How the West Was Won | |
---|---|
Directed by | |
Written by | James R. Webb |
Story by | Louis L'Amour |
Based on | "How the West Was Won" in Life |
Produced by | Bernard Smith |
Starring |
|
Narrated by | Spencer Tracy |
Cinematography | |
Edited by | Harold F. Kress |
Music by | Alfred Newman |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 164 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $14,483,000 [1] |
Box office | $50 million |
How the West Was Won is a 1962 American epic Western film directed by Henry Hathaway (who directed three out of the five chapters involving the same family), John Ford and George Marshall, produced by Bernard Smith, written by James R. Webb, and narrated by Spencer Tracy. Originally filmed in true three-lens Cinerama with the according three-panel panorama projected onto an enormous curved screen, the film features an ensemble cast formed by many cinema icons and newcomers, including (in alphabetical order) Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne and Richard Widmark. The supporting cast features Brigid Bazlen, Walter Brennan, David Brian, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Henry (Harry) Morgan, Thelma Ritter, Mickey Shaughnessy and Russ Tamblyn.
How the West Was Won is widely considered one of Hollywood's greatest epics. [2] The film received widespread critical acclaim and was a box office success, grossing $50 million on a budget of $15 million. [3] At the 36th Academy Awards it earned eight nominations, including Best Picture, and won three, for Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Best Sound and Best Film Editing. In 1997 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". [4]
Zebulon Prescott and his family set out west for the frontier on the Erie Canal. They are pulled through the first section on a barge and then build rafts to continue on the Ohio River. Along the journey, they meet mountain man Linus Rawlings, who is traveling east, to Pittsburgh, to trade his furs. Rawlings and Zebulon's daughter, Eve, are attracted to each other, but he is not ready to settle down.
Rawlings stops at an isolated trading post, advertised as a "likker" store near the river. It is actually a front run by a clan of river pirates, headed by "Alabama Colonel" Jeb Hawkins. Acting in a seducing fashion, Jeb's daughter Dora Hawkins leads Linus into a cave, stabs him in the back and pushes him into a hole. The pirates then steal his furs and sink his canoe. Wounded, Rawlings follows them. When they are about to rob the Prescott party, Linus interferes. Aided by the Prescotts, he kills all of the pirates.
The settlers then continue down the river. When the lead raft is caught in rapids, Zebulon and his wife Rebecca drown. Linus encounters the survivors. Deciding he cannot live without Eve, he asks to marry her and take her to Pittsburgh. However, she insists on homesteading at the spot where her parents died.
Eve's sister Lilith chooses to go back East, and years later finds herself touring in St. Louis. While performing at the Music hall, she attracts the attention of professional gambler Cleve Van Valen. She later inherits a California gold mine. Lilith becomes partners with Agatha, an elderly woman desperate for any man. Cleve joins the wagon train taking her there and avoids paying debts in the process. Wagonmaster Roger Morgan and Cleve court her along the way, but she rejects them both.
Surviving an attack by Cheyennes, Lilith and Cleve arrive at the mine, only to find that it is worked out and worthless. Cleve leaves. Lilith returns to work in a camp town's dance hall, living out of a covered wagon. Morgan finds her and again proposes marriage, to no avail.
Later, Lilith sings on a riverboat. By chance, Cleve is a passenger. After hearing Lilith's voice, he leaves the poker table (and a winning hand), tells her he does not care that she is poor and proposes to her. He tells her of the business opportunities waiting in San Francisco. She accepts his proposal.
Linus Rawlings has joined the Union army as a captain in the American Civil War. Despite Eve's wishes, their son Zeb enlists as well, looking for glory and an escape from farming. The bloody Battle of Shiloh shows Zeb that war is nothing like he imagined, and his father dies there. Zeb encounters a disillusioned Confederate who suggests deserting.
By chance, they bump into Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. The Confederate realizes he has the opportunity to rid the South of two of its greatest enemies and tries to shoot them, leaving Zeb no choice but to kill him. Afterward, Zeb rejoins the army. Over the course of the war, he earns a battlefield commission.
When the war ends, he returns home as a lieutenant and learns his mother died, having lost the will to live after losing Linus. Zeb renounces his share of the family farm and leaves, wanting a different life.
In the late 1860s, two competing railroad lines, the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad, open up new territory.
Zeb becomes a lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, trying to maintain peace with the Native Americans with the help of buffalo hunter Jethro Stuart, an old friend of Linus's. When railroad man Mike King violates a treaty by building on Native American territory, the Arapahos retaliate by stampeding buffalo through his camp, killing many. Disgusted, Zeb resigns from the Army and leaves town. [5] [6]
In San Francisco, the widowed Lilith auctions off her possessions to pay Cleve's debts. She travels to Arizona, inviting Zeb and his family to oversee her one remaining asset, a ranch.
