Young Wayne Blazed a Big Trail
Discussing John Wayne's first major film, The Big Trail, with Richard Schickel.
Categories: Westerns
By: Henry Cabot Beck 06/01/2008
The Big Trail (1930) succeeded in recreating, from the widest vistas to the smallest details, the saga of those men, women and children who crossed and populated the new frontier in the mid-1800s.
The movie also did everything any film could have done to launch the career of a major star, in this case, the young John Wayne in his first major screen appearance.
Notwithstanding the quality of the picture and the presence of the Duke, The Big Trail is one of the most impressive Westerns in movie history, seen by the fewest people.
Directed by Raoul Walsh, the movie tells the story of a huge wagon train crossing thousands of miles from the Mississippi to a valley in Washington State. To make the film, Walsh employed 20,000 extras and 93 principal actors. He used 725 natives from five different Indian tribes acting as scouts and, in one amazing sequence, hostiles, and the picture made use of 185 wagons, 1,800 cows, 1,400 horses, 500 buffalos and, we are told, 700 chickens, pigs and dogs. It’s probably safe to assume that some of the additional crew of 200 were carrying shovels and buckets.
They filmed the movie for four months across 4,300 miles and seven different states. If all that wasn’t enough, they shot, simultaneously, two different English-language versions, and, since dubbing as we know it was not yet technically possible, they also filmed separate versions for Spanish, Italian and German audiences with entirely different casts.
Of course none of this would be particularly memorable were it not for the fact that the movie is a fantastically entertaining spectacle, containing a staggering amount of choreography and minutiae—every frame loaded with multiple layers of detail and activity. One of the primary reasons that so few people have seen the film as it was intended is that The Big Trail is one of the first widescreen films ever made, and director Walsh took full advantage of the size and scope that the 70mm film afforded him.
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