How the West Was Won

6.6

The star of this show is surely Cinemascope. Matching the epic nature of the title and film itself, the ultra-panorama created by the expensive 3-camera medium went as quickly as it came. Thankfully, TCM recreated the roadshow presentation in all its curved glory under the monicker of Smilebox. Despite the drastic drop in screen size, the illusion was still very engaging. The breath-talking cinematography captures wide mountain ranges and raging rivers with exquisite detail and succeeds in transporting the audience to a different time and place.

Its obvious that the wider the shot, the more effective the illusion so the majority of the film is made up of wide masters. This unconventional technique really hinders the editing, taking the viewer out of the story with intrusive and sluggish cutting from one master to another. The dialogue scenes are the worst and unfortunately this film is very dialogue-heavy. The film does succeed in its action segments, which are few and far-between. The bookended set pieces of the film are its strongest points, making it clear why this is a classic.

The quality of the storytelling varies based on the different segments. The first and last parts are the strongest while some middle stories were tedious and slow. The film starts out very strong, anchored by a solid performance from James Stewart. "The Rivers" is also the film's strongest story because it is entirely character-based. When the film shifts to a larger scale in service of the epic tale, the human touch fades. The next story, "The Plains" starts out strong and maintains the rich cinematography and scale but is hindered by a slow pace. The story all but falls apart when main character Lilith is betrayed by the script writers, who abandon her characterization for a Hollywood-type happy ending. The unsatisfying undermining of women characters is one of the ways the film shows its age.

The next two parts, "The Civil War" and "The Railroad" are marred by bland characters who fail to connect. John Ford's direction of "The Civil War" falls flat, the wide-scope cinematography distracting from the story. Even with a cameo by The Duke himself, the story is short and overdramatic, hitting all the cliche notes expected from a Hollywood war epic. The Railroad marks the film's low point in story and peak of cinematic beauty. The Western frontier is captured flawlessly, juxtaposing wafer-thin characters. An abrupt resolution solidifies the pointless nature of this part.

The concluding part of the epic film, "The Outlaws" delivers the climax of the film in a train shootout. By this point, its hard to tell who's who and the convoluted script doesn't do the viewer any favors. But just as soon as the characters are barely established (or reestablished?) the climactic shootout concludes the film. Influenced by The Great Train Robbery and sure to be a point of interest to later film such as The Wild Bunch, the train sequence is a tightly-edited, well-shot piece of action driven by murky character motives. The resulting film is a series of vignettes claiming to explain how the West was won but instead adding up to nothing more than a series of beautifully-photographed, weakly-scripted short stories.