The Searchers

(1956; screens Wednesday at 3 p.m.)

John Wayne is the gruff frontiersman whose search for a child (Natalie Wood) taken captive by the Indians becomes his entire life in this John Ford Western, which is a central myth of the genre and one of the greatest of all American films. A generation of Hollywood filmmakers -- Lucas, Spielberg, Schrader, Scorsese -- have seen the mixture of racism and heroism in Wayne's character as a sign of acute moral complexity, the white-American way of regarding the world.