Some vintage 65mm Road Show attractions remain big sellers on home video, but with many other titles the studio bean counters haven’t been so eager to invest the extra $$ money required to revive them. UA/MGM’s Hawaii, The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Alamo are apparently in this high cost / low projected return category, along with the enormous Mirisch Corporation / John Sturges production The Hallelujah Trail, which only now is finally arriving in a good Blu-ray presentation.
Back in pre-pandemic 2018 an earlier independent disc company had a rough time with this movie, and their Blu-ray somehow got stuck with a terrible video master. This new Kino disc is a vast improvement, thankfully. A full explanation is below.
After his successes The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape producer-director John Sturges found moviemaking difficult in a changing Hollywood. Top actors like Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra could now usurp the power and authority that once belonged to producers and directors. But Sturges was inspired by a massive ensemble project: a Road Show western comedy spectacular. Think It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but with horses and wagons and cavalrymen and Indians. The major star Burt Lancaster owed United Artists a picture for one third of his going rate. It was a contractual penalty against Lancaster’s own company, for going overbudget on his own feature productions.
Director Sturges was genuinely excited by The Hallelujah Trail. He reportedly spent the downtime on the set of his previous film The Satan Bug working out the details. The actors complained that he neglected Satan Bug while laughing it up with editor Ferris Webster and cameraman Robert Surtees over the jokes for his pending super-western.
You must be thinking of the other Sturges.
John Sturges had mastered action films, suspense pictures, and even sentimental movies, but Trail was to be a broad, knockabout comedy. His only experience with comedy was his sub-par Rat Pack movie Sergeants Three. His screenwriter John Gay wasn’t exactly a slapstick expert either — his big movies were Run Silent, Run Deep, Separate Tables, and the heartwarming family story The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.
Here’s a short run-down of The Hallelujah Trail’s very busy storyline. In 1867, thirsty Denver miners panic at the thought of an entire winter without whisky. Their alcoholic seer Oracle Jones (Donald Pleasance) is correct when he predicts that a shipment is coming, for the frontier distiller Frank Wallingham (Brian Keith) is indeed en route with forty wagonloads of quality spirits. Wallingham fears a labor strike by his Irish teamsters, led by Kevin O’Flaherty (Tom Stern). When the Indians learn of the shipment, the alcoholic dunderheads Chief Walks-Stooped-Over and Chief Five Barrels (Martin Landau & Robert J. Wilke) argue over which band of braves will capture the Red Man’s fair share of booze.
Wallingham demands a U.S. Army escort for his liquor convoy. But the cavalry Colonel Thaddeus Gearhart (Burt Lancaster) is ‘under siege’ by the Temperance marchers of activist Cora Templeton Massingale (Lee Remick), who has enlisted Gearhart’s own daughter Louise (Pamela Tiffin) in her cause. Louise is also seeing Captain Paul Slater (Jim Hutton) on the side, for advanced necking sessions. Cora uses her feminine wiles to induce Gearhart to escort her Temperance ladies to meet the whisky wagon train. Captain Slater takes a second unit forward to make early contact.
Supply Chain Issues.
Several caravans converge on the whiskey convoy: miners, soldiers, Temperance ladies and Indians collide in the middle of a massive sandstorm. There follows a confusing series of flubbed negotiations, double-crosses and kidnappings to determine who shares in the liquid bounty. The teamsters strike and the ladies hold a temperance meeting in an Indian encampment. Colonel Gearhart cannot maintain any kind of order. Oracle Jones and Frank Wallingham join forces in a scheme to sneak some wagons out — through a quicksand bog.
What doesn’t work here? The problem is the need to make everything ‘big.’ The Hallelujah Trail spins an epic from what is really a one-joke gag. The main idea in William Gulick’s novel Super-Sizes Alexander Mackendrick’s modest 1949 Ealing farce Whiskey Galore! (aka Tight Little Island). An isolated Scottish isle undergoes comedic misery when wartime rationing curtails liquor deliveries — but they rally for a ‘patriotic’ salvage action when news arrives that a ship loaded with spirits has run aground just offshore! A nearly perfect entertainment, Tight Little Island is compact enough for its one joke — “There must be more whiskey!” — to remain hilarious for 82 minutes.
