Better Carry A Six-Gun-John Ford’s “How The West Was Won” (1962)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

How The West Was Won, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Debby Reynolds and an all-star cast of every bankable star from the 1950s, narrated by Spencer Tracy, and directed by cowboy movie legend John Ford, 1962

Most of the film reviews I have done in this space on the West, the American West, have centered on the New West, the West after as the famous Harvard Professor Turner’s thesis put the matter “the frontier ended” and you either had to swim to the Japan seas or accept a settled life or head back East. Such films as Paul Newman’s Hud and Jeff Bridges’ The Last Picture Show which show alienated young people in the post-World War II period who can no longer claim any heroic mantle but must stay put or move to the cities. Still it does no harm to take a look at the Old West, the West of the dime store novels and the oater flicks if only to see at the particular moment what the common cultural assumptions were. Today we look at famed cowboy movie director John Ford’s 1962 screen effort How The West Was Won.

While both later historical research and cultural proclivities have changed and such a movie would not play well today it is interesting as a look at what Hollywood thought the trek westward looked like using seemingly every bankable star in the town in the production. Some in cameo-like appearances and others whose characters form a thread throughout the film.         

There are aspects of this film which have a documentary feel as the narrator Spencer Tracy weaves a tale starting backing in the 1840s or so and running through the taming of the West toward the end of that century (and briefly what the place looks like today at the end). There are a series of vignettes detailing various aspects of the trip West told through three generations of the Prescott family, especially the fate of two sisters one who stays put in Ohio after their parents die in a rapids accident on a raft heading west and the other who made it to California.    

The vignettes include the standard footloose family picking up stakes and heading West (although if anybody had anything going for them in the East they stayed put it was only the ones whose land had given out or their prospects who made the dangerous trip), their troubles with con artists and criminal elements always ready to prey on the greenhorns of any generation, and their troubles with Mother Nature. Another dealt with a quick look at the Civil War and how that slowed things going to the West for the duration. Then the deluge in the aftermath as the lands opened with the arrival of the railroads heading from the Pacific east and the Mississippi west. Not everybody made it between the elements and the Indians (now Native Americans or indigenous peoples). There you have it in a quick two almost three hours. It was an okay film although I still would have rather spent my time re-watching The Last Picture Show-that’s the cinematic West too.