Oregon Movies, A to Z

Ian Keith and Marguerite Churchill cower before John Wayne’s hotness.

The Big Trail was Wayne’s first starring role. Shot in Grandeur Scope (true, that was the name of the process)

From the New York Times

THE BIG TRAIL

Had it been even marginally successful, Raoul Walsh’s 1930 epic western, “The Big Trail,”might have changed the course of film history. Made in a pioneering 70-millimeter widescreen process (as well as in conventional 35 millimeter for theaters that couldn’t afford the new equipment), this story of a wagon train’s dangerous journey from Missouri to “the land beyond Oregon” makes use of techniques that would not gain currency in Hollywood until more than two decades had passed.

Walsh makes maximum use of the width of the big screen, composing his shots so that the eye is led, as in classical painting, to pick out a series of details across the surface of the image. But he also uses the extremely high resolution of the 70-millimeter stock to create perspectives that draw the viewer from foreground details to action in the distant background, at times seemingly miles away. Nothing less is at stake here than the whole system of analytical editing within a scene, as developed by the directors of the 1910s; what Walsh is doing does not really find an equivalent until Jacques Tati’s 70-millimeter masterpiece of 1967, “Playtime.”

Unfortunately, few theaters of the time were equipped to present the process — which the studio head William Fox humbly named Fox Grandeur — and the young leading man Walsh had picked out of the prop department, a certain Marion Morrison whom Walsh renamed John Wayne, did not yet have the authority to command a film of this scope.

A financial disaster, the widescreen “Big Trail” vanished for 60 years, until the Museum of Modern Art restored it in the 1980s in a widescreen 35-millimeter print. It is this version that Fox Home Entertainment has now brought out in a fine two-disc set (which includes the standard-aspect-ratio version as well as several illuminating documentaries on the film’s making). Greedy as I am, I lust to see the true 70-millimeter version presented in Blu-ray, but even in this shadow-of-a-shadow edition, “The Big Trail” is still astounding.(Fox Home Entertainment, $19.98, not rated.)