The Big Trail (1930)
Directed by Raoul Walsh, Louis R. Loeffler

Film Review

There is a sense of preordination in the fact that the first great western of the sound era was the film in which John Wayne had his first credited screen role.  Think of the word western and the  likelihood is that the first name that pops into your head is John Wayne.  (Apologies to Clint Eastwood fans.)   The actor had appeared in a dozen or so films prior to this, in fleeting bit parts, but this is where his career began proper.   And it so very nearly didn't happen...

Director Raoul Walsh had considered casting himself in the leading role in The Big Trail and would probably have done so had he not been involved in a car accident that robbed him of his right eye shortly before the film went into production.  Walsh then considered an established star such as Gary Cooper for the part, but, having lost a considerable amount of money in the stock market crash, Fox set a budget which made it impossible for Walsh to have both a big name actor and an extensive location shoot.  Walsh was not prepared to give up the location shoot, so he was left with hiring an unknown actor for his lead role. 

It was John Ford who recommended to Walsh a bit player named Marion Michael Morrison, mainly on account of his cocky walk, which suggested he owned the world.  Now Marion Morrison, was not the kind of name that you would naturally associate with a butch cowboy hero and so Fox executives and Raoul Walsh came up with a more suitable moniker.  Christened John Wayne, the completely unknown 23-year-old actor was about to become a movie legend, although his initial salary was just $105 a week, a thirty dollar rise on what he had been earning as a bit player and stage hand. 

There had been several westerns in the silent era (include John Ford's epic The Iron Horse) but the genre fell into disrepute in the 1930s.  The Big Trail was one of the few westerns made in this decade which took their subject seriously and went beyond the tired old clichés.  This was to be a lavish production, providing a template for the high quality, big budget westerns that would be made in the 1940s and subsequent decades.  Its stunning location vistas and ambitious action scenes (which include one of the most impressive Indian attack sequences to grace a motion picture) would inspire other filmmakers, in particular John Ford.  It is not a great exaggeration to say that, with this groundbreaking film, Raoul Walsh pretty well invented the western movie as we understand it today.   

Unlike many subsequent big budget westerns, The Big Trail puts a great deal of emphasis on character, and this adds greatly to its authenticity and entertainment value (although it does slow things down somewhat in a few places).  Tyrone Power Sr. (father of the legendary Hollywood actor) makes an absurdly comical villain but it is hard not to warm to his larger-than-life performance.  El Brendel, as the comical Swede, nearly steals the show with Louise Carver playing his bullying mother-in-law, making a double act that was clearly a great loss to vaudeville.  Tully Marshall gives the most convincing performance and certainly helps to make John Wayne look less wooden than he might have done if left to his own devices.  

And if you have ever wondered just why John Wayne talks the way he does (i.e. like a man trying to make himself understood to a comatose Martian), this is because his paymasters at Fox were initially so concerned about his diction that they decided to subject him to an intensive course of speech therapy.  The man hired to do the job, Lumsden Hare, was instructed to make John Wayne speak like an Englishman.  An Englishman trying to communicate with someone on the other side of a busy airport concourse who is half deaf, half asleep and cannot understand English, presumably.

Although The Big Trail was made on a colossal two million dollar budget, Fox believed that it could recoup the cost by shooting the film in Grandeur, a revolutionary widescreen colour process using 70 mm film, as well as in the standard black-and-white format on 33 mm.  Fox was gambling that audiences would be so wowed by the new format that the studio would be in the vanguard of the biggest cinematic upheaval since the introduction of sound three years earlier.  Alas, the Great Depression soon put paid to these ambitions.  Few cinemas could afford the cost of the equipment need to project The Big Trail in its Grandeur format, and the film ended up being an enormous flop.  Although Grandeur was soon abandoned it was to provide the basis for the widescreen processes (including VistaVision and CinemaScope) that became widely used from the 1950s.

John Wayne was the biggest casualty of the film's failure.  If the film had succeeded, he would undoubtedly have become a star; instead, he went back into virtual oblivion.  He ended up making low budget films for the so-called poverty row studios for most of the rest of the decade.  It was not until John Ford offered him the lead in his 1939 film Stagecoach that John Wayne returned to the mainstream and achieved his hard-won stardom.  After that, his name would become virtually synonymous with the quality Hollywood western,  Whilst the critics were rarely kind to him, John Wayne was one of the most popular screen actors of his generation and would leave an indelible impression on American cinema.  Even if he often does sound like like a man trying to have a conversation with a comatose Martian.

Film Synopsis

Breck Coleman's quest for the man who murdered his friend brings him to the Missouri River, where a party of settlers are about to set off on a 1500 mile trek to their promised land in Oregon.  Breck soon discovers that the man leading the wagon train, a seedy character named Flack, is the man he is after, so he offers to guide the train on its long journey in the hope that an opportunity will arise for him to take his revenge.   Realising the threat Breck poses, Flack plans to dispose of him first, with the help of Thorpe, a gambler who was forced to join the train to avoid the hangman's noose.  During the long and arduous journey, Breck falls in love with a young woman named Ruth Cameron, unaware that she is also being courted by Thorpe...