1That Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) is known today as a pioneering epic owes to more than just its large-scale treatment of life on the Oregon Trail. In histories of the Hollywood film industry, it is often cited as one of the first major Westerns of the sound era. In biographies of John Wayne, it figures as the first starring role of a young actor destined to become an American icon. And in scholarship on film technology, it represents a noteworthy experiment in widescreen filmmaking—via Fox’s proprietary Grandeur 70mm system—decades before it was to become the norm. In the eyes of many of its critical champions, there is nothing quite like this early widescreen Western—a marriage of frontier spectacle and once cutting-edge media technology, starring the genre’s soon-to-be foremost star. When the Library of Congress announced that they would be adding it to their National Film Registry in 2006, these were the features they looked to highlight: the leading role played by an “unknown actor named John Wayne” and the fact that its “plot of a trek along the Oregon Trail is aided immensely by the majestic sweep provided by the experimental Grandeur wide-screen process used in filming” (“Librarian of Congress Adds”, n.p.).
2Perhaps before anything else, however, the name of The Big Trail remains known today for another reason: its notorious failure. So disastrous was its release that it has since been said to have “buried the epic Western for several years” (Aleiss and Appleford 769). With it, widescreen filmmaking, seen in the late 1920s to be nearing general adoption in Hollywood, would go into a long retreat. And John Wayne’s career would go a similar way; he would work for much of the decade to come in B-Westerns, until his breakthrough role in the film most synonymous with the revival of the big-budget Western’s fortunes, Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). In a 2015 article for American Cinematographer, Jason Apuzzo wrote: “It was the movie that made John Wayne a star—and nearly ruined his career. It was the most ambitious Western of its time—and nearly ended the genre for good” (“Visions of Grandeur”, n.p.).
3This article asks why. Why did a celebrated film like The Big Trail—one selected for the National Film Registry, no less—become such an infamous flop? Why did widescreen, Westerns, and Wayne end up “buried” in its wake? Numerous linked explanations have been advanced in the nine decades since its release, no single one of which could be said to tell the whole story: unwillingness across the film industry to invest in expensive new technology (Brownlow 399), apathy from audiences towards yet another epic Western (Stanfield 51–52), disenchantment with American myths in the era of the Great Depression (Slotkin 254–256), to list but a few discussed in what follows.
4What can be said with certainty is that failure is a context-specific thing. Moreover, that a product designed to showcase a new technological development or introduce a new lead actor should struggle commercially is hardly unprecedented. It does not preclude future forms of success, particularly when thinking about those beyond the purely financial. Perhaps the most striking thing about The Big Trail is just how prominent its innovations—its wide frame and the iconic figure of Wayne—would soon become in the Western genre. And yet, the film could only have taken the distinctive, and later acclaimed, form it did during a brief window of time early in the era of talking pictures. This article thus considers how the technological, industrial, and ideological forces at play in this moment converged with the era’s dominant conceptions of epic Western filmmaking to make The Big Trail both the untimely release it is widely recognised to have been and a strikingly timely one—a singularly ambitious screen treatment of America’s national myths that makes for a fruitful case study with which to examine what it meant to fail in a transitional period for Hollywood.
5As the 1920s came to an end, the heyday of the talking picture was just beginning. By 1930, Hollywood’s major studios had all released their final silent features, completing one of the most significant, and widely discussed, technological changes in the history of cinema. Sound, however, was not the only technology that seemed to be on the cusp of taking hold in Hollywood at this point. In the eyes of many both within and outside of the US film industry, widescreen looked to be next. Although since overshadowed by the “widescreen revolution” that would, beginning in the early 1950s, go on to make such technology a regular part of major film production, the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s can also be recognised as a decisive period in its history.
