How the West Was Won (1963)

How the West Was Won, a 1963 nominee for Best Picture, is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. It's pretty surprising that it was nominated for an Academy Award, frankly, because it isn't that good of a movie in terms of its plot (although it won an Academy Award for its screenplay) or the overall quality of the film. Perhaps it was the novelty of a Western shot in Cinerama that helped it make the cut for the top five of the year. Despite its somewhat creaky plot and hokey situations and wildly different directing styles from the three (!) directors and at-times wooden acting, I still love this movie. It doesn't really pretend to be more than it really is: an old-fashioned story that spans several generations of a family and how its members came to experience the westward expansion of the United States. It's a pretty thrilling adventure spanning river pirates, the Gold Rush, wagon trains, the Civil War, the building of the railroads, the conflicts with Native Americans; almost every piece of our western heritage is squeezed in somewhere.

Almost everyone imaginable is in this film. It's like playing a game of "who's who" as you watch. Just a short list: John Wayne (in a cameo as General Sherman), Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart (the first person we see on screen), Karl Malden, Gregory Peck (a rather oily gambler), George Peppard, Eli Wallach, Richard Widmark (up to his usual tough-guy antics), Walter Brennan (as a river pirate, of all things), Robert Preston, Harry Morgan (briefly scene as General Grant), Andy Devine--if they'd ever been in a Western, they appeared in How the West Was Won. It's a movie lover's kind of movie. But that list looks very male, doesn't it? There are women in the film, Carroll Baker chief among them in the early scenes (oddly enough, playing the daughter of her Baby Doll co-star, Karl Malden) and Carolyn Jones in the last part of the film. Still, most Western films are about the ways that men tamed the land, and this film is no exception, I guess. The film even has Spencer Tracy as the narrator to help bring that point home.

Oddly enough, though, the central character, the one whose story lasts throughout the film, is Lilith (Lily) Prescott, played by Debbie Reynolds. The film is quite a showcase for Reynolds' talent. She gets to act and sing and dance, and if you know anything about her career, you know that Reynolds could do all three of those well. When the film starts, she's a young woman heading west with her family. She gets to endure a raft ride down the Erie Canal that's quite remarkable in its execution on film. She also rides west as part of a wagon train, where she is pursued by two men, Peck and Preston (who makes perhaps the worst, most unromantic marriage proposal in the history of movies). She works in dance halls and on steamboats as an entertainer. She eventually marries Peck's gambler, only to have to sell off her accumulated wealth to return to farm life with her nephew, played by Peppard, after her husband's death. It's a role with a lot of range, and Reynolds is never less than exciting on screen. I particularly enjoyed seeing a Western that has a female character as its central focus (most of the time).

I also like the smaller parts played by two of my favorites. Agnes Moorehead, a year before she became Endora, plays the Prescott matriarch, and she brings her arch sense of humor to the few lines that she gets; she has quite a foil in Malden as her Quaker husband. (One of the funniest moments for me is seeing what is quite obviously a burly stuntman taking Moorehead's place during the scene on the rapids; another hulking brute stands in for Baker, and it's pretty obvious that the camera isn't far enough away for us to be fooled.) The other highlight is seeing the always reliable Thelma Ritter as a single woman "of a certain age" who is still looking for a man. She becomes Reynolds' sidekick for much of the middle part of the film, and who could ask for a better one? I love how Ritter's character, Agatha Clegg, still believes she's a young woman. She says to Reynolds not long after they meet: "I've got a feeling you're gonna draw men like fish to bait. Maybe I can catch one of them while they swim by." Ritter, just like Moorehead, was always good in whatever movie she was in; even if the material wasn't good, you could count on her to rise above it.

I have seen this film twice on the big screen. And when I say the big screen, I mean in true Cinerama. Twice since its remodeling a few years ago, the Cinerama Dome (over at the Arclight Cinemas) has shown How the West Was Won. If they show it again, I'll go back and see it again. It's one of the few Cinerama films still in existence, apparently. (The Arclight has also shown This Is Cinerama a couple of times; that's also a must-see.) Nothing quite prepares you for the experience of witnessing this film the way it was originally intended to be shown. You can see the seams where the three images captured by the different cameras overlap (sometimes smoothly, others not as much), but the size and scope of the film are really best appreciated on a screen that large. It is almost as if you are in the movie itself. Watching it on my television at home, even with the letterboxed version, just wasn't quite the same. You need the curved Cinerama screen to make the images look the proper way, but I still have the same affection for this movie even if I'm sitting on the couch in my living room.

The great John Ford directed the scenes set during the Civil War period, and George Marshall was in charge of those under the heading of "The Railroad." That leaves the rest--entitled "The Rivers, The Plains, The Outlaws"--in the hands of Henry Hathaway. In fact, Hathaway must have directed most of the film, considering that the Civil War and railroad sequences take up less than an hour of screen time. And even with a running time of about 162 minutes, it's still a thrilling, action-packed film. We get whitewater rapids, an Indian attack on a wagon train, the Battle of Shiloh, a buffalo stampede, and even a robbery of a moving train. Add to that the panoramic views of the various western locales such as Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, and you have a large-scale spectacular that only a major studio like MGM could have attempted.

The film ends the way it begins, with Tracy's voiceover narration describing the taming of the West. However, I still prefer the narrative's true ending. Reynolds' Lily is moving to Arizona to start a ranch with her nephew, Peppard's Zeb Rawlings, and his family. She's already endured at least forty years of adventures traveling across the country, yet she still seems eager for a new challenge. In its attempt to encompass so large a subject as the history of westward expansion, How the West Was Won really comes to a close with the scene of the family riding through the Arizona desert surrounded only by those large monuments of stone. They may be dwarfed by the landscape, but they are ready to tackle whatever comes their way.