HOW THE WEST WAS WON: Blu-ray (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Cinerama Corp. 1962) Warner Home Video
In hindsight, it is the awkwardness
of the process that remains at the forefront of this monumental and often
breathtaking excursion – Cinerama’s inability to satisfy the audience’s need
for an occasional close-up of its glittering roster of talent, the warping of
vertical objects to the extreme left and right of center, and, the incalculable
vastness of these wide-open spaces, dramatically put on display ‘measure for
measure’ to satisfy the human periphery of natural sight, give pause to
more than a handful of less than dramatically satisfying moments. Mercifully,
James R. Webb’s screenplay – based on his own series of LIFE magazine articles
– interpolates the hysterical dramatics and multiple romantic threads
intertwined throughout, with more than a fair share of exhilarating action
sequences, for which Cinerama is chiefly adept; a superbly staged battle
between George Peppard’s Zeb Rawlings and a gaggle of desperadoes aboard a
runaway train, and better still, an earth – and ear-shattering buffalo
stampede, lensed via a series of heart-pounding long shots, all show off the
Cinerama process to its best advantage while keeping the sporadically stagnant
plot moving in a forward direction.
How The West Was
Won is never a bad movie. On occasion, it even aspires to become rather a
good one. But on the whole, it remains episodic and utterly devoted to
extolling the virtues of Cinerama. The stars are not so cleverly arranged in
center frame, or artificially fitted across a static tableau as animated
waxworks trapped inside a copy of an original by Frederick Remington. We get
halcyon sunsets, bird’s eye views of the mountains and plains, Gatlin guns, ten
gallons, and garters all appropriately glistening in the early morning dew or
lightly battered in well-traveled dust at dusk. As How The West Was Won
is a byproduct of Hollywood’s then expiring studio system, its’ view about the
‘civilizing’ of the American West is highly sanitized and problematic. The good
guys all sport a sort of unfettered Roy Rogers’ cleanliness, despite enduring
wild animal and Indian attacks, a harrowing trek down some truly vicious
white-water rapids (shot mostly with rear-projection plates), an assault by
some lusty river pirates (helmed by the marvelous Walter Brennan), and, a
wagon-train’s staggeringly bleak nomadic journey from outpost to outpost, its
settler class in search of its own piece of the manifest destiny.
The first half of How The West
Was Won follows the ill-witted migration of the Prescott family;
God-fearing Quaker, Zebulon (Karl Malden), his pert wife, Rebecca (Agnes
Moorehead) and their three children, eldest, book-read daughter, Eve (Carol
Baker), feisty, Lilith (Debbie Reynolds) and their youngest, nondescript son,
Sam (Kim Charney). Along the road they befriend an unusually cultured fur
trapper, Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart – just a wee too long in the tooth to
play the amiable love interest). Fate deals a brutal hand to the Prescott clan.
Zeb and Rebecca are lost after the family’s raft is wrecked in the white-water
rapids. While Eve vows to plant her roots in this cold, but fertile land where
her parents’ remains have only just begun to ferment, later establishing a
semi-prosperous homestead, Lilith strikes out on an ambitious trek across the
wilderness to discover and test the depth, strength and merits of her own
mettle. On this journey, she befriends an aged spinster, Agetha Clegg (the
irrepressible, but woefully underused Thelma Ritter) and garners more than
passing interests from two men; Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck), a no-account
riverboat dandy and notorious gambler, and, wagon-train master, Roger Morgan
(Robert Preston), who perhaps has Lilith’s better intentions at heart. It
really doesn’t matter because Peck is the bigger star herein, and since the
second act of this sprawling epic is already shaping up to belong to Debbie
Reynolds, Peck’s card shark – newly reformed, no less – inevitably gets the
girl.
It all might have turned out rather
swell, except the producers of this grandiloquent odyssey cannot resist the
urge to depart from these established characters, interceding with bits of
unnecessary ‘history’ that is neither true to history itself, but has the
audacity to pretend in its place, merely to offer a few more familiar faces
their momentary glimpse in this passing parade. In Acts II and III, How The
West Was Won begins to take on the vagrant flavoring of Michael Todd’s Around
The World In Eighty Days (1956), minus Todd’s showmanship to pull it off.
