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How the West Was Won

How the West Was Won (1963)

February. 20,1963
|
7
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G
| Western

The epic tale of the development of the American West from the 1830s through the Civil War to the end of the century, as seen through the eyes of one pioneer family.

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ThiefHott
1963/02/20

Too much of everything

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GamerTab
1963/02/21

That was an excellent one.

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ActuallyGlimmer
1963/02/22

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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Kaelan Mccaffrey
1963/02/23

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

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Leofwine_draca
1963/02/24

HOW THE WEST WAS WON is perhaps John Ford's biggest and most epic-feeling western, featuring a sprawling storyline that depicts the building of the Old West and the violent events that shaped America in the earlier centuries. It also features an incredible ensemble cast of no less than 24 big names, a lot of them indelibly linked to the genre like Gregory Peck, James Stewart, and John Wayne. The film is awash with gorgeous cinematography, good, old-fashioned values, and romantic sub-plots which are funny and fast-paced. There's love, war, treachery, betrayal, and comradeship, and it all comes together in a way which feels surprisingly neat and concise despite the lengthy running time.

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dpaterson-2
1963/02/25

What is wonderful about the cinema is that it leaves a trail of US fascist mythology for all to see. I remember when this came out, I was 16 and the smoke put up the national intestines was everywhere. Like all of its western ilk, it took the criminal policy of taking indigenous land through lies, deception, and violence and turned it into Greek mythology -- with none of the poetry or depth. This film truly should have been titled, "How to Put Lipstick on the Pig of US Imperial Genocide."

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Neil Welch
1963/02/26

An overview of the colonisation of the central and western USA is told via various episodic tales of the trials and triumphs of several generations of one family.This 1962 movie was an Event as much as a film. It ran for nearly 3 hours, it featured a large number of big stars in roles from major down to cameos, and it was a Cinerama presentation - 3 linked cameras filmed 3 linked images which were projected on 3 linked screens which ran in a near semicircle, engaging the audience's peripheral vision.And that, in a nutshell, is both the film's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. For the very nature of Cinerama mean that the film is necessarily composed throughout in wide angle shots, many of which are simply gorgeous landscape vistas or shots of spectacular action. Conversely, given the choice to tell the story through one family, it turns out to be very difficult to convey intimacy when you can't use closeups. There are further problems, especially with sideways camera movements or lateral action - the fact that the left and right thirds of the image were at an angle to the audience plays tricks on a flat screen.It is nice to report that good work has been done on the remaster: the vertical lines where the 3 images met have been largely rendered unnoticeable where, previously, they were quite jarring on a TV screen.As for the film itself, putting to one side image issues (good and bad) and the starry cast list - well, it's OK. It tells a big story in general terms, and tells it tolerably well (but not brilliantly). Definitely well worth a watch, though.

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utgard14
1963/02/27

Epic western filmed in Cinerama. I wish I could have seen it in that format. I saw it on TV and, while it's still a beautiful-looking movie, I can only imagine how much richer the experience would have been to see it in theaters. While not an anthology film exactly, it's similar in that it is a series of different stories tied together by one family over about forty or fifty years of American history. It's all narrated by Spencer Tracy. The first segment deals with a family of settlers heading west. They encounter a mountain man (James Stewart) and one of the daughters (Carroll Baker) falls in love with him. But they all run afoul of a gang of river pirates run by Walter Brennan.The other daughter (Debbie Reynolds), scared away from the West by the hardships her family had to endure, eventually becomes a dance hall girl and is the star of the second segment. Reynolds is left an inheritance by a former customer but in order to collect it, she must head to California. So she joins a wagon train across the plains to the West and is romanced by Robert Preston and Gregory Peck. These first two segments were directed by Henry Hathaway. The first is probably the film's best but the second is the weakest.The third part is directed by John Ford. Stewart and Baker's son, played by George Peppard, follows his father into the war and fights in the Battle of Shiloh. John Wayne plays William Tecumseh Sherman. This is a good segment but seemed short. The fourth segment follows Peppard after the war as he is now part of the U.S. Cavalry. This part deals with the construction of the railroads west, as well as the Pony Express and the telegraph. It features Henry Fonda as a buffalo hunter and Richard Widmark as a railroad tycoon. This segment was directed by George Marshall. It's decent but not the strongest.The final segment is again directed by Hathaway. Debbie Reynolds' character is now a widow and moves to Arizona, where she has invited Peppard and his family to live with her on her ranch. But Peppard, a former lawman at this point, must stop outlaw Eli Wallach from robbing a train. Lee J. Cobb and Carolyn Jones are also in this part. Not a particularly strong segment but a little better than the second one. All in all, a good movie but perhaps it doesn't reach quite what it was aiming for. It definitely has one of the most impressive casts in film history.

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