6The first years of the talkies overlapped with the introduction of a variety of larger-screen formats, processes, and film stocks. Between 1929 and early 1931, these would be developed and used for a handful of features, shown in a small number of specially equipped theatres. From Paramount came Magnafilm, 56mm with an aspect ratio of 2.18:1; from Warner Bros. Vitascope, 65mm with a similar ratio; and from RKO Natural Vision, 63.5mm at 1.85:1 (Enticknap 54). The Big Trail would not be the only Western to which the studios pinned their widescreen hopes. MGM’s contribution to the wide-gauge race, Realife, is best known for being used for King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930); it involved shooting on 70mm but printing down to 35mm for exhibition. To produce a wider ratio, the tops and bottoms of frames were masked with black bars, while, as a sound-on-disc system, the picture could extend into the space often reserved for optical soundtracks (Belton 49).
Figure 1. Diagrams from William Stull, “Seventy Millimetres”, The American Cinematographer, February 1930, 43. Courtesy of Media History Digital Library
7For its part, Fox Grandeur was a 70mm format with a 2.13:1 aspect ratio, in use between the autumn of 1929 and the summer of 1930. Not only were its images more than double the standard width (Fig. 1), but the expanded film stock provided space for an optical Movietone soundtrack substantially wider than those found on 35mm prints; this had the benefit of greatly reducing unwanted noise—a common issue in the early days of talking pictures (Crafton 233). In fact, these two technologies seemed to almost go hand in hand at this point. Like many of the other studios pushing for the adoption of widescreen at the end of the 1920s, Fox actively sought to link their new proprietary process with the conversion to sound. Given that the industry was in the midst of a radical technological shift—one requiring the installation of new equipment in all venues that wanted to screen films—if further major changes were looming, it arguably made sense to undertake them close together. As one announcement by the Fox company characterised it:
The development of the Grandeur system has been an inevitable result of the revolution which Fox Movietone brought to the motion picture business. The new type of motion picture entertainment which came with sound demanded equal improvement in visual reproduction; Grandeur Pictures do for vision what Fox Movietone does for sound. (Quoted in Cameron 26)
8In fact, Fox’s push for Grandeur in this moment signalled more than mere innovation; some regard it as an attempt to take control over motion picture technology at a time in which the infamous battles over patents that had so defined the first two decades of the American film industry were far from distant history. Indeed, the studio’s founder, William Fox, was known as the man behind the antitrust lawsuit that broke up the monopolistic, Edison-led Motion Picture Patents Company in 1915. However, as Rick Mitchell observes in his history of widescreen formats, in the 1920s, “for reasons best known to him, Fox embarked on a campaign to take over the industry,” to which new technologies would be central (Mitchell 38). Put simply, had his patented Grandeur format replaced 35mm film as the format at the basis of film production, distribution, and exhibition, he could have also taken hold of—and charged rival studios to license—the basic technology behind moving images. As will be seen, none of the experimental widescreen formats mentioned above would remain in use beyond 1931—few venues would commit to the new technology, screens, and even projection booths required—but Grandeur had, by some measures, the greatest impact of any. Certainly, it would leave a legacy for the widescreen pioneers of the future: much of the underlying technology would be repurposed in the 1950s for the 70mm Todd-AO format (Enticknap 54).
9Alongside widescreen, The Big Trail was also designed to capitalise upon another type of filmmaking at least temporarily in demand. In the latter part of the American silent era, Western films—specifically historical ones produced on a lavish scale—had enjoyed a level of popular success and critical acclaim hitherto unseen in the genre. Beginning with the release of Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923), an epic of the nineteenth-century Oregon Trail pioneers battling their way over the continent to the West, big-budget middlebrow Western films had become a major part of Hollywood’s production schedules, earning not only great numbers at the box office but much-needed positive publicity for the movie industry itself (Lasky and Weldon 164).
