The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Western (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series) - Softcover

The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Western goes beyond auteur issues with striking formulations of the historical, social, and even geographical context surrounding the film. . . . The result is the best kind of auteur and genre criticism, deepening our appreciation of a film classic, providing new information on its production, [and] intelligent treatment of its thematic richness and connection to American history and culture."--Stephen Prince "Virginia Tech, author of Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968 "

The unique appeal of The Searchers lies in its essential irrationality, its mystery, its refusal of conventional narrative logic. Nowhere is this clearer than in the responses to the film found in an engaging new anthology of essentially adulatory essays on the film edited by Arthur Eckstein and Peter Lehman."--Film Quarterly

A richer, highly ambitious book is the collection of essays on The Searchers edited by Arthur M. Echstein and Peter Lehman. The quality of the writing in this book is consistently high, and each contributor approaches his/her essay with an in-depth knowledge of The Searchers. This collection offers a series of comprehensive, accessible and authoritative essays on a film that will continue to intrigue and enthrall us for the foreseeable future. It won't be the last-ever word on The Searchers; but as an anthology of disparate interpretations, it deserves to be the definitive one."--Film International

Arthur M. Eckstein is professor of History at University of Maryland. Peter Lehman is Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University. He is author of Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity and editor of Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture.