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One of the myths of the early sound era is that they couldn't make Westerns because they had trouble recording sound on location. In fact, it was the financial restrictions of the depression that temporarily killed off the genre, at least in the "A" budget bracket. However, in the period 1929-1931, before the economic downturn had really kicked in, the "A" Western flourished, notable examples including The Virginian, Billy the Kid and Cimarron. The Big Trail was perhaps the biggest of them all  a gargantuan pioneer Western shot in an early widescreen process appropriately titled grandeur. Thanks to a recent DVD release we now get to see the widescreen version alongside the fullscreen that was shot simultaneously.
The director was Raoul Walsh, a man for whom the spirit of adventure lay in vast outdoor vistas, and thus in many ways a perfect choice. He makes great use of the wider frame to show off the Western landscape at its most breathtaking. Very typical of Walsh are a number of shots towards the beginning, such as the one where a woman is chopping firewood. Most of the screen is tightly filled by the wagons and other clutter, but in one corner we see the wilderness stretching out invitingly. When the wagon train gets going, the open plain is gradually revealed to us, with wagons pulling away like stage curtains. These shots are not so effective in the fullscreen version, yet on the wider canvas Walsh's expression of the outdoors was never better.
But there's an unfortunate flipside to this. When it comes to dialogue scenes, Walsh's tendency is to place the actors in the middle of the shot, as if they were in an imaginary fullscreen box. The extra width becomes just that  extra. It may seem logical at first, because it means that height-wise we see as much of the actors as we would in a fullscreen picture. However it makes the players look small and insignificant within the frame, while all the background business dominates the shot  and there is a lot of background business in the Big Trail. When widescreen formats re-emerged in the 1950s, many directors would make the same mistake, before eventually realising that in talkie scenes it is better to frame actors from around the chest up, losing some of their height but allowing them to fill the screen.
It's a pity, because The Big Trail is a particularly well-balanced and finely scripted effort. The romance and revenge subplots are simple but well defined, and do not threaten to overbalance each other or the pioneer story. It could have been a great intimate epic, but it loses dramatic weight because every time characters start talking to each other we get distracted by herds of cattle, drifting wagons or whatever else is filling every spare inch of frame. Still, Walsh's sensitivity to deeply emotional romantic moments is still on display, and he manages to make the final scene effective and memorable. There are also some nice comedy touches, largely courtesy of "comical Swede" El Brendel.
The Big Trail is also notable for being John Wayne's first lead role. While Wayne is another victim of the distant framing in dialogue scenes, we do at least see his strong physical presence and hear his warm but assertive vocal delivery. He betrays his lack of experience, but the potential is clearly there. Sadly that potential wasn't widely realised at the time and he spent the rest of the decade slumming it in B-pictures before he finally hit stardom. Also appearing in this picture is Wayne's buddy (and later prolific character actor) Ward Bond. He's not credited, but you can spot him in a number of scenes, most prominently around the 80-minute mark where he is stood to Tyrone Power's left.
The Big Trail is a glorious epic that manages to defeat itself as a drama. And it was this stupendous scale that would put the Western (and widescreen) to bed for some time. And although the 40s and 50s are now regarded as the golden age of the Western, it was by then a changed genre, with stories of individual adventure and heroism in an established West  no better or worse, but of a different form. The early talkie period was the end of an era in which Westerns could be truly gigantic.


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