The Big Trail

A heroic young trail scout leads a large party of pioneers along THE BIG TRAIL to the West, with Indian attacks, natural disasters & romantic complications all part of the adventure.

As sweeping & magnificent as its story, Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL is a wonderful film, as entertaining as it was more than seven decades ago. With very good acting and excellent production values, it lives up to its reputation as the talkies' first epic Western.

John Wayne, pulled from obscurity for his first important movie role, looks impossibly young, but he immediately impresses with the natural charm & masculine authority he brings to the hero's role; he quietly dominates the film with the attributes which would someday make him a huge star. Marguerite Churchill is fetching as a lovely Southern belle who slowly warms to the Duke's attentions. Dialect comic El Brendel is great fun as a Swedish immigrant beset with mule & mother-in-law woes; his appearance in a scene signals laughs for the viewer.

Looking & sounding like a human grizzly bear, Tyrone Power Sr., vast & repulsive, makes a wonderful villain. Slick cardsharp Ian Keith is a sophisticated bad guy. (His famous physical similarity to John Gilbert is very apparent here.) Silent movie character actor Tully Marshall is impressive as a wily old mountain man who helps guide the wagon train. Corpulent Russ Powell, as a friendly fur trapper, puts his vocal talent for making nonsense noises to good use. Sharp-eyed movie mavens will spot Ward Bond as one of the Missouri settlers.

What will surprise many modern viewers is that THE BIG TRAIL was filmed in an early wide screen process, called Grandeur. More than living up to its name, the picture looks marvelous, with Walsh showing a mastery of the new technology. He fills the screen, every portion of it, with action. Notice during the crowd scenes, how everyone is busy doing real work, which adds so much to the verisimilitude of these sequences. Walsh deserves great credit for being one of the first directors to use wide screen. In addition, the film is blessedly free of the rear projection photography which blights so many older films. It should also be stressed that it is only natural that the soundtrack sounds a little primitive; talkies were still in their cradle. That Walsh was able to use a microphone at all, with most of the scenes shot out of doors, is more kudos for him.

THE BIG TRAIL was not a box office success. In 1930, William Haines' comedies were the big money makers and the public was looking for fare other than intelligent Westerns. Most of the cast slipped into obscurity, including Wayne. It would not be until 1939, when John Ford rescued him in STAGECOACH, that John Wayne's legend would begin in earnest. And despite its grand & sweeping vistas, it would be another 25 years before wide screen caught on with Hollywood, largely as an answer to the economic threat from television.

My giving this film a score of 8 is relative to other feature-length films from 1930. By the standards of films made just a few years later, this film might receive a score of only 6 or 7--mostly because the sound quality was so poor. Now it is possible that the film sounded better and the Fox Movie Channel did show a degraded print (it DID have a lot of lines and scratches), but I assume the sound problem was always an issue. That's because sound in movies was still a novelty in 1930 and many of the Hollywood talking pictures of 1930 sounded terrible--with background characters often drowning out the leads, characters huddled together to make sure they are picked up by the microphones or inconsistent quality (such as what was seen in THE BISHOP MURDER CASE, HELL'S ANGELS and other films of the day). This was all made much worse in THE BIG TRAIL because most of the film was shot outside--something unheard of at the time. Quite an innovation but also something that really stretched the talents of the sound technicians! So, while the film was very hard to listen to, I realize that they had to start somewhere, so I can forgive this--especially since the outdoor scenes are breathtaking--a major innovation for 1930.

The plot is rather similar to CIMARRON--a Western that came out the following year and which captured the Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, CIMARRON isn't all that great a film and I actually like THE BIG TRAIL more due to the scope of the film. While some might balk at THE BIG TRAIL's slow-moving pace, I saw it as a great history lesson about the hardships endured by those traveling West on wagon trains. Plus, the whole thing just looked so beautiful, as director Raoul Walsh went to significant trouble to film on location and THE BIG TRAIL looks almost like a film version of some Ansel Adams prints.

As for the acting, it was pretty good. This was a major break for young John Wayne--as his previous screen appearances were, at best, minor and unremarkable. Here, he was given the lead and did a dandy job--though he was obviously young and a little less "John Wayne-ish" than he was in later films, as his screen persona was not yet firmly established. Another interesting part was played by Tyrone Power II (Tyrone Power's father). He looked nothing like his extremely handsome son and looked and sounded almost exactly like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons! He made very few sound films--dying just a year after making this film--so it's a rare opportunity to see and hear this once famous actor.

