how important this track is - and how weird it is to hear Stewart on a commentary track. Something about his Old Hollywood bonafides makes this feel like an impossibility. And yet, it's here. And it's solid. Stewart is unpretentious and fittingly bemused by the experience. He has an organic, free-wheeling, game-for-anything spirit that makes it endlessly listenable. If for no other reason, Criterion's disc should be treasured for its preserving this bit of archival history.

The Searchers, meanwhile, has always been a staple of Warner Bros.' home video offering. But it's no overstatement to say this 4K disc, the first from Warner Archive Collection, is one of the finest releases in Warner's catalog - and an exemplar of the format.

A couple years ago, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I saw a 70mm screening of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging and Film Foundation restoration the disc's 2160p/HDR10 presentation is sourced from. It was breathtakingly gorgeous. And so is this 4K disc, which is the closest most of us will ever get to owning a print of the film. Colors pop. Blacks are deep. Everything soars. The DTS-HD 2.0 Mono Master Audio lossless mix is likewise excellent, immersing us in the beauty and horror and humanity of the film.

This release is also stacked with extras: an archival commentary from Peter Bogdanovich, two 30-minute documentaries on the film, newsreel footage of the premiere, an introduction from Patrick Wayne from 1996, 11-plus minutes of outtakes, and nearly 22 minutes of black and white promo pieces from 1956. Short of a full documentary on Ford or a long-forgotten commentary from someone involved in the movie - which surely doesn't exist - this is as complete a package as The Searchers will get. Nothing in this world is a no-brainer - except having this disc in your collection.

For more on The Searchers 4K, go to this link of our other coverage of its release:

https://fulvuedrive-in.com/review/16558/The+Searchers+4K+(1956/4K+Ultra+HD+Blu-ray+w/Bl

And for more on Stewart's Westerns at Universal, see this old review for a DVD set:

https://fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7042/James+Stewart+%e2%80%93+The+Western+Collection

- Dante A. Ciampaglia