The Big Trail Details

The Not So Big Trail

This was the first major wide screen movie ever made. It used a 70mm. film in a process called ?Grandeur Film?. The studio spent so much on the equipment and processing that there was not enough money for big name stars hence John Wayne got his first big starring role. Because not many cinemas were equipped to take the new Grandeur process Fox made a shorter academy ratio version. Unfortunately this is the one they have chosen to put onto DVD. What a disappointment.

The movie was a box office failure and set the cause of widescreen back by over twenty years and it?s not hard to see why when you watch the movie. It?s a film about a wagon train going west along the Oregon Trail. On the way they have to cross deserts, mountains, rivers, scale cliffs, fight hostile Indians, struggle through snow, floods, everything bar volcanoes and earthquakes. All very predictable and very yawn making: even in 1930 it had all been done before.

But every good story needs human interest, in movie jargon, a fight between good and evil. Here it is provided by a very young John Wayne, dressed in white, ?cause he?s the goodie, and a bunch of really evil looking baddies who have killed his friends. This was Wayne?s first big movie so he seems curiously repressed like flat lemonade and the baddies who include Tyrone Power senior are more like cardboard cut-outs than real people.

One word of praise, the scenery is great and on a wide cinema screen the 70mm. version must have been breathtaking for those people who first saw it in 1930.

The DVD version is worth watching only as a curio. A word of warning, have a big pot of strong coffee by you so that you can stay awake.

[Highly rated reviewer]

the big trail

the name of the film is right the big trail it trails off but it stars the young wayne in his early days as a star the film is historical being in black and white but not one i would go buy