Harry Carey Jr. followed his father, the silent Western star turned talkies character icon Harry Carey (who died in 1947), into the movies. Despite memorable roles in Howard Hawks’s “Red River,” the Disney Western TV serial “Spin and Marty,” and something on the order of 100 other TV and movie oaters, Carey Jr.’s name, like his father’s before him, is most closely associated with director John Ford (1894–1973). Mr. Carey’s association with Ford was long and intimate, so much so that in the mid-1990s he wrote a book about his collected experiences called “Company of Heroes.”

The book is unusually honest and perceptive about life on both sides of the camera. Mr. Carey is candid about his own triumphs and failings and gentle about those of his co-stars and collaborators. He describes “Uncle Jack” Ford, for instance, whose Jekyll and Hyde directing style made his stock company of actors co-dependently loyal as “a human slot machine who kept you gamely hoping for three cherries.”

Over the phone, Mr. Carey, now in his 80s, speaks easily and unaffectedly about picture-making the John Ford way. Until, that is, one Ford title in particular comes up — 1956’s “The Searchers.”

“It’s my favorite John Ford film,” Mr. Carey says, matter-of-factly at first, “and not ’cause I’m in it.” But when pressed to describe what about “The Searchers” sets it apart from the rest of the Ford cannon, he uncharacteristically struggles to find words. “There’s a mood about it … There’s a feel to it,” he offers cautiously, “that really gets under your skin. It affects me emotionally, tremendously — it hits me right where I live every time I see it.” He sounds almost apprehensive about the film and its effect on him. I know the feeling.

“The Searchers” will screen tonight as part of “Give Thanks for John Ford,” a Ford mini-retrospective programmed by Jake Perlin at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematek. I’ve seen the picture maybe 10 times, but the experience of watching it has grown in emotional intensity in the last half decade — so much so that I’m usually in tears by the time composer Max Steiner’s lurid orchestral fanfare gives way to the Sons of the Pioneers rendition of the title theme — a song that will be stuck in my head for weeks after the lights come up.

“What makes a man to wander?” the Pioneers ask in three part harmony,”What makes a man to roam? What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on home?” While I know their musical questions are rhetorical, I’ve been scouring John Ford’s “The Searchers” for the answers since I first saw it in a high school film studies class. In those days I’d already seen “The Grapes of Wrath,” “They Were Expendable,” “How Green Was My Valley,” and several other Ford pictures. But watching “The Searchers” during three successive weekday mornings, I couldn’t find the same reassuring sentimentality and tempo that had made Ford’s film world such a reassuring place to crawl into.

“The Searchers,” is set in a hardscrabble landscape where white settlers and rampaging Comanches (many played by white actors in skin-darkening make-up) fight a guerrilla war over desert real estate that seems hardly worth the bother. A free-booting ex-confederate soldier named Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) rides out of the titles to visit his settler brother and family, only to be called away in a makeshift posse pursuing a marauding band of Comanches. The posse comes up empty handed. Worse, when Ethan returns, his bother, sister-in-law, and their children have been slaughtered, brutalized, or kidnapped, and their house burned to cinders.

The bulk of the film depicts Ethan, accompanied by a half-breed whom Ethan’s late brother had taken in, criss-crossing the West in search of Debby, the sole living member of Ethan’s family. As the movie months stretch into movie years, the reality of who Debby has likely become and the homicidal hatred driving Ethan through the seasons promises that when and if they are reunited, Debby’s fate at her uncle’s hands will be unpleasant.

Fifty years after its release, the film still polarizes as much as it hypnotizes first-timers. There seems to be a line in the film buff sand that “Searchers” virgins have to want to cross. Part of the problem lies with those who unintentionally drew the line in the first place. Writing in Film Comment many years ago, the director Joe Dante described his film school experiences at NYU in the late 60s. Before screening “The Searchers,” Mr. Dante’s then NYU teacher, Martin Scorsese, announced above the groans of his students that the film they were going to see was a John Wayne Western. Wayne’s politically and dramatically myopic vanity picture “The Green Berets” was in theaters at the time. Mr. Scorsese had to position himself at the classroom door with a squirt gun and threaten to fail anyone who tried to leave before the film was over.

Mr. Scorsese and the screenwriter Paul Schrader cite “The Searchers” as a key influence on “Taxi Driver,” a film with a similarly disenfranchised, obsessive antihero driving toward an equally ugly possible confrontation. Steven Spielberg maintains that he has screened “The Searchers” prior to making every one of his movies, and George Lucas quoted liberally from the film in the first (or fourth) “Star Wars” movie in 1977.

The reputations of the film’s august fan club seem to overload expectations. “The Searchers” has become trapped in a paradigmatic “best” versus a personal “favorite” impressionist limbo. A recent review of an anniversary DVD of “The Searchers” on the Slate Web site is typical of latter day resistance to the film’s supposed perfection. The reviewer describes the film as “preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternatively sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring.”

“The Searchers,” the author Jonathan Lethem responds, “is attackable but it’s also beautifully defendable.”As a college freshman, Mr. Lethem was so caught up in his debut viewing of the film that he spontaneously lectured his restless, heckling fellow students on what they weren’t seeing when the print broke midscreening. But mounting an effective defense for a film midway through his first exposure to it proved to be a tall order.”I’d love to think,” he writes in “Defending the Searchers: Scenes in the life of an Obsession,” an essay that details his tempestuous personal relationship with the film, “that I called for judgment withheld in favor of the possibility that ‘The Searchers’ had been put together by artists with something to say, artists with a self-consciousness, possibly even a sense of irony, of their own. Of course, I didn’t. I was 19.”

Recalling the experience today, Mr. Lethem says that instead of winning over a crowd taking verbal pot-shots at the picture, “I switched the target from John Wayne to me.” His college status sacrifice is about to be rewarded, though. Mr. Lethem will introduce this evening’s 6:50 show.

“In a funny way, this is sort of a victory lap,” he said of tonight’s presentation. “I wrote this essay all about how I got in trouble lecturing people in a movie theater about ‘The Searchers,’ and now I get to reenact that, presumably with a happier vibe.”

By the time “The Searchers” begam shooting, Wayne, Carey, and the other stock company regulars had a track record of off-set card games, communal meals, and booze-ups that were just part of the process of making movies on location with Ford. But during “The Searchers” shoot, Mr. Carey remembers, Wayne “wasn’t as lighthearted as he usually was. He sort of kept Ethan with him and lived the part the whole time we were shooting. You could tell it really had a grip on him.”

Personally, I think that in order to feast on the film, you have to have had a taste of Ethan’s pain — you have to accept “the contradiction of the beauty and hatefulness of Ethan’s obsession,” as Mr. Lethem puts it. You have to have felt the same grip that John Wayne did. In some way you have to have learned, like Ethan, that the worthiest journeys are sometimes undertaken for the most hateful reasons and that the things you seek to recapture are the things most likely to be inalterably changed if you do find them.

Mr. Lethem says that he no longer feels “that my own sensibility is being attacked when people don’t like the movie. It’s supposed to freak people out. It’s exactly as dreadful and contradictory and beautiful as our national history.”

I don’t resent it went people don’t “get” “The Searchers,” any more than I feel guilty about taking a decade or more to become as obsessed by the film as Mr. Lethem was halfway through his first viewing. If the rage, hurt, and regret that is at the dark heart of John Ford’s wonderful-terrible film doesn’t speak to you, you have my envy.

Through November 29 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).