John Ford's "Stagecoach" from 1939 is often described as the film which made John Wayne a big-name Hollywood star after his wilderness years on Poverty Row; indeed, Ford often liked to claim that he was the man who "discovered" Wayne. "Stagecoach", however, was not Wayne's first leading role in a major-league movie; that was "The Big Trail" from nine years earlier, and the credit for "discovering" the previously little-known young actor should really belong to that film's director, Raoul Walsh.
The action is set around 1840 and tells the story of a wagon-train of settlers making their way along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to the Oregon Territory, at this period an Anglo-American condominium including what is today British Columbia. Along the way they encounter and have to cope with all the dangers and hardships which traditionally face westward-bound pioneers in Westerns- a buffalo stampede, an Indian attack, a dangerous crossing of a swollen river and a scene where the wagons have to be lowered on ropes down a steep cliff. The main plot centres upon Wayne's character, a young trapper named Breck Coleman, and his search for the men who killed his friend. Another sub-plot deals with the rivalry between Coleman and a gambler named Thorpe (an associate of the villains) for the hand of the film's heroine, Ruth Cameron.
The film was praised by many critics when it was first released in 1930, yet proved a financial disaster for technical reasons. It was one of a number of films from around this period shot in an early widescreen process called Grandeur, which required cinemas to install expensive new screens and projection equipment, which many of them were unwilling to invest in. "The Big Trail" was, in fact, the last film to use this format; its failure convinced the industry that Grandeur was not financially viable, and widescreen formats were not revived until the fifties and sixties.
The commercial failure of "The Big Trail" was one of the reasons why Wayne spent most of the thirties on Poverty Row, and the film itself was largely forgotten for many years. It certainly has its faults. As with a lot of early talkies- and this one was made only three years after the coming of sound in "The Jazz Singer"- the sound quality is not good, often making it difficult to follow the dialogue, and there are some curious gaps in the plot. At one stage, for example, Ruth wrongly accuses Coleman of having killed her brother, yet this little misunderstanding is soon cleared up, and he never seems to regard the fact that she has made such an allegation against him as a barrier to their romance. Its attitude to the Native Americans is not what would today be regarded as politically correct. At one point Coleman says that the Indians are his friends and that he has learned a lot from them about how to survive in the wilderness, but when they go on the warpath they case to be friendly, nature-savvy proto-conservationists and revert to the standard Hollywood stereotype of bloodthirsty savages.
Yet, for all its flaws, I have given it a relatively high mark because of Walsh's courage and ambition. During the early years of the talkies, many directors retreated back within the four walls of the studio, where costs were lower and sound recording easier, creating the "filmed theatre" style of film-making. Not so Walsh in "The Big Trail". His story was set in the Great American Outdoors, and that was where he was going to make it. Shooting took place on location across the American West, so the plains, rivers and mountains we see are all real. As a result the film has a much greater visual impact than many other films from the early thirties. It was one of the earliest films to capture the scenic grandeur of the West, something which was to become a major selling-point for the Western genre in the fifties and sixties. Grandeur, that early widescreen process, seems to have been appropriately named. 7/10
The action is set around 1840 and tells the story of a wagon-train of settlers making their way along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to the Oregon Territory, at this period an Anglo-American condominium including what is today British Columbia. Along the way they encounter and have to cope with all the dangers and hardships which traditionally face westward-bound pioneers in Westerns- a buffalo stampede, an Indian attack, a dangerous crossing of a swollen river and a scene where the wagons have to be lowered on ropes down a steep cliff. The main plot centres upon Wayne's character, a young trapper named Breck Coleman, and his search for the men who killed his friend. Another sub-plot deals with the rivalry between Coleman and a gambler named Thorpe (an associate of the villains) for the hand of the film's heroine, Ruth Cameron.
The film was praised by many critics when it was first released in 1930, yet proved a financial disaster for technical reasons. It was one of a number of films from around this period shot in an early widescreen process called Grandeur, which required cinemas to install expensive new screens and projection equipment, which many of them were unwilling to invest in. "The Big Trail" was, in fact, the last film to use this format; its failure convinced the industry that Grandeur was not financially viable, and widescreen formats were not revived until the fifties and sixties.
The commercial failure of "The Big Trail" was one of the reasons why Wayne spent most of the thirties on Poverty Row, and the film itself was largely forgotten for many years. It certainly has its faults. As with a lot of early talkies- and this one was made only three years after the coming of sound in "The Jazz Singer"- the sound quality is not good, often making it difficult to follow the dialogue, and there are some curious gaps in the plot. At one stage, for example, Ruth wrongly accuses Coleman of having killed her brother, yet this little misunderstanding is soon cleared up, and he never seems to regard the fact that she has made such an allegation against him as a barrier to their romance. Its attitude to the Native Americans is not what would today be regarded as politically correct. At one point Coleman says that the Indians are his friends and that he has learned a lot from them about how to survive in the wilderness, but when they go on the warpath they case to be friendly, nature-savvy proto-conservationists and revert to the standard Hollywood stereotype of bloodthirsty savages.
Yet, for all its flaws, I have given it a relatively high mark because of Walsh's courage and ambition. During the early years of the talkies, many directors retreated back within the four walls of the studio, where costs were lower and sound recording easier, creating the "filmed theatre" style of film-making. Not so Walsh in "The Big Trail". His story was set in the Great American Outdoors, and that was where he was going to make it. Shooting took place on location across the American West, so the plains, rivers and mountains we see are all real. As a result the film has a much greater visual impact than many other films from the early thirties. It was one of the earliest films to capture the scenic grandeur of the West, something which was to become a major selling-point for the Western genre in the fifties and sixties. Grandeur, that early widescreen process, seems to have been appropriately named. 7/10