Hence, Raymond Massey peaks his head into the camera for the obligatory
non-verbal debut of Abraham Lincoln; John Wayne too, as the marginally better
served Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The affairs of a burgeoning union in
these United States gets intermittently narrated by an off-camera Spencer
Tracy, who sounds more as though he has only just opened to Chapter One of any
number of high school history text books rewritten with the pontificating prose
of a James Hilton. For added star cache,
though given precious little to do, we also discover Henry Fonda astride a
steed as Jethro Stuart, a careworn negotiator between the white man and the
Cheyenne natives, and, Richard Widmark, doing his best to be the baddie as the
caustic railroad overseer, Mike King. While How The West Was Won is
bookended by the plight of the Prescott family, the picture’s middle act
stumbles through a very episodic patchwork of clumsily stitched together
history, picking up mere remnants of this family saga with varying degrees of
success.
It is, as example, more than a
little disheartening to lose two of the pictures’ biggest stars, James Stewart
and Gregory Peck in this second half – and off camera, no less. We learn from
Eve, now appropriately aged and withered with time, how Linus went off to
partake in the Civil War and fell in battle. Life on the ole homestead has been
rough and lonely ever since. But only a few scenes later, Carol Baker’s Eve is
given the same short shrift when, after a period of some months her eldest son,
Zeb (George Peppard) returns from war, only to learn from his younger sibling,
Jerimiah (Claude Johnson) their mother has since died, presumably, of a broken
heart. The narrative shifts now to Zeb and his family, and the threat of
annihilation from a lusty desperado, Charlie Gant (Eli Wallach). I suspect the
genuine motivation in these latter-day episodes is to illustrate how the west
really wasn’t ‘won’, but rather, belabored over through a varied and
devastating series of generational heartaches and unforgivable losses that can
wear any man down, smoothing the rougher edges as sure as pebbles caught in a
stream. Surviving a perilous confrontation with Gant, Zeb takes his wife, Julie
(Carolyn Jones) and their two young sons, Zeke (Bryan Russell) and Prescott
(Stanley Livingston), to meet their dowager Aunt Lilith, who has agreed to come
live with them after Cleve’s death and the auctioning off of their San
Franciscan Knob Hill estate. It seems, in the interim, Cleve managed to make
Lilith a very rich woman.
Unable to resist showing off the
advantages of Cinerama one last time, How The West Was Won concludes not
with the dramatic pullback, as the carriage with Zeb, his family and Aunt
Lilith drives off into Monument Valley toward an uncertain future - the family
bound by the imperishable generational bond of genuine love - but a series of
dramatic overhead shots depicting then modern-day California with the promises
made in the ‘go west, young man’ mantra presumably fulfilled by this dizzying
array of omnipotent flybys over the Los Angeles freeway, sailing over rooftops
in a congested San Franciscan skyline, zipping past irrigated orange groves, or
effortlessly looming over the precipice of the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate
Bridge – all stock footage from previous Cinerama travelogues. It all makes for
a lovely scenery, set to composer, Alfred Newman’s penetrating reprise of the
Main Title, now, complete with choral accompaniment, and, recorded in
Cinerama’s staggeringly life-like 7-track Westrex stereo; its’ aural fidelity –
at least, to my mind – never topped in the movies, even by today’s Dolby
DTS.
If anything, How The West Was
Won unintentionally illustrates the reasons why Cinerama never had much of
a future as a viable widescreen process for telling narrative stories. Its
forte – the globe-trotting travelogue – was doomed to a short shelf life. Ditto
for the specially built, ‘state-of-the-art’ theaters to accommodate its unique
presentation with louvered and curved movie screens. How The West Was Won
is a lot of fun to watch, but mostly as an anomaly and homage to this bygone
format, rather than a compelling, plot-driven drama/actioner. The roster of
talent assembled for this spectacle is uniformly solid, expertly cast and
generally giving it their all. The best moments arguably belong to Debbie
Reynolds and Carol Baker as the Prescott sisters, carrying most of the weight
of the plot until late in the second act when each is inexplicably tossed aside
to favor young Zeb and his burgeoning familial woes. The production values
afforded art directors, George W. Davis, William Ferrari, and, Addison Hehr are
decidedly first-rate. Cast and crew crossed the wide Missouri several times -
and then some - as production migrated from California, to Arizona, Kentucky,
South Dakota, Oregon, Colorado and Utah, all of it lensed in Technicolor
resplendence, and, with miraculous continuity by cinematographers, William H.
Daniels, Milton R. Krasner, Charles Lang, and, Joseph LaShelle.
