If you ever get an opportunity to see a real restored 70mm roadshow film on a big screen, give it a chance. In the late 1980s, restored re-premieres of Lawrence of Arabia and Spartacus re-energized the industry with visions of the incredible large-format wonders that flourished roughly between 1952 and 1970. The most astonishing screening I ever saw, for big screen spectacle, was a 2003 restored Ryan’s Daughter, at a packed Academy screening. A movie frame looks different on a screen 95 feet wide, with far more visual information than standard 35mm projection.
Thus we format-obsessed fans were impressed when, back in the 1990s, a film restoration festival on the old AMC cable channel showed a widescreen, letterboxed The Big Trail. The Fox Film Corporation gambled that the coming of sound called for an improved, larger film format. Along with a few other titles like The Bat Whispers, The Big Trail was filmed in the Grandeur process, basically the same 65mm format that returned in the 1950s for super epics. It is indeed fascinating to see a film with vintage ‘all talkie’ audio framed in a mighty widescreen aspect ratio. On Blu-ray we can better appreciate the film’s big-screen proportions, and imagine the impact it must have had on viewers back in 1930.
But most of America saw only a standard Academy ratio 35mm version, the normal version that was filmed simultaneously. This partly-restored encoding gives us the young John Wayne, not that far removed from the USC football squad. In at least in one version of the Wayne origin story director Raoul Walsh claimed to have discovered Wayne as a prop man. Newly name-changed from ‘Marion Morrison,’ Wayne reportedly asked if his USC buddy Ward Bond could have a role on the film as well. Raoul Walsh’s autobio is mostly a collection of celebrity anecdotes, but he seems genuine when recalling that Wayne and Bond were dependably loyal and earnest on location — some of his lead actors were stone drunk half the time.
A wagon train starts out from Missouri, with Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill) and foolish Swede Gussie (El Brendel) among the settlers hoping to reach the promised land of Oregon. Frontier scout and all-around hero Breck Coleman (John Wayne) signs on as wagon guide, as it fits in with his plan to track down the scoundrels who killed his partner. What nobody knows, not even the loyal mountain man Zeke (Tully Marshall), is that the culprit is none other than the Wagon Master Red Flack (Tyrone Power, Sr.).
Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was clearly designed for the giant screen. It is composed in locked-down angles that resemble tableaus vivants, probably because the Fox executives thought that the pictorial sweep of the giant format voided the need for montage cutting or camera motion. It’s true — many shots teem with activity that makes our eye jump about the screen, from one center of interest to the next. An okay plot was cooked up, with revenge-seeker Wayne mooning after chaste pioneer gal Churchill. The storyline is plain-wrap but there is no lack of incident. Indian attacks, a desert crossing and other natural perils are announced in frequent silent-style intertitles. It is at times less a movie than a pageant, but the giant vistas of plains, cliffs and river crossings filled with wagons and horses still impress. They must have wowed audiences back at the birth of sound.
Walsh’s memoir lists the film’s wide-ranging locations: Yuma Arizona . . . along the Colorado River . . . then to Northern California and to Sacramento for more river scenes. ‘Canyon’ scenes followed in St. George, Utah, then back to California’s Sierra Nevada and Sequoia National Park, presumably for the impressive ‘big tree’ scenes. The shoot ended in Moise, Montana, to stage a buffalo stampede. Walsh claims that the spectacular images of the wagons lowered down the side of a cliff were ‘invented on the trail,’ so to speak. Even if Walsh exaggerates, transporting all those wagons, animals and people back and forth across the country sounds pretty incredible.
Walsh recalled that John Wayne took direction well. The director used a somewhat condescending analogy to describe the young actor being a football player anxious for guidance from his coach. Wayne’s natural charm and likability certainly comes through in this first picture. His delivery of dialogue is only partly formed. Walsh says that everything Wayne learned about horses and performing for westerns was all learned on this show, and we don’t doubt it — ‘Breck Coleman’ looks natural in the saddle, and has a great presence when just walking through scenes.
