How the West Was Won
by George Marshall, Henry Hathaway, John Ford, Richard Thorpe
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DVD details
Actor: Carroll Baker, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, John WayneDirector: George Marshall, Henry Hathaway, John Ford, Richard Thorpe
Cinematographer: Charles Lang
Producer: Bernard Smith
Writer: James R. Webb
Writer: John Gay
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 162 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-05-22
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of How the West Was Won
DVD Review: It needs to be seen on the giant screen
Summary: 3 Stars
How the West Was Won seems to become more of an endurance task every year. While it throws in everything - injun attacks, shooting the rapids, stampedes, train wrecks, the Civil War, wagon trains - except a good old fashioned gunfight, the characterization and linking narrative wrapped around Richard Talmadge's impressive action scenes are a long way from the best of the West. Whether it's Karl Malden, Carol Baker, Robert Preston or Gregory Peck hamming it up or Debbie Reynolds raising yet another ruckus in another painfully gratuitous musical number, the squirm factor is high. Although John Ford's Civil War section (aided by plentiful stock footage from Raintree County) is the best remembered, the film doesn't really pick up until Reynolds is sidelined out of the picture and George Marshall takes over the directorial reins for the impressive railroad section, where it really starts to confront a few of the darker aspects of the price of progress and allows George Peppard, Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda to shine. Unfortunately by then fatigue is beginning to set in, and for all the beauty of the color the transfer from three-panel Cinerama to letterboxed DVD on the original release left the film with some very jarring distortion problems that leaves much of the film looking like it's being played in a semi-circle. And the film's exultant ending that sees the magnificent scenery buried under miles of highways and skyscrapers now seems more tragedy than triumph. At the end of the day it's pure popcorn fodder, but it has its moments and Alfred Newman's score at least has the dynamism that the majority of the film lacks.
As others have mentioned, the quality of the disc left quite a bit to be desired but WHV's 2008 three-disc DVD is something of a mixed blessing. Thanks to some very impressive digital restoration work the infamous lines between the three screens are almost completely invisible in all but a few shots, though there's still some distortion that comes from presenting a film intended for a curved screen in a horizontal format (not a problem for the Blu-Ray edition, which includes a `smileboxed' version not available to regular DVD buyers). While the film for the most part looks great, the extras are definitely lacking. Pride of place goes to 93-minute documentary Cinerama Adventure which covers the history of the format in depth and the making of How the West Was Won in passing - not stinting on the problems the format gave actors - but for some reason the other Cinerama `story' film, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, is all but completely ignored. While the new audio commentary on the main feature is welcome, the featurette about the making of HTWWW from the previous issue featuring copious amounts of home movie footage from the set has been dropped and only the general release trailer has been included (even though the roadshow trailer heralding Cinerama as the greatest step forward in the evolution of film is still missing, despite clips being used in Cinerama Adventure. If you go for the `Ultimate Collectors Edition you'll also get a sized-down reproduction of the souvenir brochure, US pressbook and 20 reproduction stills.
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