John Ford’s 1956 Western is brilliant, epic, and very, very dark. John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter play two men on a long, dangerous search to find a young girl taken by a band of Indians who slaughtered her family. What sounds like a standard search-and-rescue mission turns out to be anything but, and its unexpected layers, like Wayne’s uncharacteristically nuanced performance, make The Searchers a haunting, stirring Western. Natalie Wood co-stars.