Overall, the film is well worth seeing despite some sound problems and a few overly long scenes here and there. For 1930, it was a remarkable achievement--more so than the much more famous and award-winning CIMARRON made the following year. Much of the reason THE BIG TRAIL didn't win an Oscar most likely was because ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT came out the same year and it is truly one of the great films.

This movie is impressive for the type of physical props used. The wagons were real Conestoga, not the cut-down replicas seen in later movies. The circling of the wagons to fend off an attack by the locals was done with realism -- wagons overlapped with draft animals placed inside the ring -- resulting in what seems like hundreds milling about in the center. And when the shooting starts the wagons virtually disappear in the smoke. Very good representation of 'real life' (I shoot muzzle loading rifles so I know about the smoke part of it). Too bad I can't find this one on laserdisc for my library...

Critics generally pan this flick, probably because of its crudeness, clichés and caricatures. The critics are wrong. What we are watching in "The Big Trail" is the closest to the history of the American west that we will ever see, outside the silent classics of William S. Hart.

Early movies could use or consult people WHO HAD BEEN THERE. Of course, USC quarterback John Wayne, or even Irish thespian Tyrone Power, Sr. (who tried farming and hated it) are exceptions, but there is a ring of authenticity with "The Big Trail" which you can't get second hand. And if those aren't real plains Indians by the hundreds, I'll eat my breech clout!

And the scenery! Unfortunately, cinematographers hadn't mastered filters, so the sky is always washed out, and dust and haze obscure the deep focus. But even these limitations paradoxically serve to provide a feel of endless horizons. And the locations are spectacular, especially the Indian village, which is so enormous that at first I thought half of it was backdrop. Then, there is the spectacular rope drop of animals and equipment down an escarpment that could have inspired Herzog's "Fizcarraldo".

Of course, the acting is hammy and dialog corny, but remember, The Big Trail is from 1930 and that early sound movies had yet to evolve fully from silent film technique, which called for pantomime, with its exaggerated facial expression and movement. Also bear in mind that the style of reading lines came directly from the theater stage from which lines, lacking voice amplification, were delivered as oratory to be heard in the back rows.

Robert Flaherty in his landmark documentary "Nanuk of the North" actually set up his scenes dramatically. He was by no means a fly on the wall. If Flaherty could have made a documentary about the epic journey of a pioneer wagon train through the great Western prairies, I doubt if he could have achieved much greater impact than "The Big Trail".

Only three years after Able Gance's "Napoleon," was released in the revolutionary Spherical (1:33:1) and Triptych (4:00:1 aspect ratio) process, Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail" hit the market, shot in then-experimental "Fox Grandeur 70 mm."

That alone makes "The Big Trail" a technically significant film. Word has it that it failed economically, in part due to only two U.S. theatres presenting its original format (NYC's Roxy and LA's Grauman's Chinese Theatres). The rest of the country's movie houses balked at the cost of the extra equipment necessary, after having recently converted to sound. (Does this seem reminiscent of the "'Star Wars' digital satellite controversy" of 2002?)

Finding a VHS or DVD widescreen print of "The Big Trail" is difficult. It's been shown on tv and in special movie houses that way on occasion. Generally, though, one gets a standard screen version, which fails to capture the eye-popping 70 mm. aspect ratio of the original.

The production's statistics are impressive--a 347 cast/crew, covering 7 states in 10 weeks, replete with wagons, cattle, oxen, mules, horses, et al., retracing the first settler's trek over the Oregon trail one hundred years earlier.

Twenty year old Marion Morrison was renamed John Wayne and teamed with nineteen year old Broadway actress Margurite Churchill for a hoped-for "hot screen combination." The two worked efficiently, with Wayne's untrained, natural talent in evidence.

The production looks very laborious and challenging--yet appropriate to the conditions of those early pioneers. European "superiority" vs. Native American "savagery" is expressed in the script--establishing a skewed perspective for numerous films to follow. Likewise, macho "frontier justice" is forcefully dramatized--a model for many later western efforts.

"The Big Trail," while a technical landmark, also presents a Hollywoodized depiction of American history. For a more complete understanding of this period and these events, one is prone to engage in more committed and comprehensive research.