Walsh’s memoir makes a (likely exaggerated) joke of ‘4 drunk Broadway stars’ hired to compensate for John Wayne’s lack of experience. Of the main male players only a couple seem to have had big careers on Broadway. According to Walsh, they hated location shooting and couldn’t be depended upon for anything; Walsh even says that “as it was, the night stops were turning into orgies.” Of such ‘memoirs’ are Damien Chazelle movies made.
The size of this production still impresses, knowing that all the horses, wagons and action we see on screen are real. Most every shot is a wide master. Even for scenes of two people speaking, the deep background reveals epic-gauge activity in progress — there’s not a lot of privacy in a wagon train. They say the Walsh’s wagon train consisted of 185 full-sized functioning conestoga wagons, and in some shots the lines stretch back to the horizon. Almost a thousand genuine Native Americans were hired for the spectacular attack scene.
The direction uses few close shots and no close-ups. As with CinemaScope twenty years later, the philosophy seems to be that facial expressions will be easy to read on such a big canvas, even in wide shots. The blocking of many scenes arrays characters around the space formed by a well-placed camera. The compositions are always handsome, often strikingly so. Walsh plays the violence in wide shot or lets it happen off-screen. The Indian attack and the buffalo stampede employ a number of dynamic shots, such as low angles of Comanche horses charging over a buried camera. Most of the movie relies on breathtaking tableaux.
This can’t have been a favorite film of Marguerite Churchill, who often looks as if she were indeed camping in the rough. The story arc for the romance is little more than ‘Ruth hates Breck’ / ‘Ruth realizes Breck is OK’ / ‘Ruth loves Breck.’ Tully Marshall is a fine folksy sidekick, kind of a proto- Arthur Hunnicutt type. The ‘Tyrone Power’ given major billing is Tyrone Power senior, who we’re told was once a matinee idol in silent films. Power’s huge, uncouth villain chortles through bad teeth like Bluto. He blusters his vile threats with perfect diction — nobody takes chances with the primitive sound recording. Ian Keith rounds out the main players as a slimy Southern cardsharp who turns hired killer. For a while he has the impressionable heroine wrapped around his finger.
We assume that The studio was covering its entertainment bet when it added comedian El Brendel, Hollywood’s main purveyor of ethnic ‘stupid Swede’ humor. Brendel’s popularity escapes us now, but he was a big name for a few seasons. Fantasy fans know him as the star of Fox’s giant Science Fiction musical Just Imagine made the same year, with even more ‘by golly’ and ‘yumpin’ yimminy’ jokes. El Brendel’s clown is given a lot of screen time, mostly taking the abuse of his stern mother-in-law. His one genuinely funny joke shows him sitting foolishly in a mud puddle. When asked how deep the mudhole is, he replies that he’s sitting on his horse!
On the disc extras assembled for this 2011 Blu-ray we learn that the studio’s hopes for both The Big Trail and 70mm Grandeur were dashed by the 1929 stock market crash. Theaters could barely afford the new sound equipment, let alone the bigger projectors and screens required to screen Grandeur. The 70mm version played in only a few big cities. John Wayne’s followup pictures were cancelled, along with the effort to make him a star. He’d labor for eight years on micro-budgeted program westerns, until his rediscovery and jump to instant stardom with John Ford’s Stagecoach.
The show is indeed spectacular on a large video screen, where we can imagine it splayed across a vintage picture palace. Everything is an impressive location vista, and the painterly compositions are often breathtaking. The show conveys an impressive sense of scale, the best example of which is reserved for the romantic finale. Wayne reunites with Churchill in an Ansel Adams-like stand of colossal redwoods. He’s first seen as a tiny figure dwarfed by the giant trees. The Big Trail is historically an important western, with its unique impression of a giant moving mural painting. It’s great fun to see John Wayne stepping up to the plate and putting his best effort into his incredible career opportunity. He would wait 30 years before again stepping in front of a 65mm movie camera, directing as well as starring in his own Road Show epic The Alamo.
