‘How The West Was Won’ Reissue

Few films are as indivisible from their production process as this 1962 Cinerama frontier saga that put the ‘sprawling’ very much into the ‘epic’.

Cinerama used a three-camera set-up and curved projection screen to produce a vertiginous proto-IMAX experience that – for a short time – lured TV-sated late-Fifties audiences back into the picture palaces with a series of audaciously conceived and opulently presented travelogues.

One of the only two narrative films made in this format (the other being the nightmarish day-glo brain-wrong of ‘The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm’) ‘HTWWW’ is one of those massive and undeniably worthy undertakings that one might be forgiven for mentally filing alongside such forbiddingly overstuffed Bank Holiday filler as ‘A Bridge Too Far’ or ‘The Longest Day’. To do so, however, is to miss out on an incredibly grand and operatic slice of American history told with a fair amount of grit and no little wit.

Utilising the directorial talents of John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall it relates nothing less than fifty turbulent years in the history of a family of settlers making their way Westward across a nation discovering itself through the separation of Civil War and the building of the railroads.

Hollywood heavyweights John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda are kept on their toes by the energy of young guns Eli Wallach and George Peppard and there’s even a scene-stealing performance from Gregory Peck, successfully cast against type as a card-sharping cad.

But despite the efforts of its cast and the wherewithal of its trio of directors in marshalling this three-lensed circus, the film is ultimately impressive rather than in any way involving.

This has no little to do with the lack of close-ups that are a consequence of the curvature of the fish-eye lenses that the Cinerama cameras were required to use in order to fill out the screen. It is an anamorphic side effect that also means that when a character strolls away from the camera they appear to ping off into the distance like the Millennium Falcon going into hyperspace.