10Despite emerging from a genre that largely played to juvenile and rural audiences by the start of the 1920s, Paramount’s epic story of what were then America’s most celebrated nation-builders had come to be regarded by many as the most admirable thing to have come out of Hollywood in its short history—“the picture event of a decade,” according to Variety, “universally heralded by press and public” (“Covered Wagon Sensation of Broadway” 27). It was recognised as a work of entertainment yet also of education, and described as “the first great picture to bring home to us the history of our own country” by one critic (Smith 54). Others referred to it as “the great American picture,” a “screen history” that marked “a tremendous leap forward in the progress of this art and this industry” (“Illustrated Screen Reports” 913). Not only would it become an archetype for a novel kind of large-form historical film, celebrated by Hollywood’s advocates and its critics alike, but The Covered Wagon would inaugurate a cycle of prestige Westerns that together proposed to tell what historians of the time regarded as the foundational story of the United States, that of the nineteenth-century frontier. The final half-decade of silent Hollywood saw the arrival of a string of titles that sought to present, on a grand and edifying scale, key episodes of the American national story to mass audiences: North of 36 (Irvin Willat, 1924), The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924), The Pony Express (James Cruze, 1925), and The Vanishing American (George B. Seitz, 1925) were all hailed, to lesser or greater degrees, for the rare “authenticity” they brought to interpreting the United States’ constructive Old West period via stories of westbound pioneers and doomed Indians, transcontinental railroads and new trails of human commerce.
11In other words, The Big Trail arrived at a time when Western filmmaking was enjoying a new kind of legitimacy founded on cinema’s capacity to project a patriotic, mass-consumed national narrative, one that Hollywood’s champions and its critics alike could get behind as evidence of Hollywood moving in a promising new direction—an example of what cinema could or should be, both educational and instrumental in the Americanisation of its audiences (Hampton 338–340, Messel 222–223). During a period in which immigration, urbanisation, and industrialisation were seen to be dividing American society, films such as The Covered Wagon were hailed for offering a singularly timely, persuasive, and wide-reaching delineation of America’s collective identity. With the new widescreen format, Fox and director Walsh would look to match, if not surpass, the standard set by these 1920s Westerns.
12On 10th September 1930, Variety ran the headline “Wide Film’s Future Depends on Fox’s Big Trail at Roxy in Oct” (5):
Wide film will either materialize as a part of the film industry before the end of this November or else it will most likely take the shelf indef[initely]. Success or failure rests with Fox, which pioneers its third debut of the different stages of wide film at the Roxy around Oct. 15. The Big Trail and the public’s reaction will settle matters.
13In the name of widescreen’s very future, it seemed, Fox turned to a kind of story that would be immediately familiar to audiences of the day: that of a wagon train undertaking its perilous trek from Missouri to Oregon and, in the process, laying the foundations for the future prosperity of the US nation. The hero of the piece is a young trapper, Breck Coleman (John Wayne), who joins the party while seeking revenge for the killing of another trapper by the trail boss Red Flack (Tyrone Power Sr.) and soon romances the young settler Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill). While the pair are united in Oregon at the film’s end, to get there, deserts and blizzards must be overcome, a Cheyenne attack repelled, and a treacherous river forded.
14This basic narrative structure is firmly in line with what would be expected from a big-budget wagon train epic of the time. Centred around the spectacle of nineteenth-century pioneers on the trail and what they went through in their journey to the West, it immediately recalls its vaunted silent forebear The Covered Wagon, now seven years old. Where Cruze’s earlier film had opened with, “The blood of America is the blood of pioneers—the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness” (The Covered Wagon 00:00:50–00:01:04). Walsh offers a dedication: “Dedicated—to the men and women who planted civilization in the wilderness and courage in the blood of their children” (The Big Trail 00:00:36–00:00:53). From there on, like its celebrated predecessor, Walsh’s historical romance allows the more intimate aspects of its drama to come second to a greater human endeavour: the momentous trek of the pioneers. As the intertitles explain, these pioneers, “gathered from the North, the South and the East,” have been brought together by a common purpose: “the conquest of the West” (The Big Trail 00:00:53–00:01:05). They are there less to pursue their personal goals than to advance a national project.