Zeb (now a marshal), his wife Julie, and their children meet Lilith at Gold City's train station. There, Zeb runs into outlaw Charlie Gant. Zeb had previously killed Gant's brother in a gunfight. When Gant makes threats against Zeb and his family, Zeb turns to his friend, local marshal Lou Ramsey. However, Gant is not wanted for anything in that territory, so Ramsey can do nothing.
Nonetheless, Zeb decides he has to act. Suspecting Gant plans to rob a train's gold shipment, he prepares an ambush with Ramsey's reluctant help. Gant and his gang are killed in the shootout and resulting train wreck. Lilith and the Rawlings family travel by wagon to their new home.
The film marked then 66-year-old Raymond Massey's last appearance as Abraham Lincoln, a role that he previously played on stage ( Abe Lincoln in Illinois and the stage adaptation of John Brown's Body ), on screen ( Abe Lincoln in Illinois ) and on television (The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and two more productions of Abe Lincoln in Illinois).
MGM had enjoyed a great success with the big screen remake of Ben-Hur (1959) and initiated a number of spectacles, including remakes of Cimarron , Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Mutiny on the Bounty . [7]
In 1960, MGM struck a deal to produce four films in the Cinerama process, and Bing Crosby approached the studio with a proposition. He was developing a television spectacular called How the West Was Won based on photographs of the Old West in Life , with profits earmarked for St. John's Hospital, along with an album inspired by the same article recorded with Rosemary Clooney. MGM purchased the film rights from Crosby. [8]
MGM announced the project in June 1960, originally titled The Great Western Story. The plan was to film a story of six segments featuring 12 stars, with a cohesive overall storyline. Among the historical figures to be featured were Buffalo Bill, the James brothers and Billy the Kid. [9] [10] St. John's Hospital president Irene Dunne and others persuaded the film's stars to accept less than their usual fees. However, the hospital later sued for a share of the film's profits. [11]
Bernard Smith was assigned as producer, and he hired James Webb to write the script. [8] George Peppard was announced as the lead in October 1960, and Irene Dunne and Bing Crosby were originally announced as stars. [12] Laurence Harvey and John Wayne were also slated to appear in one sequence together. [13]
By April 1961, Wayne and Spencer Tracy had confirmed their plans to play Generals Sherman and Grant for a segment directed by John Ford, and James Stewart had been signed as well. [14] Other roles would go to Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, Russ Tamblyn and Carroll Baker, while Henry Hathaway and George Marshall would also direct from a script by James Webb. Crosby was scheduled to provide narration. [15] Jim Hutton was intended to appear in the Civil War segment. [16] Eventually, Harry Morgan appeared as Grant when Tracy was unavailable.
Ultimately, the film contained five sections: the 1830s westward migration, the 1849 California gold rush, the Civil War, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and the "taming" of the Wild West, with one family's story over three generations providing the bridge between each time period. The budget was set to at least $8 million. John Ford directed the Civil War segment, George Marshall the railroad segment and Henry Hathaway the rest. [8] "We wanted three old pros, no young geniuses," said Smith. [17]
How the West Was Won was one of only two dramatic feature films (along with The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm ) produced with the three-strip Cinerama process. Although the picture quality when projected onto curved screens in theaters is stunning, attempts to convert the film to a smaller screen suffer. When the film is projected in letterbox format, the actors' faces are nearly indistinguishable in long shots.
Filming started in May 1961 by John Ford in Paducah, Kentucky. Producer Bernard Smith said, "It is essential for our purposes that virtually the whole movie be shot outdoors. Throughout the movie, one of the basic themes is to show little people against a vast country – huge deserts, endless plains, towering mountains, broad rivers. We want to capture the spirit of adventure, the restless spirit that led these men and women across the country in [the] face of many difficulties and dangers." [18]
After Ford finished his segment, Hathaway took over on location. [18] Hathaway called Ford's segment "a little stagey". [19]
Parts of the film were shot in Monument Valley, Utah [20] and in Wildwood Regional Park in Thousand Oaks, California. [21] [22]
Ford complained about having to dress such huge sets, as Cinerama photographed a much wider view than did the standard single-camera process to which Hollywood directors were accustomed. Director Henry Hathaway was quoted as saying, "That Goddamned Cinerama; do you know a waist shot is as close as you can get with that thing?" [23]
A more difficult problem was that filming required that the actors be artificially positioned out of dramatic and emotional frame and out of synchronization with one another. Only when the three-print Cinerama process was projected upon a Cinerama screen did the positions and emotions of the actors synchronize, such as normal eye contact or emotional harmony between actors in a dramatic sequence. Because of the nature of Cinerama, if the film were shown in flat-screen projection, it would appear as if the actors made no eye contact. One brief scene of Mexican soldiers was sourced by John Wayne from his 1960 version of The Alamo.
