Cinerama: Winning the West

How The West Was Won couldn’t be made today in its original form, either technically or creatively. That’s a shame. It’s not like America was in a state of perfect harmony in 1962, but we were a proud, confident nation back then. With breathtaking Cinerama photography, audiences saw primordial America as a natural paradise. Small bands of native tribesmen and white traders were a modest burden on that land. As the timeline progresses (roughly 1835-’85) there’s awe for the thrilling struggles and physical achievements of the settlers and our young nation. Yet there’s also a sad nobility about the defeat of the native American that’s not sugary, not faked; it came from the heart of a nation that was mature enough to understand both sides of history’s truth.

That both-sides attitude would be almost inconceivable in today’s culture. This was 1962, so to be sure, it was slightly liberal for its day. Hollywood was going through one of its periodic (justified) fits of conscience about being “fair to the Indians”. By today’s standards, this epic falls far, far short of that standard. But by the standards of its time, it depicts the inevitable, tragic parts of the conquest of the American west in terms that seemed fair for ‘62, a step forward for Hollywood’s standards of historical honesty.

This film–unusually, adapted from a Life Magazine series–was made by then-almighty MGM, the studio that released Gone With The Wind, and was a pretty direct attempt to duplicate the impact and financial success of the 1939 film, still at that point the super-mega-Star Wars of all time. How the West Was Won wanted to do for the West what Gone With The Wind did for the South–be a lasting, endlessly re-releasable popular tribute to the history of an entire vast region of America. The Cinerama epic does not depict the Indians, as we called them then, as evil. But the conflict is faced up to. It’s real, and it’s scary. GWTW’s enslaved blacks were mostly at the margins of the story. How the West Was Won would try to do better.

I was ten when Christmastime ’62 rolled in. My church’s scout troop hired a chartered bus into Manhattan to see How the West Was Won. The impact of Cinerama, in effect the IMAX of 1952-‘63, is hard to imagine now, when all of us have grown up with large theater screens and rich mixes of multichannel sound. Decades earlier, you didn’t see this kind of viewing experience outside of a world’s fair or theme park.

The musical score by Alfred Newman was wonderful. Stereophonic records were still a novelty when the soundtrack album became a best seller. When Tigerlily wrote about the film in 2017, John Peabody (@JohnAPeabody) commented: “I watched the film a few months ago (first time since 1965) and was blown away. Sure, I’m a sucker for epic films. But the music, the hope, the dreams of the song, was nearly overwhelming to me…I had my church choir sing it at the next Thursday night’s rehearsal”.

I’ve always been struck with the iconic, silent film-like final shot of part one, ending the early, Erie Canal part of the journey: teenaged Lilith Prescott (Debbie Reynolds), evocatively poised like a 19^th century painting, looking out at the next stage of her future–the sighting of a steamship on the Mississippi.

The use of multiple directors, including America’s greatest director, John Ford, made this a virtual victory parade of classic Hollywood Golden Era style.

The juxtaposition of the unstoppable growth of the railroad westward, with the Native response, a massive, cinematically overwhelming buffalo stampede, is as stark and powerfully designed, graphically, as any film of its time. Unlike today, it doesn’t dwell on the instant, horrifying fate of the families that took shelter in the wrong places during the stampede. It doesn’t take a Tarantino-like cold-eyed view of the details of the carnage. But unlike most other Hollywood films until then, it didn’t offer any outs either, no brief flash of an escape that leads them to safety.

No, as the film bluntly shows, mortal danger and brutal death are real, even for families and children; they were constant companions in the old west, and by 1962 even a movie for family audiences was direct enough to acknowledge it.

For the final dramatic segment, the one that most closely resembles what we think of as the familiar world of a tense Western town, we return to the storyline that’s the backbone of the film, the surviving sister who lives to see the family take roots in the west and prosper. We’ve seen Lilith Prescott grow from naïve virgin to bawdy-but-adorable saloon singer, to tough pioneer businesswoman, to dignified family matriarch. In many ways it’s a more admirable saga than petulant, spoiled Scarlett O’Hara’s, though alas, not as iconic or vivid in our cultural memory.

To quote from that 2017 post by Tigerlily (@tigerlily): “I couldn’t help but think that Hollywood would not produce a similar celebration of the development of our nation today. The epilogue highlights one after another of the Left’s current bete-noires – large dams (Hoover Dam in the film); an open-pit mine (essential for the metals and minerals that make our current world possible); cultivated agricultural land in the southwestern desert, obviously requiring imported water; large logging operations; the sprawling urban development of Los Angeles including a massive four level freeway interchange”.

With a spectacular montage of aerial photography of southwest and west coast locations, the movie concludes with a rousing choral reprise of its main musical theme, “I Am Bound for the Promised Land.”

How did ten-year-old boys respond to a history film that was 2 hours and 44 minutes long? We loved it. Every one of us would have walked right back in to see it again. The action scenes, the stupendous wraparound screen, the dashing uniforms, the galloping horses, the steam-belching locomotives. Those were the kinds of men we wanted to be.

On the long ride home from Times Square, there was already a hint of darker times for America right outside the bus window if we’d been mature enough to understand what they meant.

An epilog, and an elegy, for Cinerama: How the West Was Won was the final film made in three-screen Cinerama, at least in the US; the Soviets kept their own version going for a few more years. The great success of the original 1952 three-screen process tended, at first, to obscure its colossal expense, requiring custom-bult theaters with three synchronized projectors (and three union projectionists). The whole point of the initial publicity was “Movies far too big to ever put on TV!”, but once Hollywood studios made much of their income selling films to television, that slogan lost its appeal.

Starting with 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Cinerama would be filmed and shown as a conventional one projector 70mm process, no different from the many Fifties widescreen formats that imitated it for less cost, from Super Technirama to Ultra Panavision. There was still an emphasis on huge screens and spectacular visuals (Grand Prix, 1966; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).

Gradually, Cinerama-branded theaters retired their deeply curved screens. But while they still had them, some first run films took full advantage. During the run of Patton in 1970, they were temporarily dubbed “Dimension 150” theaters. All that meant was the usual 70mm print of Patton, which for an epic has an unusual number of very wide angle, almost fisheye shots that looked particularly spectacular in old school Cinerama theaters that had a 146 degree semi-circular sweep.

An epilog, and an elegy, for the long-ago America of 1962. The early Sixties were a transitional time. Americans stood at the peak of postwar power in the world. We were the richest society in history, on our way to the Moon. Yet things weren’t quite right: the challenge and unrest of the civil rights movement, the high cost of the Cold War, the shock of rising crime, and a sense of cultural sickness were beginning to spread. A majority of Americans in 1962 were still untouched by that uneasy sense, but they’d come to know it soon enough.