"How The West Was Won": Film format as auteur (Updated)

To start with a ran­dom thought: Warner Home Video’s new DVDs of How The West Was Won can be taken as proof that there are more, or louder, Cinerama fans out there than there are Leo McCarey fans. After all, Leo McCarey fans have been clam­or­ing for years for decent domest­ic discs of the likes of Ruggles of Red Gap and Make Way For Tomorrow, and they’ve been rewar­ded with bup­kis. Surely some kind of very pas­sion­ate lob­by­ing had to do with the metic­u­lous res­tor­a­tion and elab­or­ate releases of what is, when you come right down to it, a cine­mat­ic white elephant. 

Which isn’t to say I don’t like How The West Was Won. Hell, I love it. Kitsch on such a gran­di­ose scale is genu­inely irres­ist­ible, and the the way the film’s all-star cast so famil­iarly embody the cliches that its script is a conveyer-belt for is merely one of the film’s par­tic­u­lar charms. But more than any­thing else, West is defined by Cinerama, the ultra-widescreen film format that was essen­tially a more refined ver­sion of Abel Gance’s trip­tych tech­no­logy (see his 1924 Napoleon); that is, scenes are shot with three cam­er­as, with the res­ult­ant images mel­ded into one. Cinerama was designed for pro­jec­tion on a gigant­ic curved screen, so as to engulf the view­er. The form­at’s “elong­ated depth per­spect­ive,” writes Tag Gallagher, “befit­ted travelogue epics and roller­coast­er rides.” Indeed, among the high­lights of 1952’s This Is Cinerama were a you-are-there roller­coast­er sequence and some breath­tak­ing aer­i­al foot­age of the Rockies.

For the dra­mat­ic film­maker, work­ing in Cinerama was a form of bond­age. The dir­ect­or was­n’t the auteur—the format was. You can infer this while watch­ing in the ver­sion of the film retoggled for Cinemascope, but you get the most vivid sense of it watch­ing the “Smilebox” present­a­tion of West, which is only avail­able in the Blu-ray ver­sion of the film, and which presents the film in a sim­u­la­tion of Cinerama’s curved screen. There are a lot of long, stat­ic takes whenev­er there’s a group of people talk­ing. In scenes involving two or more char­ac­ters facing each oth­er, there’s stand­ard shot/reverse shot cut­ting, but the char­ac­ters are almost always centered in a way that looks forced, as with Debbie Reynolds here: 

The pro­cess looks as “nat­ur­al” as it ever will in POV shots in action sequences such as this one, a treach­er­ous white-water encounter.

Hmm. Perhaps Cinerama would have been an ideal format for the all-subjective film as pos­ited by Robert Montgomery’s The Lady In The Lake.

West has three cred­ited dir­ect­ors: George Marshall, Henry Hathaway, and John Ford. Ford most likely came on board because one of Cinerama’s main back­ers and boost­ers was his old friend Merian C. Cooper. Tag Gallagher writes of Ford’s con­tri­bu­tion: “Everything is said; and with such for­mid­able eleg­ance and con­cision that the neigh­bor­ing epis­odes of ‘The Civil War’ (behemoths by[…] Hathaway and […}Marshall) seem like so much bad disco moment­ar­ily ceas­ing for the St. Matthew Passion’s final funer­eal chorus.”

True that, and Ford also com­poses beau­ti­fully for the format. But even he can­’t escape its pit­falls, as these two sequen­tial shots—yes, the first cuts dir­ectly to the second—testify.

Sounds like I’m complaining—and I am! But I don’t think it’s in any way para­dox­ic­al that I find the Blu-ray of West to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen this year. If you’ve got the gear, you abso­lutely should pick it up. 

UPDATE: My pal Joseph Failla dis­agrees with me on the dra­mat­ic qual­it­ies of West:

I don’t think of West as kitsch, and I genu­inely enjoy enjoy the many action and peri­od set pieces it throws at you one after anoth­er. Admittedly, the epis­od­ic nature of the story works against the film as a whole, par­ticuarly since every event is “hos­ted” by a major Hollywood star (such as explorer Jimmy Stewart, gam­bler Gregory Peck or General John Wayne). It can feel like sev­er­al short­er movies strung togeth­er, with only Debbie Reynolds’ char­ac­ter in com­mon (as she makes her way west, she matures from feisty young girl, to sexy saloon hall music enter­tain­er, to wealthy landown­er). I do find her per­form­ance in the lat­ter scenes, sur­roun­ded by fam­ily to be fairly affect­ing. I don’t feel the John Ford dir­ec­ted Civil War center­piece sequence inter­rupts the action of the sur­round­ing chapters as much as it gives weight to the spec­tacle on hand. Watching the Civil War fought in micro­cosm some­how serves as a remind­er to the price paid for set­tling such a sprawl­ing land.

The glor­i­ous last shot fly­ing over the Golden Gate Bridge as Alfred Newman’s music soars, is the per­fect cap­per to all that has come before and closes the pro­ceed­ings on the high note the film has been search­ing for. This after all is the movie that inspired Ron Howard to make films—seeing such a rush of American his­tory and west­ern icon­o­graphy presen­ted in Cinerama made an incred­ible impres­sion on him as a small child he could nev­er for­get. His pro­posed Alamo pro­ject was deemed too big for a stu­dio to under­take today and no doubt, West served as a power­ful inspir­a­tion to what might have been. As there’s a streak of Americana and fair play that runs through his work to this day, per­haps the respons­ib­il­ity for those beliefs could be on the vivid memor­ies of view­ing this film.

Now, where could George Pal’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm be hiding?

There’s a bois­ter­ous dis­cus­sion of West, Cinerama, Grimm…and flat-screen-TVs and their dis­con­tents, ongo­ing at Dave Kehr’s place.