Screenings
Part of the series Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind: Joan Didion and Cinema
The Searchers
TUE NOV 15, 7:30 PM
Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Visit the exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means before the film. Galleries will be open until 7:30 p.m.
“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours,” wrote Joan Didion, “he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” Hers was a profile of a complicated icon. Wayne’s turn in The Searchers as a Civil War veteran determined to exact revenge upon the Comanche tribe that murdered his family and abducted his niece is arguably the finest of his career, the keystone of director John Ford’s inquiry into the psychosis of American racism.
(1956, dir. John Ford, 35mm, color, 119 min.)
