Would either man have achieved their iconic status in film history without the other? Hard to say, really, but I case could be made Ford would have been fine and Wayne vanished forgotten had the former not given the latter star treatment in his 1939 classic Stagecoach. It was here the actor exploded into the public's consciousness as wily gunfighter The Ringo Kid, and from that point on Wayne's obscurity was ended and the era of The Duke began.
Now Warner Bros. celebrates Ford and Wayne's collaboration with an eight film, ten disc box set spanning almost two decades in the working relationship between these two titans of Hollywood. Unlike most sets from the studio, Warner keeps the special features to a minimum, three of the films (They Were Expendable, 3 Godfathers and The Wings of Eagles) containing nothing more than a theatrical trailer. Other titles (The Long Voyage Home, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) include the usual features found in these collections, most notably short featurettes on their making produced by Turner Classic Movies (TCM). (Ribbon does include one major treat, and that's the inclusion of some of Ford's own home movies taken while he was out scouting locations for this second part of his famed Calvary Trilogy.)
Not that any of this matters, especially with the bells and whistles on the two-disc special editions of Stagecoach and The Searchers. A set featuring these two titles alone would be worth the price of purchase. These discs are the crème de la crème, fantabulous features representing landmarks in Hollywood history so strong and stirring it's rare that you'll find anything better. These are classics, and in the case of The Searchers one of the greatest films ever made, and Warner Bros. goes out of there way to give these movies their historic due on DVD.
Stagecoach may be where the Western as we know it got its start. This is the story of a group of disparate travelers (led by drunken doctor Thomas Mitchell, kind-hearted saloon girl Claire Trevor and rigidly proper gambler John Carradine) heading across Monument Valley, the danger of vicious native attacks dogging them every step of the journey. Along the way they pick up The Duke, deal with a pregnancy and even have time to engage in a little bit of romance. It's a kitchen sink Western, every cliché in the genre playbook on vigorous and exuberant display, in many cases for the very first time.
The two disc special edition DVD of Stagecoach is about as good as they come. There is a great profile of Ford and Wayne's first broadcast on the long-running PBS "American Masters" television series, a solid TCM featurette, the original radio adaptation with Claire Trevor and Randolph Scott, and – of course – the film's theatrical trailer. Best of all is an audio commentary from Ford biographer Scott Eyman, one of the best scholarly commentaries I've ever heard. The film is wonderfully restored from its original nitrate elements, and while it definitely shows its age the spectacular chases and gunfights still ring as audacious and true today as they must have back in 1939.
Made almost twenty years later, the 1956 classic The Searchers might just be the greatest Western ever made. Personally, I think it is one of the top ten or twenty motion pictures of all time, each viewing something exciting and new pops off the screen for me to experience. This is why Warner's original DVD release of the film was always so disappointing. Audiences deserved better than that sad version of the epic, the sound and colors so washed out and muddy putting it out on the marketplace at all was borderline criminal.
Well the studio has redeemed themselves beautifully with this deluxe collector's edition. Not only is this dark, brooding revisionist Western gorgeously restored (the lusty VistVision images have never looked better), the special features included with the package or as informative and entertaining as they come. There are two outstanding documentaries; "The Searchers: An Appreciation" and "A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne, and The Searchers"; great behind the scenes footage with Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter and of Monument Valley, the theatrical trailer, and introduction to the film by Patrick Wayne and an entertainingly informative audio commentary by director Peter Bogdanovich. Also included are original 1956 reproductions of the Dell comic book adaptation, the original press book, filmmaker memos, correspondence and ten behind-the-scenes postcards.
As for the film, The Searchers is arguably one of the best motion pictures you will ever see. For me, the only two that come close are Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but as good as those two are I'm not even sure they'd exist without The Searchers, as such I can't help but give Ford and Wayne's triumph the slight edge. It is the five year journey of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) to find the band of Comanche Indians who massacred his brother's family and took the youngest female child captive. He is joined by Martin Pawley (Hunter), a man he is forced to trust even as he hates the fact that the fellow searcher has a bit of Indian blood running through his veins.
The quest becomes an odyssey Odysseus himself would be proud of, the duo battling the elements, natives, soldiers and each other as they trek from the great southwest all the way to the Canadian border to find the child and kill those responsible for taking her. The great question lingering through it all, however, is whether or not Ethan's journey is to save the girl or to kill her, his hatred for Indians so strong that just the thought of her living amongst them for so long practically driving him mad.
While the John Wayne-John Ford Collection doesn't have the same bells and whistles usually associated with boxed collections from Warner Bros., what it lacks in bonus feature quantity it certainly makes up for it in cinematic quality. With nary a bad seed in the lot, this collection has more certified classics than almost any other in recent DVD memory. All eight of the films are monstrously entertaining in and of themselves, but more than that, they are also an enlightening look at a working relationship between director and star that, more so than almost any other, can truly be called legendary.