The Big Trail (1930)

Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was an early attempt to make a truly epic western. Fox (this was before the merger that created 20th Century-Fox) not only spent a fortune on the film they also decided to shoot it in an all-new experimental format which they called Grandeur. This was the first widescreen process to be used in Hollywood.

The timing could not have been worse. By the time the movie was ready to go out the Depression was starting to bite. Added to this movie theatre owners were still reeling from the expense of converting to sound. There was no way anyone was going to spend the money required to convert theatres to allow The Big Trail to be screened in the Grandeur format.

The idea of an epic western was also fairly new and perhaps movie-goers were not ready for it. The Big Trail performed poorly at the box office.

The legend has it that this was the movie that should have made John Wayne a star but ended up setting back his bid for stardom by a decade. Personally I think that in 1930 John Wayne was just not ready for stardom. His performance here has none of the effortless quality that characterised his later great performances. He seems a bit nervous and and a bit tentative. When he did finally achieve star status he was ready and in full command of himself as an actor.

The Big Trail is concerned with a huge wagon train full of settlers heading west. Breck Coleman (John Wayne) has been hired as a scout. The wagon boss is a disreputable character named Red Flack (played by Tyrone Power’s dad Tyrone Power Sr). Flack has with him his equally disreputable pal, Lopez.

Coleman signed on as scout because of Red Flack, and because of an old friend of Coleman’s. He very strongly suspects that Flack and Lopez murdered that old friend. Coleman intends to make them pay. He has no intention of turning them over to the proper authorities. That’s not how frontier justice works. He simply intends to kill both men.

Coleman has other things on my mind, principally one of the would-be settlers, Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill). He got off on the wrong foot with her and she hates him but he’s still sure she’s the girl for him.

Gambler and con-man Bill Thorpe (Ian Keith) is a complication. He has also set his eyes on Ruth and has told her stories of his vast plantation in Louisiana. In fact Thorpe owns nothing but the clothes on his back but he’s a charming liar and Ruth believes him. He will cause lots of problems.

The trek to the West is an ordeal. There are constant setbacks, wagons are lost in river crossing, many settlers die crossing 500 miles of desert and there’s a full-scale battle with the Cheyenne. The wagon train pushes on regardless, while Coleman watches and waits for his opportunity to avenge his friend.

These were the very early days of sound pictures, when those pictures were very static and studio-bound. Raoul Walsh wasn’t having any of that nonsense. He intended to shoot on location with live sound, and he did.

This was an insanely ambitious movie. The scale of the movie is breathtaking. Every shot seems to include several hundred extras. There are huge numbers of wagons. This is not the sort of wagon train you see in most westerns. This is like a vast army of settlers on the march.

Walsh’s shot compositions are incredibly busy, there is so much happening in the foreground and the background, but they work. This is spectacle in the best sense of the word. And this was 1930. Walsh could not rely on special effects. If he wanted a scene with dozens of wagons being lowered down a sheer cliff-face the only way to do it was to lower dozens of wagons down a sheer cliff-face, which is what he did. Those kinds of scenes look real in a way that modern CGI never does look real. They look real because they were real.

There are some problems. The pacing is slow at times. The plot doesn’t have much complexity. Many of the supporting actors were forced on Walsh by the studio. He wasn’t happy with them, and he was right. Many of them are terrible. Tyrone Power Sr is just awful. The acting of most of the supporting cast members is stiff and some of the dialogue scenes are rather cringe-inducing. There is irritating comic relief, and there’s too much of it.

John Wayne is OK, but he’s not yet the real John Wayne, the John Wayne of his great movies. Marguerite Churchill on the other hand is very good (her performance is the best in the movie).

You have to make allowances for the fact that this was 1930. The conquest of the West was not something that happened in the distant past. There were plenty of people still living who took part in that conquest, and had first-hand memories of the Wild West. The director of the movie, Raoul Walsh, was personally acquainted with Wyatt Earp (and Earp and John Ford were good buddies). The West had an emotional resonance with Americans in 1930 that is difficult to imagine today. The triumphalist “planting civilisation in the wilderness” message is understandable when you take these things into account.

Somehow The Big Trail manages to overcome its flaws. The visual magnificence helps a great deal. What also helps is the total lack of modern fashionable irony. Whatever you think about the conquest of the West there is no denying that those pioneers had guts. This movie takes their courage seriously, and it takes their suffering seriously.

Watching this movie in its correct aspect ratio on Blu-Ray is an overwhelming experience. If you’re serious about classic movies it’s one that you have to see. And it’s one of the great Hollywood epics. With all its problems it’s still highly recommended.