How the West Was Won

The fourth nominee for the 1963 Best Picture Oscar was How the West Was Won, which was notable for being the first Cinerama movie to tell a story, and for having some spectacular stunt work. Otherwise, it's a dud.

Chock full of stars, and with three different directors, the film was based on a series of Life magazine articles. It was an extension of the historical belief that western expansion was carried out by plucky white people who were brave and true. Spencer Tracy, in the narration, mentions that the west was "won" from nature and primitive man. I guess then that the Indians were losers.

The thread of the plot covers a smorgasbord of Western tropes. We start with the Prescott family, New Englanders who are headed to Illinois sometime in the 1830s or '40s. Karl Malden is the patriarch, Agnes Moorehead his wife, with Carroll Baker and Debbie Reynolds as his daughters. They take the Erie Canal and then move across Ohio by river. Along the way they meet mountain man James Stewart. Here is one big problem--what is a mountain man doing in Ohio? He says he's on his way to Pittsburgh, but that's a long way to go to get a drink, when St. Louis was already a thriving haven of sin.

Baker and Stewart fall for each other, and he saves them from river pirates. Malden and Moorehead are killed while going down rapids, and Baker decides to build a farm right there, and Stewart stays with her.

Reynolds, though, wants city life, and ends up in St. Louis as an entertainer. She finds out she's been left a gold mine in San Francisco, and joins a wagon train west. The wagon master, Robert Preston, wants to marry her, but she falls in love with a gambler, Gregory Peck.

The story jumps to the Civil War. Baker and Stewart's son, George Peppard, joins up and we see him at the battle of Shiloh. We get a brief cameo of John Wayne as Sherman, with Harry Morgan as Grant. Peppard returns home, finds Baker is dead (Stewart was killed during the war) and decides to head west with the cavalry. He ends up guarding the workers toiling on the Union Pacific, watched over by the unscrupulous Richard Widmark. Peppard is sympathetic to the Indians, whose hunting grounds are destroyed by white settlement. During this segment Henry Fonda has a cameo as a mountain man and buffalo hunter.

Finally, Peppard decides to help his aunt, Reynolds, run her ranch in Arizona. A former lawman, he has to have it out with an outlaw (Eli Wallach).

Cinerama was a process that used three projectors showing on a curved screen. It was a gimmick that didn't last long (there were only about a dozen theaters who could show it), and most of the films were travelogues. Even now, on DVD, one can see the screen divided into three segments. Directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall, there are some exciting scenes, including a buffalo stampede, an Indian attack on the wagon train, and a shootout aboard a moving train. Some of the stunt work is brilliant.

But the script is tin-eared and banal, full of cliches. Amazingly, it won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, a crime of unusual proportions (it beat 8 1/2).

It was the only film to feature Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda, but they didn't appear in any scenes together.