How the West Was Won Cinerama Art Editions Book

Fritz Lang in Contempt said that widescreen was "good for snakes and funerals." If he had seen How the Due west Was Won, I wonder if he would've added horses, bison, rivers and trains. This was one of those m spectacular feats of Hollywood at a time when, frankly, they had to find ways to lure Americans from their Goggle box sets. Though widescreen epics were nothing new, nor 70mm, this was CINERAMA, a special procedure where the filmmakers shot on with cameras back to back fastened. This, too, wasn't necessarily a wholly original innovation; Abel Gance crush them to the punch in a way with his 1927 Napoleon film, though he had to simply have three cameras put side by side for his panoramic battle scenes. With the "Cinerama photographic camera" (or in this case notwithstanding three cameras), information technology was all, at least meant to requite the impression in one negative, though spliced in three parts, so there were 2 divider lines (or, in technical speak, an attribute ratio of ii:v:1, as opposed to 2:35:1, for most widescreen today).

These weren't all that noticeable for audiences at the particularly outfitted 70MM Cinerama viewings, with the special projectors, but for people viewing the film in regular ol' 35mm - or, for that affair, for the by several years on VHS and DVD - the image was distorted. Now on blu-ray, it comes in two versions, one with a (I'd say) 97% corrected widescreen version and 1 that is a kind of special 'Curved' edition like in the Cinerama screens, which is meant for curved HD tvs. I watched the quondam, and I tin can run across showtime and foremost how the filmmakers certainly went all out with the locations and scope of what they had. Just in any version, it is still a pic, and I have to watch what the movie has to offering as a story.

What How the W Was One is, well, kind of a proto-Pulp-Fiction, you could say, or more than apt as a comparison is Deject Atlas: multiple stories, which are all one story loosely inter-continued. Here, led by Spencer Tracy's transitional narrations, we see how people came from the East to find their place out West - white people, of course, as the Native American tribesmen are depicted as, more or less, a threat if not outright villains. The segments are broken up into an anthology pic with three directors: Henry Hathaway has the commencement two and the last segment, almost "The Rivers" (James Stewart as a trapper coming across Karl Malden and his family unit, with ane of his daughters I think taking an immediate fancy to him), "The Plains" (Debbie Reynolds going across country for gold, Gregory Peck trying to woo her, and so come the Indians), and "The Outlaws" (Lee J. Cobb and Eli Wallach, enough said); John Ford does The Civil War; George Marshall does a segment on the Railroad.

Why is this such a mixed bag? There are some truly spectacular, magnificently-stage set pieces hither. When the family unit in The Rivers segment is on the river of the title, and on a rickety raft that may or may not terminal on the rapids, it'due south suspenseful and, despite the process-studio shots mixed obviously with stunt-people on the actual river, has some impact and build up. When the bison come up roaring through in The Railroad segment, driven past the Natives to send a message (if not stomp out) the railroading-cheating-whites, it's staggering to meet and wonder how the director got those shots without destroying the camera.

And Hathaway makes upward for some competent but kind of standard direction with a climactic gunfight on a railroad train. And the pic is populated by so many, many stars, some of them quite good here: Henry Fonda, Stewart, Cobb, Wallach, fifty-fifty practical walk-ons like Walter Brennan, Thelma Ritter, Agnes Moorehead, Lee van Cleef, and a rather brief simply approximately gruff John Wayne help make this memorable. If information technology had Clint Eastwood and Lee Marven it could be dipped in gold and put in a museum somewhere, and I mean that as a compliment.

Merely some of the writing here is so bad. In the Rivers segment, Stewart's fur-trapping (?) mountain man is just immediately seen every bit *the* guy for one of the women, and it seems to come out of nowhere, with the dialog between them just awful; I felt bad for Stewart having to also go through the motions in what is a plot twist that seems really ridiculous and non-sensical regarding an injury (how does he come back from that, what). Peck also has a fairly one-dimensional character, simply he tries to exercise what he can with it. Not so lucky is Richard Widmark, who is all but missing his mustache - co-opted, no doubt, only Fonda - for a villainout railroad human being who says 1 of those statements after the bison scene that made me almost desire to turn off the motion picture. For every time an actor comes upwardly that does bring something, some other comes along and brings things downwardly to a level that feels like it should, ironically, exist meant for television.

Henry Fonda - in 70MM, for a limited time only, folks.

And the direction is of similar mixed quality, though maybe non all on the error of them; it must've been a really bizarre, cumbersome adjustment with this Cinerama system, especially to become anything close to close-ups. It also seems odd to see characters placed very specifically in center frame, not for whatsoever motivation of the scene simply rather for the technical requirements (or, possibly, for later Idiot box cropping), and the spaces on the sides of the characters lacking full depth. This isn't all of the time, to be certain, and in that location are several scenes where y'all practise feel the blitz and magnificence of the Western vistas and landscapes, or of the hustle and bustle of the environments... other times, it merely seems like infinite taken up to make it *seem* like it is.

Hence why I mention that Hathaway is the epitome of the quality existence in a wide range; in the opening segment he seems to be trying to find his ground, while by the end he is certain-footed, masking scenes between Cobb and George Peppard and others with Wallach feel grounded and simple in a good way, and that climax actually powerful. Ford, meanwhile, makes his Ceremonious War scenes really lovely and 1 (cursory) boxing perhaps the highlight of the movie. But it's not enough there, despite a very loose and (for me) unnecessary connectedness with the residual of the motion picture - had it been its ain movie, I could encounter information technology equally one of the towering Ford Westerns, which is proverb a lot.

Oh, and it's dated, in a lot of ways. Some of those are charming, some not. So with How the Westward is Won, it's a true product of its fourth dimension circa 1962/1963, correct when these epics were appealing (or trying to) for audiences just fine with Gunsmoke or The Virginian, and certainly giving eye-candy a run for its coin. If it simply had what all movies need uniformly in the script.

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Source: https://cinetarium.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-west-was-won-in-cinerama-blu-ray.html

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