15In the early twentieth century, under the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis, the experience of the trek depicted in The Big Trail was one widely held to be the basis of the American character and its democratic institutions (Etulain 42). The pioneers were considered vital nation-builders, their endeavours fundamental to how Americans understood themselves and their nation. The process of moving west as a community was supposed to have done more than expand the country; it was a transformative experience that made its people who they were, in their lifetimes and for generations to come. With the introduction of sound and a new leading man, The Big Trail grants new voice to what are ideas firmly associated with the Western genre. As Coleman reminds the wavering emigrants when some of the less resolute among their number contemplate abandoning the trek and returning east,
We can’t turn back! We’re blazing a trail that started in England. Not even the storms of the sea could turn back those first settlers; and they carried it on further. They blazed it on through the wilderness of Kentucky. Famine, hunger—not even massacres could stop them. And now we’ve picked up the trail again. And nothing can stop us! Not even the snows of winter, nor the peaks of the highest mountains. We’re building a nation! And we’ve got to suffer. (The Big Trail 01:44:30–01:45:00)
16The young trapper’s message is one firmly in line with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the justification it was supposed to provide for colonisation: Westward goes the course of civilisation, and to turn against it would be to betray a historical mission greater than that of any single wagon train. The direction of national destiny itself is at stake—a centuries-long “trail” that successive generations had pursued across sea and land, through famine, hunger, and massacres. Sacrifices will be made. In fact, they must be made, for it is the experience of the struggle to master the wilderness, more so than territorial expansion itself, that will truly “make” these Americans and advance their country to the next stage of its destiny.
17The significance of their mission would not be lost on audiences of the day, reinforced by hyperbolic intertitles that punctuate the many extreme long shots of the wagons, just as they had in the film’s silent forebears: “Ten weary miles a day. There is no road, but there is a will, and history cuts the way” (The Big Trail 01:34:47–01:34:56). New life arrives and old life passes, emphasising that the train’s progress is made with future generations in mind. And through dialogue like Coleman’s above-quoted exhortation, the action beneath the canopies is yoked back to a larger history as but one strand of a grand narrative that the film shares with the major epic Westerns of years gone by: that of a civilisation forged and an exceptional people made.
18The Big Trail was thus a production firmly in line with what came before but also an enlargement of or expansion upon it. It pushed the epic mission of the pioneers yet further, into widescreen and, more specifically, the Grandeur system. It brought the novelty of sound to a familiar tale, along with a new star: Wayne, real name Marion Morrison, plucked by director Walsh from work as a prop hand at the Fox studio and occasional bit parts in John Ford films. And it was made on a singular scale—a gruelling shoot across five states, with 20,000 extras, 1800 cattle, 1400 horses, and 500 buffalo—at what was a considerable cost for the time, around $1.7 million (Eyman 59).
19The result was a film well placed to show off the merits of a new widescreen technology—a purpose to which the vistas of the American West have been put at various points since, most notably in the later widescreen revolution that began in the 1950s, as exemplified by the sprawling Cinerama epic of westward expansion How the West Was Won (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall, 1962). Harnessing this, Walsh’s images from the trail remain remarkable, with their river crossings, buffalo hunts, parched deserts, blizzards, and, most famously, a scene in which the emigrants lower their wagons, people, and livestock by rope down a cliffside and onto a canyon floor (Fig. 2). Shot in wide dimensions of a kind little seen previously, it creates quite a unique spectacle of migration, one achieved through a kind of extensive outdoor location work far removed from the more studio-bound expectations one might have for a Hollywood film made so soon after the introduction of sound.
Figure 2. Lowering the wagons, shot near Spread Creek, Wyoming. (The Big Trail 01:02:50)
20In making use of its expanded frame, The Big Trail’s visual style diverges from norms of mise-en-scène and continuity editing that had built up in the narrower, broadly 4:3 aspect ratios of years gone by. There is less cutting than would be expected in such a film, with Walsh often favouring unembellished, prolonged takes. Medium or long shots are used in places where many filmmakers would turn to close-ups, such as Wayne’s arrival as Coleman, on horseback from behind a wagon canopy (The Big Trail 00:02:10). Deep focus is deployed to striking effect, along with a distinct emphasis on horizontal composition within frames. In fact, the images stress horizontality in more than one sense: exploiting the wider screen space, extras and leads alike can be seen to mime their way through incidents and routines from daily life on the trail, in compositions made up of multiple planes of unfolding action. There are several moments in which Coleman’s actions unfold behind or beyond the immediate focus of the shot, such as in an early scene where a group of women are gathered cleaning and brushing their hair; he enters and exits the frame always on its periphery, before the film cuts to follow him (Fig. 3). Such images draw attention to the backgrounds in a way that helps the larger pioneer group going west register as more than mere supporting players to a frontier romance.
