"The Searchers" is undoubtedly the ultimate meeting of these two legends who frequently worked together. The direction of John Ford is technically brilliant, while John Wayne easily commands the screen as the lead. Yet there is no escaping the fact that both contribute to the film's weaker elements.

John Wayne tends to split people into two camps: those who say that he was a legend and those who say that he simply couldn't act. He normally depicted the all-American hero, so his hard-bitten, often unsympathetic portrayal of a man not even welcomed by his own family in "The Searchers" was surprising.

It's not a role that seemed to suit him well and he looks uncomfortable throughout the movie. In it he plays an ex-Confederate who sets out to find his niece, captured by Comanche Indians.

Prior to this we witness his family's demise and it's a tense and arresting start to the movie. But Wayne's subsequent five-year journey through the perils of Monument Valley can at times lack excitement. And his bitter determination to kill his niece does not provide positive motivation for the viewer to stick along for the ride. Ultimately Wayne believes that the Indians who killed his family will have defiled her. But Ford fails to deal with this issue, nor the questions raised about Wayne's unpopularity with his family.

Where Ford makes up for unsympathetic characterisation is through the mounting of this handsome film. The Monument Valley setting is captured in an epic sense and there are some fine action set-pieces. On the scale of Westerns this is undoubtedly one of the most grand. But the attempts to examine the darker psyche of the characters that occupy it are not so successful.

Read the DVD review.