World-renown newsman/adventurer,
Lowell Thomas – who had not only served as MC on the very first Cinerama
feature: This is Cinerama (1952) (the headily anticipated experimental
foray into this ‘new’ form of exhibition that would briefly spawn a movie-going
renaissance) and also held controlling stock in the brain trust behind it, even
in 1952, correctly pegged Cinerama as a ‘gimmick’ - like 3D, just another ploy
to counterbalance and/or stave off the insidious panic-stricken animosity
inculcated inside the front offices of Hollywood’s movie-making empires by TV –
that new-fangled gadget effectively cutting theater attendance by nearly half
in just three short years, from 90 million paid admissions in 1949 to barely 56
million in 1952. Placed in its proper
context, Cinerama can rightly be judged as the forerunner in the widescreen war
that would overtake the industry the following year with Darryl F. Zanuck’s
inauguration of Cinemascope, an infinitely more manageable single-lens
anamorphic process. But by 1962, Cinerama’s initial impact had inevitably
cooled, enough to suggest it was not long for this world. So, why did MGM,
already foundering badly by the early sixties, think Cinerama was their best chance
at salvation?
Lest we forget neither Cinerama nor
Cinemascope were ‘new’ to the 1950’s. No, that honor goes to French director,
Abel Gance, who beat producer, Merian C. Cooper and Fred Waller’s invention by
nearly twenty-years with the premiere of Napoleon (1927), a silent epic
that, in its penultimate battle sequence, breathtakingly expanded the
conventional 1.33:1 movie image into a 3-camera projection for the epically
staged deluge at Waterloo. For those unwilling to concede as much, we can
neither dismiss nor ignore American impresario, William Fox’s even more
ambitious Grandeur widescreen process, first launched with 1930’s The Big
Trail - a 70mm precursor some thirty-years ahead of its time. It also
equally failed to catch on. So, Cinerama did not embark on a quantum
evolutionary step into the unknown. Nor was it to attain the longevity of
newer/arguably, better widescreen wonders already looming large on the horizon:
Cinemascope, Todd A-O, VistaVision, Technirama, Dimension-150 and, Super
Panavision-70; all better suited than Cinerama to tell a compelling drama like How
The West Was Won.
Besides, the Cinerama system had
serious drawbacks, not the least of which was its frequent inability to
properly align all three projected panels, thereby making the seams between the
center and side panels more obvious. Also, if one of the reels should suffer a
break, corresponding frames needed to be cut from the other two reels to
preserve synchronization. Cinerama also tested the patience of How The West
Was Won’s stars and directors; co-star, Stanley Livingston recalling “…to
get anything that even resembled a close-up meant you were no more than two
feet away from the camera, which is bizarre. It needed to be right in your face
to get a close-up.” In close-up,
another anomaly emerged, a noticeable bending-in of any horizontal information
too close to the seams, resulting in some oddly twisted tree branches in more
than a handful of outdoor scene, and, curtains on a window that appear to meet
in the middle directly behind Debbie Reynolds as she performs one of her songs.
Reynolds would later recall, “Any conversation I had with my co-stars was
purely coincidental. The camera was always between you and the other person.
Half the time you had to stare at this mark they placed just out of camera
range and pretend it was the other person. You had to act like the camera
wasn’t there, but it was sometimes the only thing you saw.” Also, zoom
lenses were impossible. But perhaps the greatest limitation was something later
referenced as Cinerama’s ‘sweet spot’, a sort of midrange-long shot from
which all action viewed through the three bug-eyed lenses appeared as
accurately represented. Deviating even slightly from this optimal setup or
placing foreground action caused portions of the image to suddenly appear
distorted; perhaps nowhere more egregiously on display in How The West Was
Won, than during the stampede, where buffalo appear to be running into one
another as they slip past the seams that link the side panels to the center
image.
The impact a theatrical exhibition
of Cinerama had on audiences in its heyday cannot be overstated, and, viewed in
its proper mode of projection inside an equipped movie palace, I have no doubt
as to why reviews of the day hailed How The West Was Won as a landmark
achievement, not the least for its ability to overcome a good deal of the
aforementioned shortcomings while simultaneously managing – against great
technological disadvantages – to offer audiences conventional storytelling
utilizing a highly unconventional format. Alas, there is no way to replicate
this Cinerama experience in all its 360-degree enveloping splendor in the
privacy of one’s living room. Flattening the image into three perfectly aligned
panels creates a very thin ‘letterboxed’ image best viewed on TV screens 85
inches or greater. But it also severely distorts the geometry of the original
presentation. Actors walking from left to right, now appear to unnecessarily
approach the camera at a discombobulating or even equilibrium-altering angle,
only to move away at the same angle as the process is repeated on the other
side of the screen.