Figure 3. Breck Coleman (John Wayne), the hero on the periphery. (The Big Trail 00:04:45)
21Nevertheless, it is not just being in widescreen that makes The Big Trail look so distinctive. An article from shortly before the film’s release by cinematographer Arthur Edeson explained how its visual style arose directly from the requirements of the Grandeur process:
Due to the more natural shape of the Grandeur frame, there is a certain pseudo-stereoscopic effect produced: but this effect is lost unless there is a very considerable depth of focus in the image. The 70 millimeter picture is very nearly the same proportion as the natural field of our vision, which, I suppose, is responsible for this pseudostereoscopy. But, clearly, to take full advantage of this, we must use lenses which will give us a degree of depth at least somewhat approximating that of our eyes. (9)
22The result is that “the director, however, must in a Grandeur picture pay considerably more attention to his background action than is usually the case, for, even in close-ups, the depth of focus demanded by Grandeur makes the background an important part of the picture” (21). From Edeson’s account, it appears that the new 70mm format was almost ideally suited to the Western genre, the harbinger of a resplendent new era of frontier filmmaking. Thanks to its ability, or even obligation, to register “vast backgrounds and the intimate foreground action in a single shot,” it was better equipped to capture the “sweep of the story” than any forebear or competitor (21). More recent assessments, such as John Belton’s claim that when “filming exterior action, such as Westerns or newsreels, Grandeur provided a ‘panoramic expanse’ that was more appropriate to the material” (50), suggest that he had a point.
23In other words, The Big Trail looked well positioned to bring a new dimension to America’s national genre, if not its entire film industry. Instead, it became a quite infamous flop, at least relative to its massive production costs—a misguided venture that “buried” the big-budget Western for years to come (Aleiss and Appleford 769), delaying the mainstream acceptance of its leading man and widescreen filmmaking with it.
24From early on, The Big Trail was an unusually troubled production, drawn out by the complication of having to simultaneously shoot two negatives for the film, using widescreen cameras and regular-aperture ones respectively. From these, separate versions were prepared for Grandeur-ready exhibitors and otherwise, with, as Edeson makes clear, the standard-format version being considered the less important of the two: the film shoot proceeded with the widescreen version in mind, prioritised in terms of setups, takes, and angles (8–9).
25Yet it was this latter, secondary version that most people saw in theatres in 1930. In fact, Edeson’s Grandeur cinematography, so impressive today, had only been seen in two locations by the end of the film’s run: the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where it premiered on 24th October 1930, exactly one year after the catastrophic “Black Thursday” of the Wall Street Crash (Eyman 59). Of its first four openings, two had been in 70mm and two had been in 35mm; the comparison of the two was to help measure the impact of widescreen at the box office. It should be noted that it enjoyed the longest run of any widescreen film of its day, at Grauman’s Chinese, where it lasted eight weeks. At the Roxy, however, it managed only two. Nevertheless, out of the initial four engagements, its best performance was a 35mm one, at the McVickers in Chicago. These initial showings were enough for the studio to order retakes and cancel their plans for further premium roadshow screenings across the United States (Hall and Neale 75).