Stuntman Bob Morgan, husband of Yvonne De Carlo, was seriously injured and lost a leg during a break in filming a gunfight on a moving train while filming the Outlaws portion. Chains holding logs on a flatbed car broke, crushing Morgan as he crouched beside them. [24]
In a scene in which George Peppard's character reminisces about his late father, Peppard improvises with an imitation of James Stewart's voice. Ford initially objected, but Peppard felt that it was important in such a long, sprawling film to remind the audience which character his father was supposed to be.
Hathaway later said that making the film was "goddam trouble. They had an idiot for a producer and Sol Siegel was drunk most of the time. We spent so much money on the picture they almost decided not to do the last part. We had a meeting, and I said, 'You can't quit. You've got to show how the West was won. The West was won when the law took over'." [25]
Filming was completed in January 1962. After the film was shot, MGM ordered a new ending that resolved the family story, which caused shooting to continue for another month and included George Peppard and Debbie Reynolds. [26] The budget eventually reached $12 million. [27]
For "The Civil War" segment, footage from MGM's 1957 film Raintree County of the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga were used for combat scenes during the day, as the scenes with Peppard, Tamblyn, Wayne, and Morgan were all at night. A brief shot of a steamboat going down a river (seen during the end of the Plains Segment) is also used from Raintree County.
For "The Railroad" segment, a subplot was cut featuring Hope Lange as Stuart's daughter, Julie, who becomes involved in a love triangle with Zeb and King; she ultimately marries and abandons Zeb. [5] [6]
The film later inspired a television series of the same name.
The film's music was composed and conducted by Alfred Newman. The soundtrack album was originally released by MGM Records. Dimitri Tiomkin, known for his Western film scores, was the first composer approached, but he became unavailable following eye surgery and Newman was hired as a replacement.
The score is widely considered[ by whom? ] as among Newman's best, and it appears on the AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores list. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, losing to the score for Tom Jones .
Debbie Reynolds sings three songs in the film: "Raise a Ruckus Tonight" starting a party around the camp fire, "What Was Your Name in the States?" and "A Home in the Meadow" to the tune of "Greensleeves", with lyrics by Sammy Cahn. [28] Her rendition is heard by Cleve (Gregory Peck), who is so moved that he proposes marriage. This scene ends the Plains segment.
Surprisingly for such an American film, How the West Was Won had its world premiere in the United Kingdom at London's Casino Cinerama Theatre on November 1, 1962. [29] It had a $450,000 advance. [30] The film ran at the Casino for 123 weeks, ending in April 1965.
Harold Myers of Variety called it a "magnificent and exciting spectacle" and in relation to the Cinerama process noted that there had been "a vast improvement in the process. The print joins are barely noticeable, and the wobble, which beset earlier productions, has been eliminated." [30] Reviews from London were favorable but with reservations over the storyline. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard called it "a super-epic which shucks away your sophistication. If ever I heard the sound of success it is this." The Times said "it has a kind of surge and splendour and extravagance not to be despised." [31]
How the West Was Won was a massive commercial success. Produced on a large budget of $15 million, it grossed $46,500,000 at the North American box office, [32] making it the second-highest-grossing film of 1963. The film has grossed over $50 million worldwide. [3]
The following people won Academy Awards for their work: [33] [34]
The following were nominated for five other Academy Awards:
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
In 2000, Warner Bros. assigned Crest Digital the task of restoring the original Cinerama negative for How the West Was Won. As part of the process, Crest Digital built its own authentic Cinerama screening room. [36] Hewlett-Packard has led efforts [37] to combine the three image portions to make the Cinerama image look more acceptable on a flat screen. This has finally been accomplished on the latest DVD and Blu-ray disc release. Previously, the lines where the three Cinerama panels join were glaringly visible, but this has been largely corrected on the Warner Bros. DVD and Blu-ray releases. However, the joints remain visible in places, especially against bright backgrounds.
The restoration also corrects some of the geometric distortions inherent in the process. For instance, in the final shot, the Golden Gate Bridge appears to curve in perspective as the camera flies underneath it whereas in the Cinerama version, it breaks into three straight sections at different angles.
The Blu-ray disc also contains a "SmileBox" version simulating the curved-screen effect.
Though the aspect ratio of Cinerama is 2.59:1, Warner's new releases of the film offer an aspect ratio of 2.89:1, incorporating much information on both sides that was not intended to be seen when projected. The Blu-ray-exclusive SmileBox alternative contains the intended cropping intact.
