How the West Was Won (Blu-ray)

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You want big? Really big? I mean the biggest possible screen and cast and production imaginable? That's "How the West Was Won," not just the biggest film of 1962 but one of the biggest films of all time. No, it's not one of the greatest films of all time, but it is one of the most spectacular, and while no home screen can hope to compete with a full-sized Cinerama theater screen, the ultrawide Blu-ray presentation is an enjoyable, small-scale substitute.

By the early 1950s, television was making an impact on the way people were getting their entertainment. The picture tube in the living room fascinated people, and they didn't see the necessity of going out to the movies as often as they had. The movies fought back with more color, more splash, and bigger screens. Hollywood wanted to give audiences something they couldn't get at home. So they got Cinerama and CinemaScope. But it was Cinerama that was really big, so big it often required three separate projectors and three wraparound screens to encompass it. That's the effect we get in MGM's "How the West Was Won," presented here in an aspect ratio that Warner Bros. claim on their packaging is 2.89:1. Now, that's big.

And not only is the screen big, the cast is big. The movie is 162 minutes long and stars Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark. Spencer Tracy narrates, and Brigid Bazlen, Walter Brennan, David Brian, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Harry Morgan, Thelma Ritter, Mickey Shaughnessy, Russ Tamblyn, and others co-star.

How big again? So big it needed three directors to handle its various sections: John Ford ("Stagecoach," "My Darling Clementine," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers"), Henry Hathaway ("Rawhide," "From Hell to Texas," "True Grit"), and George Marshall ("Destry Rides Again," "Riding High," "Fancy Pants"). This is because the film covers about fifty years in America's history, from 1839-1889, and the filmmakers divvy up the duties of telling multiple stories within this context.

There are actually five major sequences in the movie: Hathaway covers the first two sections, "The Rivers" and "The Plains"; Ford handles "The Civil War"; Marshal handles "The Railroad"; and Hathaway comes back to finish up with "The Outlaws." It's sort of a like a series of mini-Westerns in one picture. Let me go over them briefly.

The movie begins with a four-and-and-half minute overture, sounding nice in its remixed Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. It contains snippets of music from composer Alfred Newman, and later in the movie we hear songs from Sammy Cahn and Johnny Mercer, with folksinging by Dave Guard (at the time newly departed from the Kingston Trio) and the Whiskey Hill Singers. The first half of the film, especially, contains a good deal of music and song. It's one of the best things about it.

The 1840s set the stage for the first segment of the story, which shows us the earliest pioneer families moving West along the Erie Canal to Ohio, Illinois, and beyond. In the film we will follow several generations of one such family, the Prescotts, headed up by papa Zebulon (Karl Malden) and his marriageable daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lillith (Debbie Reynolds). Moseying into their company comes mountain man Linus Rawlings (James Stewart), who takes a reluctant shine to daughter Eve.

The scenery, shot on location all over the U.S. from Kentucky to Monument Valley, from South Dakota to California, with spectacular vistas of hills, mountains, valleys, and prairies, is another particularly engaging quality of the film. But you would expect a film with so wide a scope to employ the biggest scale and the most gorgeous panoramas possible.

Yes, the scenery is terrific, the adventures are episodic but fun, and the romance is inevitable. Clearly, too, the film means for much of the adventure to take advantage of the wide screen--things like the shooting of the rapids, the charge of cavalry soldiers, and the truly awesome stampede of buffalo.

Next, we move into the 1850s, and folks have discovered gold in California, bringing even more people West. Daughter Lillith Prescott by this time has left the family and become an entertainer. While moving westward, a wagonmaster (Robert Preston) and a tinhorn gambler (Gregory Peck) both take a shine to her. Also by this time we can see that the movie is far too big, too sprawling, and often too slow-moving for its own good, yet the multitude of stars and the absolute beauty of the settings are enough to keep our attention.

The intermission (of course, there's an intermission, complete with entr'acte music) comes at the eighty-four-minute mark, and for a theater audience it probably couldn't have come too soon. At home, at least we have the "Pause" button.

We take up next with Ford's contribution, the Civil War of the 1860s. Linus has gone off to fight in the War, and his and Eve's son, Zeb (George Peppard), soon follows after him. Oddly, even with the brief presence of John Wayne as General William Tecumseh Sherman and Harry Morgan as General Ulysses S. Grant, this is probably the least-effective segment in the film. It moves with an uneasy, uncomfortable gait and seems to go by almost unnoticed.

Next, we get the 1870s, the pony express, the telegraph, and the opening of the West to the railroads, the Central Pacific from one end and the Union Pacific from the other. In this section we find Henry Fonda as a buffalo hunter and old mountain-man friend of Linus, who meets up with Linus's son Zeb, now a cavalry officer assigned to protect the railroads from hostile American Natives. Richard Widmark plays a no-good railroad man. The highlight is the buffalo stampede.