I watched “The Big Trail” last night; and as stated in a previous comment, this is a very underrated movie! This movie, for me, goes right alongside the later Duke Classics, or at least I have a new appreciation of it!
The good points about the movie:
Director Raoul Walsh did a great job of painting an authentic picture of “The Oregon Trail”; he didn’t white-wash it! He showed the brutality of the wagon train life; from crossing the canyons and cliffs, crossing the desert, the aftermath of the Indian attack. These were all tough scenes!
The big picture captures all of the things that the pioneers had to go through just to prepare for the wagon train – Walsh did a great job of showing all of that! It’s almost as if he slipped back in time and documented an actual wagon train! Good detail work! I think even to this day it’s the most authentic depiction of a wagon train that you can see in the movies!
Years ago, when this movie first became available to us again, I use to think it just “plodded along”, but now when I watch it, I’m watching every scene; not just the main characters in the foreground, but all of the things going on in the background as well! I always see something I’ve missed before, like one scene where bad-guy Lopez is eating, and a dog comes along and steals his food! That’s not really in the background but I’ve never noticed that before! There’s something happening in every part of the screen!
And then when you add in all the different locations from California, to Utah, Wyoming, The Grand Canyon, etc., plus the different takes for the different formats and different language versions; making this movie took a lot of hard work!
Then of course, there’s the melodramatic part of it; bad guys commit murder, hero tracks them down and finds love along the way! That mixture of realism and romanticism; well it’s good story-telling! Got to have it!
As far as the flaws of the movie; well I don’t have much to say about that! I’m not a nitpicker! The acting style is the same acting style you see in all of the early talkies; dated and corny! But that just adds to the fun of it. The comic relief back then was VERY corny and sometimes a little annoying; the vaudevillian comic El Brendel was no exception! The main bad-guy, Flack (Tyrone Power, Sr.), is probably the corniest character of all; he’s right out of a silent movie melodrama (they were still making a few of these at this time)! Someone at another sight compared him to Yosemite Sam! Now, every time I watch the movie, I see Yosemite Sam! (Hey, it makes me laugh; just another little bit of fun I find in this movie!)
Then of course, this is where Duke Morrison became John Wayne! If at times he seems like a 23-year-old kid who had never starred as the lead in a major movie before, it’s because he was a 23-year-old kid who had never starred as the lead in major movie before! Awkward at times, but no worse than other leading men of the era. As an actor, yeah, he had a long way to go, but, that natural charisma and toughness was there even at that early stage! In the scene at “the last outpost” where he defies Flack, or every time he quietly challenges the three bad-guys, or when he gives the “When you stop fighting, that’s death” speech, that’ s pure John Wayne – he was giving us a glimpse ofthings to come!
A couple of other things; I have the Blu-ray with both the 70mm Widescreen version and the Standard Version; of course, I watch the wide-screen version! It just looks better! But, I did re-watch the Indian Attack Scene in the Standard version; in that version, you see more of The Duke in that scene, while in the wide-screen version, because of the different angles, he gets lost in the crowd!
A couple of “bloopers” that made me laugh; It’s already been mentioned that Ward Bond was mouthing the dialog of the other actors –that’s always funny! Another thing I noticed this time; when you watch the movie again, and in the scene where the character Zeke is using sign languageto talk to the Pawnee, see if at one point he doesn’t nonchalantly flip the bird!
This was a good choice for movie discussions! Maybe it was never one of my favorite John Wayne movies, but I think it’s working its way up the list!
