A Movie A Week: HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962) I still went to see the varmint with that pirate girl…
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Week.
[For those who new to the column, A Movie A Week is just that, a dedicated way for me explore vintage cinema every week. I’ll review a movie every Monday and each one will be connected to the one before it via a common thread, either an actor, director, writer, producer or some other crew member. Each film, pulled from my DVD shelf or recorded on the home DVR (I heart TCM) will be one I haven’t seen.]
This week we follow the great character actress with the best porn name ever, Agnes Moorehead, over to the Cinerama epic HOW THE WEST WAS WON, the only studio feature film to be shot and shown in true Cinerama.
Today there are still Cinerama theaters, but they don’t display the technology as it was originally envisioned. They look great, no doubt. I saw LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in 70mm at the Cineramadome in LA and it was mindblowingly clear and massive on the curved screen.
But what’s fascinating about Cinerama is that it is essentially 3-D without the glasses. Projected onto a sharply curved screen that literally fills your peripherals and projected with three different film projectors you are in the action.
This film was also shot with three cameras in a monster rig that was certainly a nightmare to work with, but goddamn… even watching the awesome Blu-Ray Cinerama experience I felt a real difference in depth. For exhibition they would sync up the three different prints through three projectors angled just right and it would form one massive image.
Now the technology (originally developed to train air pilots how to line up enemy planes during WWII) wasn’t perfected. Even in this film you can see the connecting lines where the three film strips run (although there are some really sharp framing decisions made in the film that hide these connectors in vertical lines, like trees and building edges) and there’s some trouble with focus, but overall even on my 61” Toshiba the Cinerama experience is fascinating.
It’s a great technology and there’s a long documentary on the Blu-Ray that details it, where it came from, how they executed it and how the 70mm experience ended up overtaking it fairly quickly because of costs involved in distributing and projecting a Cinerama feature.
Technology is great, amazing and all that, but it doesn’t mean much if the film isn’t good. Luckily this was a great match of technology and material. If anything should have ever been shot in such a sensational way it is an IB Tech western with masters like John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway at the helm.
No question about it, HOW THE WEST WAS WON is a giant America Is The Fucking Best Country EVER movie, a sincere love letter to the days of our burgeoning country. There’s absolutely no way around that aspect of the movie, but it felt sincere to me, not preachy. I think that had a lot to do with the stories that are being told.
The film isn’t one long narrative, but rather a few distinct stories about our pioneering days, highlighting different aspects of the West, with a special focus on the call of opportunity as California’s gold rush kicks up.
Henry Hathaway directed the bulk of the flick, which features a few different stories, including a family headed downriver who meets up with a Mountain Man (James Stewart oddly cast, but it works) and some pirates and then there’s a conman (Gregory Peck) who tails a stage singer (Debbie Reynolds) as she heads west to claim an inherited gold mine. John Ford directed one segment focusing on The Civil War and George Marshall does another segment about the expansion of the railroad.
All of the stories are interconnected and span decades. For instance, Reynolds and Carroll Baker play the single daughters of Karl Malden’s Zeb Prescott whose itchy feet have propelled him West via river travel. Baker ends up falling in love with James Stewart, a Davy Crockett-ish trapper. Stewart is conflicted, though. He’s always been a free man and even though he loves Baker he runs away, afraid of settling down.
This segment has one of my favorite moments of the whole movie as Stewart stops at a riverside store advertising “Likker.” A man I was sure was Lee Van Cleef (turns out I was right) announces Stewart’s arrival and I knew this place was bad news. Yep, they are pirates and they try to kill Stewart, but he gets away injured, but alive.
However, the love of his life and her family are close behind him and stop at the same pirates’ store front. Now here’s where we get to see Stewart do some ass-kicking during the big rescue. Everybody gets a moment here. Malden breaks a chair over Walter Brennan’s kisser, Baker belts a hot pirate girl and Stewart blows a whole group of pirates to shit with a keg of gunpowder thrown on a fire.
This sequence ends with a disastrous trip down the rapids which claims many lives. Baker and Stewart settle down and then we follow Reynolds into the next segment, which takes place years later as she’s an entertainer who catches the eye of a conniving gambler (Gregory Peck).
I particularly liked this section of the film as Peck finds out this hot girl has inherited a gold mine and joins up in a Wagon Train West to go claim it and does everything he can, putting all the charm he has, into winning her over. At the same time the plain, but nice guy running the wagon train (Robert Preston) falls for Reynolds, too, but there’s no spark.
Peck is just cool as ice here, running from debts, but always feeling classy even at his scummiest. He sweet-talks Thelma Ritter (who is looking after Reynolds) and gets her to stake his claim and off they go. Peck shows real heroism on this trip and ultimately wins Reynolds’ heart, but what I liked the most about this (aside from the spectacular Indian attack scene) is that they don’t sugar-coat Peck or Reynolds. Their characters aren’t perfect and this isn’t a romantic comedy.
The Civil War segment (following George Peppard as Baker and Stewart’s son) is probably my least favorite, even though it’s directed by my favorite of the three directors on this project (John Ford) and features a two-or-three-scene cameo by John Wayne as Gen. Sherman. It’s well done and has a really strong moment as Peppard befriends a disillusioned confederate soldier and stops an assassination attempt on Gen. Grant, but ultimately it doesn’t really have its own story.
It serves as more of a set-up for The Railroad segment, which is pretty great mostly because it features Richard Widmark as a ruthless railroad man and Henry Fonda as a hunter with a heart. Peppard goes to work for the railroad and teams with Fonda (an old friend of his father) to deal with the Indians as the railroad makes its way through their land, breaking every promise to the indigenous people along the way.
But the most fun I had with the movie was in Henry Hathaway’s Outlaw segment and that’s because the great Eli Wallach plays a real scumbag gang-leader and trainrobber and the whole thing culminates in a hell of an intense robbery where Peppard (now a sheriff) and Lee J. Cobb hold off Wallach’s gang.
Final Thoughts: Alfred Newman provides a great, rousing score, the Technicolor photography is only made more beautiful by the Cinerama process and it’s just fun to watch all these great actors playing together. This film makes me wish we’d see something similar attempted using digital photography and projection set-ups. It might be limited to museums and theme parks, but it’s a gorgeous technology that really does put the viewer into the world of the film. With digital the edges could be cleaned up and the whole thing made perfectly seamless. Maybe some day…
Upcoming A Movie A Week Titles:
Monday, July 27th: CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948)
Monday, August 3rd: ROPE (1948)
Monday, August 10th: THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944)
Monday, August 17th: TRACK OF THE CAT (1954)
I finish this write-up while on the flight back to Austin from my New York trip where I saw Paul McCartney play Citi Field, which was an awesome experience. Beatles, Wings and some of his recent and solo stuff. He was joined onstage by Billy Joel to sing I SAW HER STANDING THERE and that rocked the place.
There are a couple of things I want to mention, so bear with me a second… McCartney sang A DAY IN THE LIFE, which was a (predominantly) John Lennon song. I thought that was odd, but then he segued from that into a cover of GIVE PEACE A CHANCE and the entire stadium… must have been at least 75,000 people if not more… sang along. It was pretty transcendent.
McCartney and his band also did an instrumental cover of Foxy Lady and McCartney then told a story about Jimi Hendrix covering Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club band. He said that the album came out on a Friday and he went to go see Hendrix the following Saturday night and Hendrix had it down already.
McCartney then mentioned that when using a Whammy bar, as Hendrix was wont to do, the guitar goes extremely out of tune, so after the song Jimi called out into the audience for Eric to come up and re-tune the guitar. Eric being, of course, Eric Clapton. Sweet, right?
Thinking back on that time in music makes me both incredibly sad and incredibly proud. That’s weird, right? But I’m sad as shit that we don’t have that kind of thing permeating the mainstream today, but amazed at the confluence of events that conspired to produce people like McCartney, Lennon, Hendrix, Joplin, Daltrey, Page, Plant, etc. as the leaders in their field.
Anyway, next week we’ll follow both James Stewart and Lee J. Cobb as well as director Henry Hathaway and composer Alfred Newman back a couple of decades from HTWWW to an early work from them both, a noir called CALL NORTHSIDE 777. That’ll be smack dab at the end of Comic-Con, so I hope to have that watched and written, locked and loaded as they say in the war movies, before the Con so the article stands a chance of being even half-way legible.