26On 18th October 1930, Motion Picture News published a short notice headed “Hollywood Undisturbed Over Grandeur’s Advent”: “The Big Trail, showing at Grauman’s Chinese on Grandeur, is kicking up no new tremors of excitement over wide film” (41). With rewiring for sound fresh in the memory and the Great Depression taking hold, few exhibitors were willing to make the investment necessary to show what were, at the end of the day, a small number of Fox products. For The Big Trail, the standard-format 35mm version—a version without what is now the film’s most celebrated feature—would have to suffice in the vast majority of venues. Handled by Lucien N. Andriot and lacking the distinctive visual style that came with Edeson’s approach to the Grandeur frame (Figs. 4 and 5), it had the major advantage that it could be shown in any cinema using regular projection equipment. It was also shorter than the 70mm version, reported to have been “cut by a half-hour a week after its release” on the grounds that it was “too long and too slow” (Mitchell 41).
Figures 4 and 5. Breck Coleman (John Wayne) in the 70mm Grandeur (since preserved on 35mm) and original 35mm versions. (The Big Trail 00:17:43 in the Grandeur release, 00:15:39 in the 35mm release)
27The costs required for production and distribution of prints was one issue; the need for new projectors, screens, and in some cases projection booths was another. And these were compounded by a lack of technical standardisation across the widescreen field. Where the litigious competition at the turn of the century between a range of formats developed by rival companies had prompted the adoption of 35mm film as the norm, the coming of sound and widescreen had led to new battles over what were to become the industry’s standards. Variety coverage of the conflict from February 1930 had Warner, First National, Paramount, and RKO favouring 65mm, while Universal, MGM, and, of course, Fox were leaning towards 70mm: the “entire situation appears to have been brought about by the Fox aggressiveness,” they reported (“Reports Conflict” 11). As Donald Crafton concludes, the ultimate decline of widescreen in the 1930s owed to both this lack of standardisation and concerns over Fox’s aforementioned attempt to establish his company’s hold over film technology: “Ostensibly to agree on industry standards (but also to thwart Fox), the Academy declared a moratorium on widescreen in 1931” (235).
28As early as May 1930, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) declared that the development of widescreen should be restricted until a standard gauge was decided. Variety’s coverage of the announcement was headlined “Wide Film Declared Out”: widescreen would be held in abeyance for the time being, due to the “Danger of wrecking the entire industry by placing, via wide film, a burden upon theatres which the majority could not be expected to survive” (5). In “addition to nearly tripling production and distribution costs, fully 75% of the first run theatres in the world, and practically all of the lesser houses, would have to be altered and in many cases completely rebuilt,” they continued:
The giant screen is to be tucked away as an emergency stimulus such as sound proved with its introduction. Only should the public show marked signs of wearying of picture entertainment as they did before talk manifested itself will wide width be trotted out. (5)
29Before the end of 1930, this was followed by an announcement that such innovations should be abandoned for at least two years. The first slate of widescreen films having failed, the idea of undertaking further experimentation without agreement on a single standard was recognised as a costly folly. As Variety’s headline of 17th December read, “Wide Film is Ruled Out” (5).
30It is worth noting that widescreen was not the only technological innovation to impact The Big Trail’s fortunes. In the early days of sound, before dubbing and subtitling became the norm, it was standard practice for Hollywood studios to produce multiple foreign-language versions of their films, using many of the same sets, costumes, and locations. In the case of The Big Trail, separate French, German, Spanish, and Italian versions with their own casts and directors were made on location alongside it: La Piste des géants (Pierre Couderc, 1931), Die große Fahrt (Lewis Seiler, 1931), La gran jornada (David Howard, Samuel Schneider, and Raoul Walsh, 1931), and Il grande sentiero (Louis R. Loeffler, 1931).
31Ironically, these alternate versions provided the closest thing to a profit Fox would see. Against its reported $1.7 million budget, The Big Trail would gross only $945,000 in the domestic market. Per Scott Eyman, the foreign-language versions took in more than the additional $200,000 they cost to produce, albeit to a meagre sum of $9,264: “The Big Trail was a financial bloodbath” (59). And it was a “bloodbath” that at least partly explains why widescreen was so readily returned to the shelf. As Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale agree, “Following precedents such as these, other companies generally chose not to stress the wide formats in publicity for their subsequent films or to produce further titles in large format” (75).
