Classic Movie Review: How the West Was Won

By Josh Spiegel

September 4, 2009

My gun is bigger than your gun.

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Though it's a bit of a cheap comparison, before there was IMAX, there was Cinerama. IMAX, as you may or may not know, is the filmmaking format that enables various people, from Christopher Nolan and Michael Bay to nature-film directors, to make films or sequences that can fill a six-story screen. IMAX, at its best, engulfs the audience member in the film, immersing them in a movie more than any other format ever has. However, before IMAX came about, there were Cinerama domes and Cinerama filmmaking. As incredible as Cinerama was, only two feature films were ever made in that format. One of them was the 1962 epic Western How The West Was Won.

Recently, How The West Was Won was released on the Blu-ray format in a groundbreaking edition, which lets you watch the film in, essentially, the right way: one of the two discs has a Cinerama-style version that curves the screen as Cinerama domes did when presenting films in the unique format. Even on a high-definition TV screen, it is just a bit staggering to see some of the helicopter shots, where the camera gives us just about a real panorama of the Western plains, the mountains, the rolling hills. Unfortunately, How The West Was Won is 162 minutes long, and those awe-inspiring shots make up only a few minutes.

Yes, How The West Was Won is another epic from the age when epics were just about the most boring things coming out of Hollywood. Here we have a film with countless actors, all of whom are working here simply because of the massive proportions upon which the film is based. Where else would you see a film featuring actors like James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Karl Malden, Debbie Reynolds, Robert Preston, Lee J. Cobb, Eli Wallach, Walter Brennan, Richard Widmark, and George Peppard? There are even more actors here, but these are among the biggest in a film that's so big that it had three — yes, that number is correct — directors, including the iconic John Ford. Oh, and the narrator was Spencer Tracy. Like I said, we're talking a big movie here.




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Big, as always, doesn't always mean good, though. Five vignettes make up the entirety of How The West Was Won, as we follow the Prescotts through 50 years of Western growth. First, the Prescotts are a simple family heading toward California; lonely daughter Eve (Carroll Baker) meets Linus Rawlings, a real-life mountain man, and is immediately attracted beyond even her wildest fantasies. At first, Linus is, while being attracted to the younger woman, not interested in settling down after such a long time of being a loner. Moreover, he is meant to be a bad man, someone who might not make such a fine fit with a proper, prim woman like Eve.

Here again, the movie doesn't work for one simple reason: Linus is played by Stewart, an actor who cannot, despite his films with Alfred Hitchcock or Anthony Mann, pull off a line such as this: "Eve, I'm a sinful man. I'm deep, dark, sinful. I'm on the way to Pittsburgh to be sinful again." No, Jimmy. No, you're not going to be sinful in Pittsburgh, or any other town, for that matter. It's one thing for Stewart and Baker, working with a nearly 25 year age difference, to get involved in the movie, but it's another thing entirely for Stewart, not Baker, to be playing the sinful one. Even in his darker roles, Stewart works from a place of subversion, as the filmmakers let the audience know that they're playing with the idea of the icon being the nicest man in Hollywood.


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