How the West Was Won (1962)

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1. 

   DisneyStitch

   It takes a bit of time to get used to the Cinerama aspect but once you do it morphs into a beautifully shot film. The extreme wide angle gives an amazing sense of environment so it's very easy to fall into what you see. Even though it may suffer from the lack of close ups I think it works because the environment on screen is just as important as the characters inhabiting it. This is a story of the characters but also of the untamed west in all its majesty and beauty. 8 years 2 months ago
2. 

   Siskoid

   John Ford may get top director billing, but How the West Was Won is really Henry Hathaway's film, having shot most of it, and really, the BEST parts of it. Ford's famous, I get it, but Hathaway's no slouch (True Grit, Niagara) and here his still shots have a painterly quality, and his movement is visceral, putting the camera right in the action. Now, this was shot in Cinerama, a three-strip process that was only ever used for two movies, what you might call primitive Imax, and sometimes, you can see where the strips join (but very seldom in the restoration). For movie goers getting this experience, it would have been immersive, with the three panel screen going around them. On a flat screen, it's just about the widest image you can get, and the way the camera moves through space, as if through history, has a distorted, fish-eyed, effect that makes the land seem to bulge and move, as if it were alive. The difficulty in converting this into something we can watch without the original technology makes it an even more resonant visual artifact for me. And I do love the music, which I once used for a Western role-playing campaign. Debbie Reynolds is on hand to trigger some diagetic musical numbers. As for the story, we follow different elements of the same family through the history of settling in the West, from Ohio to California and the territories in between. The best parts are the opener - Jimmy Stewart as a mountain man crossing paths with the Prescotts on their dangerous river journey - and the final train sequence that looks truly dangerous. Hathaway's camera is always affixed to a wagon or a horse or a boat, putting you right in the action, and when a man flies, he flies quite a ways. The middle part is where it sags for me, George Peppard not terribly exciting as a naive young man - you're basically waiting for him to grow up - and the non-Hathaway sequences by Ford and Marshall not as exciting as the rest (though I respect the buffalo stampede sequence by the latter). Still, with Spencer Tracy's rousing narration, this feels big and epic and there's more to love than there is to forget. 3 years 8 months ago
3. 

   ClassicLady

   This was beautiful on my 55" HD TV at home. I can only imagine how spectacular it looks on a Cinerama screen. Granted, there were very few close-ups and the sides of the picture seemed to "fish-eye" somewhat. But when used with the right equipment, I think it was an experiment worth trying. 11 years 2 months ago

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