Things seem to be going wrong when members of his brother's family are killed or kidnapped by the Commanche, where veteran civil war veteran Ethan Edwards pledges to do the job that could save the rest of the family. Now, Edwards is trying to track down his surviving relatives and rescue them from the Indian tribe before they die.
There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here (forever excluded from home, as the doorway shots at beginning and end suggest), but it hardly matters, given the film's visual splendou
The final shot of this genuine epic says everything the Western ever had to say about the price of the American frontier and those forgotten bones upon which a nation was built.
Film4
May 13, 2008
A mature, dark, ambivalent piece that helped pave the way for the modern western.
Some fine vignettes of frontier life in the early southwest and a realistic presentation of the difficulties faced by the settlers in carving out a homestead in dangerous Indian country.