In 2006, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging performed digital restoration on How the West Was Won. The film was restored frame by frame at Prasad Corporation to remove dirt, tears, scratches and other damage, restoring the film's original appearance. [38] The restored version has been shown on television since October 2008 on the Encore Westerns channel. [39] [40] [41]
George Peppard was an American actor. He secured a major role as struggling writer Paul Varjak when he starred alongside Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and later portrayed a character based on Howard Hughes in The Carpetbaggers (1964). On television, he played the title role of millionaire insurance investigator and sleuth Thomas Banacek in the early-1970s mystery series Banacek. He played Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, the cigar-smoking leader of a renegade commando squad in the 1980s action television series The A-Team.
Victor Lonzo Fleming was an American film director, cinematographer, and producer. His most popular films were Gone with the Wind, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director, and The Wizard of Oz. Fleming has those same two films listed in the top 10 of the American Film Institute's 2007 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list.
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146-degrees of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of several novel processes introduced during the 1950s when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening.
Russell Irving Tamblyn, also known as Rusty Tamblyn, is an American film and television actor and dancer.
John Lee Mahin was an American screenwriter and producer of films who was active in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known as the favorite writer of Clark Gable and Victor Fleming. In the words of one profile, he had "a flair for rousing adventure material, and at the same time he wrote some of the raciest and most sophisticated sexual comedies of that period."
Henry Hathaway was an American film director and producer. He is best known as a director of Westerns, especially starring Randolph Scott and John Wayne. He directed Gary Cooper in seven films.
Dana Scott James "Jim" Hutton was an American actor in film and television best remembered for his role as Ellery Queen in the 1970s TV series of the same name, and his screen partnership with Paula Prentiss in four films, starting with Where the Boys Are. He is the father of actor Timothy Hutton.
Cimarron is a 1960 American epic Western film based on the 1930 Edna Ferber novel Cimarron. The film stars Glenn Ford and Maria Schell and was directed by Anthony Mann and Charles Walters, though Walters is not credited onscreen. Ferber's novel was previously adapted as a film in 1931; that version won three Academy Awards.
Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer was an American composer and cellist best known for his motion picture scores.
How the West Was Won is an American Western television series that starred James Arness, Eva Marie Saint, Fionnula Flanagan, Bruce Boxleitner, and Richard Kiley. Loosely based on the 1962 Cinerama film of the same name, it began with a two-hour television film, The Macahans, in 1976, followed by a mini-series in 1977, and a regular series in 1978 and 1979.
Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were, from 1957 to 1966, the marketing brands that identified motion pictures photographed with Panavision's anamorphic movie camera lenses on 65 mm film. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were shot at 24 frames per second (fps) using anamorphic camera lenses. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65's anamorphic lenses compressed the image 1.25 times, yielding an extremely wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is a 1962 American biographical fantasy film directed by Henry Levin and George Pal. The latter was the producer and also in charge of the stop motion animation. The film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1962. It won one Oscar and was nominated for three additional Academy Awards. The cast included several prominent actors—including Laurence Harvey, Karlheinz Böhm, Jim Backus, Barbara Eden and Buddy Hackett.
Henry Levin began as a stage actor and director but was most notable as an American film director of over fifty feature films. His best known credits were Jolson Sings Again (1949), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Where the Boys Are (1960).
Sol C. Siegel was an American film producer. Two of the numerous films he produced, A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Tom Thumb is a 1958 British musical fantasy film produced and directed by George Pal, and released by MGM. The film, based on the fairy tale "Thumbling" by the Brothers Grimm, is about a tiny youth who manages to outwit two thieves determined to make a fortune from him.
Ice Station Zebra is a 1968 American espionage thriller film directed by John Sturges and starring Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, and Jim Brown. The screenplay is by Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink, and W. R. Burnett, loosely based on Alistair MacLean's 1963 novel. Both have parallels to real-life events that took place in 1959. The film concerns a US nuclear submarine that must rush to the North Pole to rescue the members of the Ice Station Zebra.
Cinerama Adventure is a 2002 documentary about the history of the Cinerama widescreen film process. It tells the story of the widescreen process' evolution, from a primitive multi-screen pyramid process to a Vitarama format that played a big part in World War II, to the three-screen panoramic process it eventually became. The film includes interviews with surviving cast and crew who personally worked on the Cinerama films, plus vintage interviews with late creator Fred Waller.
Stanley Bernard Livingston is an American actor.
James Ruffin Webb was an American screenwriter. He was best known for writing the screenplay for the film How the West Was Won (1962), which garnered widespread critical acclaim and earned him an Academy Award.
"The Colter Craven Story" is the November 23, 1960 black-and-white episode of the American television western series, Wagon Train, which had an eight-season run from 1957 to 1965. Presented as the 9th installment of the hour-long program's 4th season, it is the third of four episodes of various television series directed by filmmaker John Ford, the only four-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Director.
That Goddamned Cinerama; do you know that a waist shot is as close as you can get with that thing?