**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall
screenplay by Hal G. Evarts
directed by Raoul Walsh
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Big Trail is the kind of movie that comes wrapped in a big piece of butcher’s paper with the word WESTERN stamped on it. It offers the barest structural skeleton of the genre, with pioneers fulfilling their Manifest Destiny over terrain both harsh and unforgiving, and it sticks with its forward march to Oregon with only minor narrative flourishes to distract from the standard-issue myth of America. Later westerns would meditate on the nature of both the lone-wolf cowboy hero and the value of the westward expansion, but this early John Wayne vehicle is quaintly naïve in its taking it all for granted, making for great film-historical fascination when the drama and the intrigue flag.
Remember, the picture is from 1930, some time before the genre’s maturation with Stagecoach (and way before meta-westerns like Shane and The Searchers). The filmmakers are thinking of western conventions instead of about them, and thus the plot trappings are spare hero and villain stuff. Our hero is Breck Coleman (a young, surprisingly svelte Wayne), a wagon train scout attempting to keep the covered wagons of a caravan moving through to their destination. His antagonists are a range of in-cahoots bullies: beefy, bearded wagon boss Red Flack (Tyrone Power, Sr.), whose villainy extends to murder and theft of pelts; snivelling sidekick Lopez (Charles Stephens); and sharpshooter Bill Thorpe (Ian Keith), brought in as insurance against potential threats from pure-hearted Coleman. Nothing surprising in other words; throw in a recalcitrant romantic interest named Ruth (Marguerite Churchill) and you’ve got the by-the-book makings of mild western intrigue.
The plot, of course, is hardly the point. The Big Trail‘s raison d’être is to gently glorify the West and the future America it ensures–a value it keeps close to its heart like a picture in a locket. It’s here in the movie’s subconscious that it becomes interesting, as it offers a glimpse of Americana that existed before both the country and the medium became unduly self-reflexive. There is no breast-beating over the reasons for going west, you just do it because it’s what you’re supposed to do. And there is even less breast-beating about the myth of the cowboy and the formal complexity of the medium–you make westerns and movies because people like them, and leave it at that. As an extreme example of Hollywood naiveté, it’s rather amusing, like reading the teenage diary of someone you know intimately as an adult.
The film devotes all of its visuals to showing the vast space of the nation being founded. Terrain is very big in The Big Trail, on the level of both story and image–part of its purpose is to cover as varied a series of surroundings as possible, both to impress on us the hardship of the settlers and the unthinking awe at the might of the land of the free. Somehow, the limited camera positions of early sound filmmaking only enhance this, requiring many wide shots that consequently swallow up the figures in land and surroundings. Director Raoul Walsh also has a keen eye for stunning vistas, ensuring that feeling of being in the sweet arms of America (even as it thins your ranks), adding up to an auto-pilot reverie that would be unthinkable just ten years later. I can’t say that it makes for crackerjack storytelling, but as a throwback to a bygone era it’s probably priceless, and worth seeing at least for specialist purposes.
THE DVD
The DVD itself is a middling effort. The Big Trail isn’t really an A-list classic, so no attempts have been made to clean up its picture and audio– its slightly rough-and-tumble condition clearly show that it’s been dumped into the market without thought. That said, the image defects aren’t too intrusive and there’s enough definition to get the transfer by, while the sound, remastered in stereo, is adequate for a film that saw the dawn of talking pictures. Alas, if you’re expecting the widescreen version of the film that appeared on cable to much acclaim, you’ll be disappointed, as the DVD gods at Fox have accidentally released the much shorter and Academy ratio’d version that was shot concurrently. Beat-up but amusing trailers for The Undefeated, The Comancheros, and North to Alaska round out the platter.
108 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; Region One; DVD-9; Fox