32Yet for all that the box-office losses of a production as risky as The Big Trail might seem hardly surprising, it remains that one bloated production and the poor take-up of one studio’s widescreen technology would surely not be enough to bury a genre for close to a decade, as some have suggested it did. While there are various ways of approaching the Western’s fortunes in this period, there undoubtedly was a major diminishment in the big-budget Western’s status in the years that followed, with B-Westerns coming to dominate the market throughout much of the 1930s (Stanfield 54). This rapid decline would bottom out in 1934, a year in which no A-Westerns were produced (Slotkin 255). Most accounts of the genre’s history assert that it only regained its old prominence in the final years of the decade. The 1939 release of John Ford’s Stagecoach—again starring Wayne—would come, in the decades that followed, to be “commonly credited with reviving the genre’s status” and ushering in its “classical” heyday (Studlar and Bernstein 5).
33Why, then, did the prestige Western decline so dramatically at the start of the 1930s? The critical response to The Big Trail goes some way towards offering an explanation. Whether reviewers saw the Grandeur version or the standard 35mm version seemed to actually have little bearing on their assessments. Where they took issue with Fox’s grandest ever frontier epic was that this kind of subject had simply been done enough. For Picture Play Magazine, there was no novelty in what was really “just a noisy Covered Wagon,” led by a “newcomer with schoolboy diction,” Wayne: “When will producers realize that fans want interesting people and acting, not longer wagon trains?” (“A Confidential Guide” 118). With striking similarity, Sime Silverman of Variety complained that the film was “only a noisy Covered Wagon”: “It is the same thing over and over again, including the Indian attack on the wagon train-made corral” (17).
34Some reviewers were more positive, but as Peter Stanfield writes in his study of 1930s Westerns, where “the 1930/31 Western was concerned, film reviewers and the industry” found little compensation in the novelties of widescreen and sound “for what was seen to be a dramatically played-out genre” (51–52). Citing the response to The Big Trail alongside those for fellow large-scale frontier flops Billy the Kid and Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), he summarises: “Time and again reference is made to the epic Westerns produced in the latter years of silent cinema, The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, and The Pony Express, and how little the new Westerns have to offer over their predecessors” (51). While Cimarron is remembered today for winning Best Picture at the fourth Academy Awards, it only recouped its budget after a 1935 re-release.
35Clearly, this rejection of the Western’s charms suggests a sizeable shift in popular tastes relative to the preceding decade. Stanfield offers one of the most compelling explanations for the major studios’ Depression-era move away from Western production and towards “films whose costs could be more firmly controlled within a studio environment”: “The indifferent performance of these Westerns [The Big Trail, Billy the Kid, and Cimarron] at the box office, their poor scripts, inappropriate technological innovations, […] their lack of novelty, reviewers’ sense of ennui […] help to explain the genre’s disappearance from the major producers’ production schedules” (54). In a radically changed financial landscape, studios seemed less inclined to devote funds to productions that may well have been edifying but were certainly expensive and increasingly unprofitable, such as prestige Westerns.
36Stanfield’s is far from the only explanation for this decline, however. While the question of why the Western fell so precipitously from popular favour remains a matter of little consensus, John G. Cawelti’s work exemplifies one of the most common rationales:
The decline of the 1920s’ version of the western formula into pulp novels and B western films reflected the impact of the boom and bust of the late 1920s and the depression of the 1930s. (244)
37Under the impact of the Depression, American moviegoers were disenchanted by the gap between their historical myths of the Western—those of collective heroism, triumph, and regeneration—and the social reality they now inhabited. Stories of unfettered optimism no longer seemed quite so pertinent to the realities of life, and accordingly, more up-to-date subject matter, such as that of the gangster film, rose to popularity in its place. Probably the most succinct articulation of this idea comes, however, from Richard Slotkin, in his monumental work on frontier mythology: that the epic Western’s “vision of history was invalid, or no longer useful,” for the 1930s public (256). The “historical catastrophe” of the Wall Street Crash had undermined the heroic ideal of limitless growth, marking “the failure of the progressive dream that had been embodied in the Myth of the Frontier” (256). For many in the decade of the Dust Bowl, the dreams most associated with the American imagination looked more unattainable than ever.
