Pioneering Widescreen Epic Finally Hits DVD

Widescreen television has been slowly but steadily gaining in popularity over the past decade, attempting to emulate the wider rectangular shape that theatrical films adopted over half a century ago as one of the film industry’s responses to competition from television at that time (which reproduced the four-by-three ratio rectangle that films had used since the 1890s).

The widescreen revolution in film in the mid-1950s was a success, bringing theatrical filmgoers a picture more impressive than the small TV screens they had at home. However, a generation earlier Hollywood had already tried to switch its production over to higher quality and more spectacular wider film formats an attempt doomed to failure by the Great Depression.

In 1929-30, Hollywood had just undergone a transition from silent film to synchronized sound and was promoting 70mm and other widescreen processes as the next wave of the future. Several feature-length movies were produced in that format, although standard 35mm versions were shot simultaneously for theatres that did not install new projectors and double-width screens.

The comedy thriller “The Bat Whispers” has been on DVD in both its wide and standard versions for some time, but currently only the regular 35mm editions (if any copies at all) are known to survive for most of those pioneering experiments in widescreen.

Possibly the most ambitious of them is now out in a DVD double-disc set that preserves the original widescreen “Grandeur” version. Fox Home Video had released the standard version of “The Big Trail” (1930) about a year ago, but last week they finally made the preferred widescreen version available for home viewing in a well-produced special DVD edition, along with the shorter standard version for comparison.

It includes nearly an hour’s worth of documentaries about the short-lived 70mm process, the film, its director, and star, plus galleries of over 150 production photos.

The widescreen version of the feature also contains an audio commentary by critic Richard Schickel that is adequate for an average viewer, but is not particularly insightful and won’t tell a film buff much new information, repeating much of what the DVD’s four documentaries explain much more interestingly.

“The Big Trail” is an important film for a variety of reasons besides its historical significance of shooting a wider than usual image on 70mm film (a 2.1 to 1 aspect ratio, compared to the normal 1.33 to 1, or the nearly square 1.18 to 1 used by many early sound films). It is a careful and truly epic recreation of experiences undergone by pioneers who crossed America in covered wagons, filmed at a time there were still people who remembered those years and much of the landscape was still unspoiled by civilization. It is a key work by major filmmaker Raoul Walsh, whose directing career spanned from 1915 to 1964, and it was the very first film to star movie icon John Wayne.

The widescreen version of “The Big Trail,” even though its two-hour running time (plus an additional two minutes of exit music) runs a good 14 minutes longer than the standard-screen version, actually seems to be better paced. One reason may be because its wider frame includes more for the audience to look at, so that the pacing seems reasonably natural, whereas long shots running the same length of time in the standard version seem psychologically to last longer.

Another reason may be that the most careful positioning of the camera was done for the 70mm version, with the 35mm camera capturing a similar but slightly different view from off to the side a bit. Sometimes it shows less on the sides, and other times it uses a wider angle lens and takes in extra sky above or ground below.

The differences are subtle, but the widescreen version simply looks and flows better.

The film itself is something of a mixed bag from an entertainment standpoint. The widescreen cinematography is genuinely spectacular, enhanced by gorgeous locations, and the historical re-enactment of the sometimes unbelievably difficult wagon train experience provides some breathtaking moments in the days before computer-generated effects.
What you see is actually what happened in front of the cameras, from wagons, animals and people (including small children) fording the river, to lowering wagons and people over a sheer cliff, to a buffalo hunt, to miles of wagons gathering in a circle so they can repel an attack by thousands of warring Indians.

All of this had been done in the groundbreaking 1923 epic “The Covered Wagon,” but the combination of the wider image with synchronized sound gives “The Big Trail” an immediacy that still impresses.

Dramatically, the plot is full of standard western movie clichés of villainy, revenge, and romance, not to mention El Brendel’s Swedish comedy relief, although it does have a generally sympathetic treatment of the Native Americans encountered by the settlers.

The acting, as often happened during the first couple years of talking pictures, is largely patterned after live theatre (and indeed uses several major Broadway actors), besides being inhibited by the sometimes uneven early sound recording technology. Tyrone Power, Sr. is the most flamboyant as the wicked wagon boss Red Flack.

Newcomer John Wayne, however, already shows at age 23 the personality, mannerisms, and attitude that would become the trademarks of his long career. Unfortunately for Wayne, the huge expense of the film (its $2 million in 1930 would be an estimated $300 million today) made it a financial failure. While critics and audiences were impressed with the widescreen spectacle, only theatres in New York and Los Angeles were able to screen it in its 70mm version, and the 35mm version that played everywhere else lacked the power to draw viewers. Wayne did not get another starring role in a major studio production until “Stagecoach” nine years later.

The 70mm version of “The Big Trail,” despite some dated performances and occasional scratches on the negative, is well worth watching on as big a screen as possible for anyone into period epic movies (too bad it’s not yet on Blu-Ray).
The 35mm version is primarily for John Wayne fans who have only a 4x3 television set and don’t like letterboxing, for those who prefer just a bit less of El Brendel’s antics, for diehard fans of movies about wagon trains (the 1923 “The Covered Wagon” is much better), or for those curious to compare the effects of the alternate camera angles in the two versions.