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O Pioneers! and 70mm, Bierstadt and Vitaphone, "we're building a nation!" From Missouri to Washington State is the rugged path, Raoul Walsh opens on a bustling long-shot of covered wagons and swiftly states the style—multiple planes of action in deep focus, wide tableaux steered like oxen, human figures revealed rather than dwarfed by nature's grandeur. "No road but a will" and therein hangs the tale, "history cuts the way" once guided by the young John Wayne in fringed buckskin, rangy and curly-haired and already in effortless command as the trapper leading the caravan. The displaced belle (Marguerite Churchill) embodies romance while villainy is divided between the primeval barbarity of the gnarled "he-grizzly" (Tyrone Power Sr.) and the counterfeit gallantry of the Southern gambler (Ian Keith). Hunts and dances, weddings and burials, henpecked Swedes and Pawnee scouts and Cheyenne braves all pass before the lenses as part of the theater of a country in flux. The landscape meanwhile swings between deserts and blizzards before settling on a redwood Eden "altogether too civilized" for some. "Rope, muscle and determination" comprise Walsh's great sense of adventure, a broad-shouldered monumentality that accommodates prairie schooners under a Dovzhenko sky along with the mangy vaudevillian belching out animal impressions. (The camera stands back to absorb the resplendent mountain ranges and horizon, and leans close to register the squeaking of wagon wheels and the marvelous sight of pilgrim women washing and combing their long tresses.) "See you next year." "Bring your scalp along back!" Altman remembers the snowy showdown in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the upwards tilt in the forest of towering trunks gives birth to a key Malick image. With Tully Marshall, El Brendel, David Rollins, Frederick Burton, Charles Stevens, and Louise Carver. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |