How the West Was Won (Blu-ray)

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The final segment of the film takes place in the 1880s, as cattlemen, sheep ranchers, and settlers have pretty much tamed the West, although they don't exactly live in harmony with one another. This brings up the need for lawmen, and our friend Zeb is now a middle-aged Arizona Marshal. Lee J. Cobb plays his fellow lawman, Marshal Lou Ramsey, and his nemesis is the villainous Charley Gant, played by Eli Wallach. (It would be a few more years before Wallach did the "Ugly" in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." More amazingly, Wallach, in his nineties as of this writing, is still acting in films.) So, the last section is an old-fashioned Western gunslinger affair in the manner of "High Noon."

Anyway, as I keep saying, this thing is big. It covers fifty years and has more familiar faces in it than practically any film before or since. "How the West Was Won" managed to win Oscars for Best Editing, Sound, and Writing, which, ironically, I thought were the weakest parts of the picture but lost out for Best Picture, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Music, most of which I thought were stronger than the categories in which it won. What do I know.

Video:
Warner Bros. went out of their way to present the movie as best as they could. The copy is pristine, with hardly a trace of age, excessive grain, noise, scratches, flecks, or specks. What's more, the studio engineers not only present it in a normal widescreen but in a special "SmileBox" transfer that attempts to duplicate the way the film might have looked in a Cinerama theater with its gigantic wraparound screen. I found this "SmileBox" presentation fairly awkward, however, the "SmileBox" title a description of the way the image curls up (and down) at the sides to simulate the edges of the screen being closer to the viewer. I also found some degree of distortion at the sides of the picture, so I watched the movie in its regular home-theater form.

The video engineers use a pair of dual-layer Blu-ray BD50s and a VC-1 encode to do up the two versions of the film properly. As I said earlier, the studio claims on the packaging that the home-theater screen ratio is 2.89:1, the same as I measured (given about 5% overscan in my current TV), the widest film I have ever watched in my home. More important, the picture quality is excellent. The Technicolor comes up looking very natural, the definition looks fine, and, given that the filmmakers shot much of the film on location, the screen looks free of much grain, except that which is undoubtedly inherent to the original print. There were a few moments where I noticed the three separate screen divisions, but it's a concern hardly worth mentioning.

Audio:
The choices in English are regular Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby TrueHD 5.1. The latter is slightly smoother and more spacious than the former, but it is still a bit hard and flat, with voices sometimes sounding a mite nasal and hollow. It's fine at the frequency extremes, though, with a strong dynamic impact, a wide front-channel stereo response, and a touch of surround. While the TrueHD does a good job with the movie's music, it does an even better job in the big battle scenes and the buffalo stampede.

Extras:
Disc one of this two-disc Blu-ray set contains the regular widescreen, high-def version of the film and three major bonus items in standard definition. The first item is an exceptionally instructive audio commentary by filmmaker David Strohmaier, director of Cinerama, Inc. John Sittig, film historian Rudy Behlmer, music historian Jon Burlingame, and stuntman Loren James. The second item is a 2008 documentary, "Cinerama Adventure," a comprehensive, ninety-seven-minute history of the super-widescreen process, in which I counted about eighteen chapter stops. The third item is a non-anamorphic widescreen theatrical trailer, truncated in width.

The extras on disc one wrap up with forty-one scene selections; English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Disc two contains the SmileBox transfer, which replicates the Cinerama wraparound theatrical experience I mentioned above. There are again forty-one scene selections but no other extras.

The two discs come housed in the front and back of a Digibook package, which includes forty-four glossy pages of information, pictures, illustrations, posters, maps, and memorabilia. First class.

Parting Thoughts:
There is no denying the spectacle, the adventure, and the romance in "How the West Was Won," with Spencer Tracy's narration lending the enterprise a proper and lasting dignity. Nevertheless, I found the movie far too long, and I admit I occasionally lost interest in its piecemeal construction. I'm not sure it's the kind of film a person is going to want to watch too often, at least not in its entirety, yet it's a film whose various parts might well stick in memory for quite some time.

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