A new 4K restoration of John Ford’s monumental western THE SEARCHERS (1956), starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood, will run at Film Forum from Friday, September 13 through Thursday, September 19.

After John Wayne returns home to Texas from the Civil War, he sets out to track down the surviving members of his family who’ve been abducted by Comanches. With Jeffrey Hunter, they go on a dangerous multi-year quest to rescue his kidnapped niece Natalie Wood.

“THE SEARCHERS showed Ford’s willingness to make a more ‘modern’-seeming Western for an audience that wanted greater psychological realism from the genre… the film turns the concept of Western heroism inside out, showing the lone gunman who acts in the name of nascent civilization as a warped, destructive force.” – Joseph McBride in Searching for John Ford