38As a consequence, the nation’s pioneer forebears could no longer necessarily be celebrated with the same prideful presentism as they had only a few years earlier. Individualism was a core national virtue, but now, at least in the eyes of some, the cost of its unchecked exercise was being laid bare. Henry Steele Commager’s 1933 article “Farewell to Laissez Faire” exemplifies this growing sentiment, challenging the prideful tenor with which people had for so long claimed the pioneers of the past as the natural forebears to the capitalists of the present. In it, he describes “an invading horde” of “Americans [that] surged across the continent, reaping where they had not sowed”: “In the name of individualism and enterprise Americans had used up those fabulous stores of wealth that were to be the foundation of a new society” (quoted in Wrobel 128). As the United States entered the 1930s and the Western its decline, the Depression had “shattered” this “temple of prosperity […] and the religion of individualism which it symbolized” (quoted in Wrobel 128).
39Why did The Big Trail fail upon its initial release? An absence of novelty? A lack of resonance with Depression-era audiences? Bloated production costs? The almost non-existent take-up for the Grandeur system? All of these certainly played their part in what was, by any measure, a costly misadventure. Whatever the case, unlike sound, widescreen was not here to stay. As Sheri Chinen Biesen summarises the myriad consequences of Fox’s experiment,
The financial failure of The Big Trail, not to mention its enormous cost, potentially contributed to the reluctance of the industry to adopt widescreen, 70mm, Grandeur, and extensive location shooting. […] It also hurt the Fox studio, the careers of Walsh and Wayne, and the Western as an A-picture film genre. […] Ultimately, The Big Trail’s widescreen 70mm location shooting was twenty years ahead of its time and anticipated the postwar Hollywood era. (54–55)
40The idea of a film “twenty years ahead of its time” echoes a contention with which this article opened: that The Big Trail was a release both untimely and timely, one that would in the decades to come be acclaimed on account of a specific convergence of factors that both produced it and saw it fail in 1930. In The War, The West, and the Wilderness from 1979, Kevin Brownlow laments the fact that, as theatres “could ill-afford” to invest in Grandeur projection, “The Big Trail has thus been as neglected as most of the silent Westerns. Yet in its efforts to re-create American history, it made American history—on a minor, but for a picture about pioneers, a very significant scale” (399). Today, from its position in the National Film Registry, it no longer looks quite so “neglected.” Apuzzo strikes what is now a familiar sentiment when hailing “the granddaddy of all widescreen epics, the forefather of today’s IMAX and 3D extravaganzas”: “Everything new about The Big Trail—including its 70mm imagery, higher-fidelity sound, and John Wayne—would prove its appeal in the years ahead” (“Visions of Grandeur”, n.p.).
41“Timing is everything,” concludes a Gilcrease Museum announcement for a 2018 exhibition featuring stereoscopic photographs from The Big Trail’s production (“Exploring The Big Trail”). As has been seen, though, this need not only mean that it arrived at the wrong time. It is hard not to identify a serendipity in its combination of unique widescreen spectacle and newcomer lead—those same features, inseparable from the brief period in film history discussed here, that Apuzzo cites as being central to its appeal today. Tellingly, Fox’s other Grandeur releases would not enjoy the kind of subsequent reclamation and canonisation reserved for Walsh’s Western epic. For all that it might have seemed like a tired retread of familiar ground to some in its day, The Big Trail is a film that often strikes modern viewers as something novel, even unique. It offers an intriguing look at a bold direction to which the US film industry of the 1930s ultimately did not commit, at least not in this form and at this point. More than a failure, it is maybe best understood as a trail not taken in the history of the Western and in the larger history of Hollywood filmmaking—a revealing foray into widescreen decades before it actually did become the norm. Watching it today is to wonder just how different 1930s cinema, the Western, and even John Wayne’s career might have looked had it been an immediate success, rather than having to wait so long to become one.
Flux RSS