Hallelujah leads off with a rollicking Elmer Bernstein overture, after which every scene feels overpopulated, overstated and overly juvenile. Rollicking cavalry comedy worked okay in Sturges’ Sergeants Three mainly because we accepted the clowning of the Rat Pack cast. We also love the silly Burlesque- level slapstick in TV’s F-Troop, with Sgt. O’Rourke, Corporal Agarn and the ‘funny Injun’ Edward Everett Horton as ‘Roaring Chicken.’
The Hallelujah Trail is so big and its main joke so thin that most of its charm is used up before the forty-minute mark. Its fans surely enjoy the scale, the giant screen presentation and the antics of Remick and Lancaster — even if Burt must play the stiff straight man to a pack of cartoon caricatures. The proceedings are at all times amusing, but big laughs are few and far between.
When booze humor isn’t funny, you’re in trouble.
All those talent supporting players are allocated just one joke apiece. The soggy seer played by the great Donald Pleasance is just not funny, as is almost all of the script’s drunk humor. Pamela Tiffin had proved her comedy skills with Billy Wilder but this script gives her few laugh lines. Jim Hutton’s Captain Slater is so functional, he might as well be Colonel Gearhart’s butler. A random trooper is given the duty of mis-translating between English and Sioux, a big part with little or no humorous impact. Were Hutton given that comic business to perform, he might have made something of it.
We aren’t bothered that today’s PC crowd will reject the show’s dated humor. The script follows an older farce definition of feminism: uppity suffragettes may think that prohibition is a good idea, but they’re still ruled by emotions and hormones. Activist Cora Massingale reneges on her bargains and makes devious use of her ‘feminine advantage.’ She turns out to be a phony anyway, hitting the booze for an easy joke. Lee Remick’s considerable charm can’t make the thin (witless?) jokes seem funny. We also suspect that her surname was intended as a joke on a feminine hygiene product.
The ’60s were a big time for lame Injun jokes — awful comic westerns like Texas Across the River abounded with tipsy Indians with funny names. Hallelujah’s drunken Indian humor now plays as more stupid than racist. Martin Landau and Robert J. Wilke lead the pack here, but even their parts are underwritten — Landau often just stands around with a vacant look on his face. Sturges is generous with his casting — but Robert J. Wilke and John Anderson’s nice underplaying goes for naught.
John Dehner’s deadpan narration starts the film off on a good, ‘serious’ footing, a ploy that soon wears out its welcome. We remember enjoying little bits of business, such as Lancaster flashing his famous shark smile, and a few ‘bop on the head’ jokes suitable for The Three Stooges. But in the end Hallelujah Trail is ‘skit’ material that doesn’t build to bigger laughs. We end up thinking about the abundant professionalism on screen — the precision of the riders, the many dangerous-looking stunt gags.
That doesn’t mean that John Sturges’ picture wasn’t impressive when new. Filmed in Ultra Panavision 70 and billed as 70mm Super Cinerama, it must have looked incredible spread out to the wide, wide 2.76: 1 aspect ratio. The audio was originally in six-track magnetic stereo. But the box office failure of this and other Road Show pictures put United Artists off big 70mm productions permanently. Five years later, when Walter Mirisch filmed the big-scale Fiddler on the Roof, it was released in 70mm but filmed in ordinary 35mm Panavision.
The days of Road Show spectaculars soon ended, but not because people disliked the format. Nobody forgets the experience of seeing How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but the movies had to be worth the effort. Lawrence of Arabia is a life-changing experience but Ice Station Zebra simply isn’t. The sub-par 70mm shows Custer of the West and Krakatoa East of Java didn’t even give viewers a good time for their money. The Hallelujah Trail is high-quality goods, yet seems a modest idea blown up all out of (Road Show) proportion.
John Sturges’ directing career never recovered. His Hour of the Gun is a genuine masterpiece that unfortunately sank without a trace. From then on he was mostly a director for hire. Time has not been kind to Ice Station Zebra, Marooned is terrible, and of his remaining pictures only Joe Kidd shows some of Sturges’ former flair for taut, efficient thrills.
The Hallelujah Trail is a knockout of a production. We who love Road Show movies will find reasons to like it — if only to enjoy all those favorite actors doing their best to generate laughs. The giant-vista scenery will please western fans, that’s for sure. Would I laugh with an audience in a theater? I’m not sure I would.
