The 1962 version. With Debbie Reynolds. Have I ever mentioned that as far back as my memory goes I have been a Debbie Reynolds fan?
Back in the mid 1990s I was in Debbie Reynold's casino in Las Vegas. I won a huge jackpot on a nickel video poker machine. Debbie sang nightly in her casino, usually, and after her show would often wander through her casino drinking a glass of wine. This I did not get to see.
In the past week I watched the contemporary movie Love and Other Drugs with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. I believe I was supposed to somehow find this a charming story. Instead I found it annoyingly, tastelessly, bad.
Lately I find when I watch certain type movies I go into a strange empathy mode. I think this may be a function of no longer being a teenager and having experienced enough of life that you sort of know the whole sad arc of the life experience.
Which is the story told on How The West Was Won. Sort of.
How The West Was Won was one of the last of the old-fashioned MGM epic type films. This movie is one of only 2 dramatic feature films to be shot using the 3-strip Cinerama process. This is meant to be projected on to a curved Cinerama screen. For decades this meant that How The West Was Won did not look right on old-fashioned TVs. This problem has now been fixed, for the most part.
How The West Was Won is broken into 5 segments. Henry Hathaway directed The Rivers, The Plains and The Outlaws segments. John Ford directed The Civil War segment. While George Marshall directed The Railroad segment.
Spencer Tracy provides narration from start to finish, helping make the transition between segments.
How The West Was Won starts in 1839 with the Prescott Family heading west from New York via the Erie Canal. This is The Rivers segment. The family meets James Stewart, who takes a shining to Carroll Baker.
But after shining all night long, James leaves Carroll, gets back in his canoe and then runs into Walter Brennan and a gang of pirates who steal from James Stewart after trying to kill him. Walter Brennan's pirates then go after the Prescotts, but James Stewart comes to the rescue with a hatchet.
James and Carroll part again, with the Prescott Family heading downriver, where they take a wrong fork and end up in some serious whitewater rapids. Ma and Pa Prescott are killed in the rapids. Carroll and her sister, Debbie Reynolds, bury Ma and Pa, aka, Karl Malden and Agnes Morehead, with the help of Jimmy Stewart, who shows up after he learns the family had taken the wrong river turn.
Carroll refuses to leave the place where her mom and dad are buried. She decides this is as far west as she will go. Jimmy Stewart decides to stay with her and give up his plan to go to St. Louis.
By The Civil War segment we learn that James Stewart has gone off to fight the Rebels, and the oldest of his and Carroll's two sons wants to join his dad. So, with much sadness, on his mother Carroll's part, George Peppard takes off for the Battle of Shiloh where he learns war is hell, decides to desert with a rebel he'd somehow befriended, who was also disillusioned.
But then Geogre and his rebel friend over hear Generals Grant and Sherman, aka, John Wayne and Harry Morgan and the rebel decides to kill them, but is thwarted by his new Yankee friend, George Peppard, who kills him.
By the end of the war George has learned that Jimmy Stewart had been killed at Shiloh. And when he gets home he finds his mom's grave in the family graveyard. George Peppard finds his brother, they exchange pleasantries and then George heads West to find his fortune. I do not know if George Peppard ever saw his brother again.
Meanwhile, prior to The Civil War segment, we saw Debbie Reynolds being a saloon hall girl in a St. Louis honky tonk. She gets word she has inherited a California gold mine. Gregory Peck over hears this news. Gregory finagles his way onto the Wagon Train heading West, by charming Debbie's wagon buddy, Thelma Ritter, eventually proving himself useful, and hooking up with Debbie Reynolds.
But not before they survive an attack by Cheyenne Indians.
After finding out the California gold mine had panned out, Gregory left Debbie, who then returned to her dance hall career. Eventually that turns into singing on a riverboat, where Gregory overhears Debbie singing, proposes that they go to San Francisco to make their fortune in that boom town. They proceed to do so, earning and spending several fortunes, till in 1889, in The Outlaws section, we learn that Gregory Peck has died, with the widow, Debbie, selling off all she owns in San Francisco to pay off her debts, before heading to Arizona, where she still owns some land, and where her nephew, George Peppard, and his family, eagerly meet Debbie at a train station.
Debbie had never seen her nephew, George, before, and she never saw her sister, Carroll Baker, again, after leaving her to head West. Debbie and Carroll did exchange letters. They had no email or phones, which I use to communicate with my relatives, who I have not seen in years.
The Railroad segment that came before The Outlaw segment was impressive due to the buffalo stampede that the angry Arapaho directed through a camp that was making them cranky because the Whites had lied, yet again. George Peppard had tried to make it all work.
This movie handled the Native American part of the story accurately, to my point of view. Henry Fonda, an old trapper friend of George Peppard's dad, Jimmy Stewart, was also employed by the railroad. Henry helped George negotiate with the Arapaho. Henry and George became good friends. Eventually Henry leaves to go to his isolated cabin in the mountains, due to being fed up with all the White duplicity. George soon visits Henry in his cabin, before making his way to being a lawman in Arizona Territory.
In the final segment, The Outlaws, after Debbie arrives in town, nephew George has to deal with some outlaws. Eventually this turns into one of the best train robbery battles I've ever seen in the movies. It must have been epic on the Cinerama big screen.
After George successfully dispatches the outlaws it is time to load up the buggy and head to Debbie Reynold's land. Which apparently was somewhere on the other side of Monument Valley. As the buggy went head towards some of my favorite scenery in the West, the camera began to pan out and zoom to the future where I soon recognized Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. We continued to zoom West until we were hovering over the freeways of Los Angeles of the early 1960s, and then north to the 1960s version of San Francisco.
This was a long movie. It had an Intermission I fast forwarded through. I did not expect to watch the whole thing. I thought it started off corny. But by the time Jimmy Stewart showed up, I was hooked. Amazing scenery. I wonder if this movie could be made today, without having to fake the scenery with special effects? When this movie was filmed it appeared there were still HUGE areas of America that had not been marked by man.
Somehow in this movie that is all about How The West Was Won there is absolutely no mention made of the town Where The West Begins. There is mention made of Texas. Like the Rebel that George Peppard had to kill to save Generals Sherman and Grant, that Rebel was from Texas.
