The Big Trail (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Louis R. Loeffler, Raoul Walsh
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: El Brendel, John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, Tully Marshall, Tyrone Power Sr.Director: Louis R. Loeffler, Raoul Walsh
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Writer: Raoul Walsh
Producer: Winfield R. Sheehan
Writer: Florence Postal
Writer: Hal G. Evarts
Writer: Jack Peabody
Writer: Marie Boyle
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: Black & White, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.20:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-05-13
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of The Big Trail (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: THE GREAT JOHN WAYNE EMERGES IN THIS FORGOTTON WESTERN GREAT
Summary: 5 Stars
The Big Trail (1930) is a lavish early widescreen movie shot on location across the American West starring John Wayne in his first leading role and directed by Raoul Walsh.
In 2006, the United States Library of Congress deemed this film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry
Filming began in April 1930. During production, John Wayne, a completely unknown actor recently promoted from prop man (and renamed) by director Raoul Walsh, fell sick from dysentery and was nearly replaced as the lead.
Legend has it that the director Raoul Walsh had co-star Tyrone Power, Sr. almost beaten to death for forcing himself on the leading lady, Marguerite Churchill. Power would die just a year later from a heart attack.
Although the 23-year-old Wayne delivered an intriguing and charismatic performance as wagon train scout Breck Coleman, the expensive shot-on-location movie was financially unsuccessful as a result of being the first widescreen release during a time when theatres would not change over due to the encroachments of the Great Depression. After making The Big Trail, Wayne found stardom only in low-budget serials and features (mostly B-westerns). It would take another nine years--and the film Stagecoach--to return Wayne to mainstream movies.
The Big Trail was shot in an early widescreen process using 70mm film called Fox Grandeur which was first used in The William Fox Movietone Follies of 1929. Widescreen, along with Technicolor, were picked up by movie studios as the next big technological advancement for films in 1929. In 1930, a large number of films were produced which featured either widescreen or color. Color fared a lot better than widescreen because no special equipment was needed to view color films whereas theatres needed to buy special projectors and screens in order to project widescreen films.
Late in 1930, however, when the effects of the Depression were finally beginning to be felt by the public, studios abandoned the use of widescreen and color in an attempt to decrease costs. Because only a small number of theatres could play widescreen films, two versions of the widescreen films were always simultaneously filmed, one in 35 mm and one in the 70 mm Grandeur process. By doing this, the film would be able to be played throughout the country in 35mm at the same time it was being played in deluxe theatres capable of screening widescreen films.
The wagon train drive across the country was pioneering in its use of camera work and the stunning scenery from the epic landscape. An extraordinary effort was made to lend authenticity to the movie, with the wagons drawn by oxen and lowered by ropes down canyons when necessary. Tyrone Power's character's clothing looks grimy in a more realistic way than has been seen in movies since, and even the food supplies the immigrants carried with them were researched. Locations in five states were used in the film caravan's 2,000 mile trek.
In the early 1980s, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which housed the 65mm nitrate camera negative for "The Big Trail", wanted to preserve the film, but found that the negative was way too shrunken and fragile to be copied and that no film lab would touch it. They went to Karl Malkames, an accomplished cinematographer, and at that time a leading specialist and pioneer in actual film reproduction, restoration and preservation. Malkames was known to be a "problem solver" when it came to early odd gauge format films in desperate need of attention and tender loving care. He immediately set about designing and building a special printer to handle the careful frame by frame reproduction of the negative to a 35mm anamorphic (CinemaScope) fine grain master (the printer itself copied at a speed of one frame a second!) This was a painstaking undertaking which Malkames oversaw himself from start to finish. The entire project took him a year to complete. It is solely because of him that this film survives in this version.
Amazingly enough, the 70mm version was seen on cable television at a time when only the 35mm version had been released to VHS and DVD. A 2-disc DVD was released in the US on May 13, 2008, containing both versions.
Another widescreen western was also produced the same year, Billy the Kid, starring Wallace Beery as Pat Garrett and Johnny Mack Brown as Billy the Kid. No widescreen prints of Billy the Kid survive, however, only a standard-width version shot simultaneously remains.
Summary of The Big Trail (Two-Disc Special Edition)
In this sweeping pioneer adventure, a courageous young scout (WAYNE) leads hundreds of settlers across treacherous cliffs, though brutal snowstorms, Indian attacks and buffalo stampedes to their destiny out West. Along the way, he loses his heart to a beautiful pioneer woman (MARGUERITE CHURCHILL) and never stops trying to win her love. TYRONE POWER co-stars in this visually spectacular epic.One of very few widescreen productions filmed at the dawn of the talkies, The Big Trail was dismissed by reviewers of the day, little seen, and soon shelved and forgotten--for more than half a century, as it turned out. For movie buffs, it became a sort of Holy Grail. After all, the esteemed Raoul Walsh had directed, the early 70mm angle was tantalizing, and wasn't this the movie that was intended to make a star of Duke Morrison, a 22-year-old former prop man whom Walsh had rechristened John Wayne for the occasion? For curiosity value alone, surely it rated a look.
Restored in the late 1980s and warmly embraced by film festival audiences, The Big Trail proved to be more than just a historical footnote. What were those 1930 reviewers thinking?! Wayne is fresh, exuberant, matinee-idol handsome, and irresistibly charming (only a little purple prose trips him up, and no one should have been asked to speak such early-talkie flapdoodle anyway). The scenario winds through epic settings from the banks of the Mississippi by way of the Grand Canyon to the snows of Oregon and the mountain vistas of Washington, marking both a wagon train's journey and the settling of a personal score between trail guide Wayne and Tyrone Power Sr. as a veritable ogre of a villain. (A villain off-camera, too: Legend holds that Walsh had the actor beaten nearly to death for attempting to force himself on leading lady Marguerite Churchill.) The Big Trail is now an authentic classic, and a swell movie. Probably always was. --Richard T. Jameson
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