This 1962 epic is tub-thumping, jingoistic Manifest Destiny propaganda but I like it.
The film as it's screened today looks like you're watching it through a fish-eye lens, but compared to movies made today, I love how it takes advantage of its vast aspect ratio and immerses you in the scene. You have characters standing apart from each other or at different distances. Sometimes you have one character standing in the center but it's made to add to the immersion.
It looks like a silly museum piece but there's a charm about that aesthetic. It's also why I like Si Versailles m'Ètait Conté, although that one is a comedy and doesn't take itself too seriously.
I generally love Westerns because there's an earthiness about them. Having them shot in high-quality Technicolor always helps.
As a fan of Eli Wallach, I got it because it was one of his seven Western movies, though he only appeared in the last half hour. I think he was one of the best actors in the film. I've also realized that his Charlie Gant and Henry Fonda's Jethro Stuart are two sides of the same coin: both are characters fighting a changing world and fighting to preserve their ways of life, though while Charlie is a psychotic outlaw whose reasoning, while understandable, is incredibly entitled, Jethro is a peace-loving mountain man who co-exists with the people incrementally being forced out.
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| Eli Wallach as Charlie Gant |
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| Henry Fonda as Jethro Stuart |
As a film that was made for roadshow screenings, it had a very grand, theatrical prologue and intermission, illustrated with a painting you'd probably find in a Midwestern library or steakhouse. At the intermission the image is accompanied by a medley, arranged by Alfred Newman, of traditional American songs, along with something written to the tune of 'Greensleeves'. The whole thing is very kitschy and it's one of my favorite parts of the movie.
The film indulges in buzzwords like "progress", conveniently glossing over the fact that the West was more stolen than won, and at the end crows about "legends of courage and pride" and brags about how cities were built "to rank among the great ones of the world".
The ending song, playing over a prototype of Soarin' Over California, also utilizes lyrics like "Here came dreamers with Bible, fist and gun" and "They tamed the savage prairie land" to justify the violence of the white invaders (who displaced Spanish Californians and Mexican Americans as well as countless Indigenous tribes) to morally set them apart from the alleged "savages".
All this is why 'How The West was Won' is one of my top guilty pleasure films. It's up its own backside, it embodies the worst aspects of mid- 20th Century Westerns but I enjoy it a lot.