To be fair, Cinerama did introduce
various innovations to the movie-going experience that truly made it unique
among its rivals. Cinerama’s louvered screen, as example, comprised of
horizontal chords meticulously angled, greatly improved the overall luminosity
and clarity of the image being projected onto them. So too did Cinerama give
audiences their first real taste of eight-track directionalized stereophonic
sound. Walt Disney had toyed with the
concept of true stereo, all the way back to 1940’s Fantasia. But it was
Cinerama that fulfilled this prophecy of true stereo with an uncanny and
superior richness in overall fidelity, unheard in movies before its
inauguration and arguably, never again with such razor-sharp vibrancy. Even so, How The West Was Won emerges
as an even more perplexed anomaly to the footnote of Cinerama – coming, as it
did, an entire decade after the initial hype of This is Cinerama had
ostensibly cooled. Billed as an ‘epic western’ by MGM’s marketing department, How
The West Was Won would go on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1963,
no small feat as it inevitably played in fewer venues equipped to handle
Cinerama, and, more proof positive Cinerama’s novelty had not entirely faded
away with the ticket-paying public.
For years, all home video versions
of How The West Was Won were little more than a glaring reminder of what
time had done to Cinerama’s more prominent shortcomings: mis-registration of
the three-camera negatives, severe and obvious fading between the various film
stocks, grotesquely exaggerated separation seams between left, middle and right
panels, etc. However, in 1997, the Library of Congress declared How The West
Was Won a culturally, historically and aesthetically significant film
worthy of preservation. After decades of neglect, and two thoroughly lackluster
incarnations on DVD, Warner Home Video concurred with this assessment,
resurrecting How The West Was Won in a definitive – and very expensive
reboot/nee, approximation of how the movie must have appeared to audiences in
1962. This Blu-ray while already 6-years-old, is decidedly cause for
celebration on several levels. First, it offers two viewing options: a standard
flat reassembly of the three panels with all the dirt, debris, scratches, and
yes – even the seams between each panel – digitally massaged, thus creating a
superior visual presentation for the very first time – or, in rechristened
‘Smilebox’ format; the image artificially bent from left to right to recreate
the curvature of a Cinerama screen within the conventional framing of a flat TV
screen. I confess, seated closely and in a completely darkened room, the
‘Smilebox’ rendering of How The West Was Won gave a fairly accurate
approximation of the Cinerama experience. Now, having seen How The West Was
Won back in the mid-1990’s in a real Cinerama venue, I should point out,
for anyone else who has had this good fortune, prepare to be disappointed, and
yet very pleasantly surprised by how good this faux recreation looks. Barring
one has the finances for a true ‘curved screen’ home theater set-up, nothing
else will ever approximate the Cinerama experience of a legit Cinerama theater.
The pluses on this Blu-ray are
worth noting: exceptional color reproduction and a level of clarity unseen
since How The West Was Won had its world premiere. The image, cribbing
from 2K scans of all 3 panels, stitched to a 6K master, dumbed to 4K output,
and then down-rezed to 1080p is nevertheless hearty and robust, with
eye-popping hues and copious amounts of fine detail burgeoning from all corners
of the newly expanded and restore frame. Warner Home Video has done a
thoroughly outstanding job on resurrecting the Cinerama experience for home
theater viewing. Again, it is still an approximation with no real counterpart
to an actual Cinerama screening, but, with the added bonuses of having the
wobble and jitter of real Cinerama completely removed and the seams between the
center and side panels ostensibly expunged.
Contrast is superb. Film grain is accurately represented. The image is
crisp without appearing to have sustained any undue artificial sharpening. Better still, this remastered 5.1 DTS resurrects
the exhilaration of the original 7-track stereo. The original overture, entr'acte and exit music is also included here. This disc is housed in a handsome digi-pack booklet. A bare-bones standard clip-case version is also readily available. If you have never experienced
Cinerama audio before, this disc will thoroughly satisfy and surprise you.
Extras include a superb audio commentary stitched together from new and vintage
interviews with surviving cast and crew. We also get the feature-length and
thoroughly comprehensive documentary, Cinerama Adventure - a fond look
at those early heady days of this widescreen wonder, and easily worth the price
of admission by itself. A point to consider: the commentary is only available
on the standard version. The ‘Smilebox’ version houses the documentary. Bottom
line: How The West Was Won may not be superior storytelling, but it
remains something of a visual feast, and, in its present-day reincarnation is
an elegant, overblown and infectiously alluring ‘gimmick’ not to be missed.
This one belongs on everyone’s top shelf!
FILM RATING (out
of 5 - 5 being the best)
3.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
3.5
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