by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the U.S. release of the western epic How the West Was Won. Rather than cover this as part of Printing The Legend, my westerns column, I want to focus on how this release parallels the film industry today. By the 1950s, cinema was facing its first crisis: the popularity of television. Already reeling from the Paramount ruling in 1948, studios (and now exhibitors) were worried that the availability of visual media at home was going to undercut their bottom line. The answer from the studios was to go big and bright. Television was still monochromatic and screens were small, so movies went brighter and wider. Robe introduced the wider CinemaScope format in 1953, and soon studios were churning out large scale epics like War and Peace, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Ten Commandments. These epics focused on the broadest appeal and the biggest spectacle, which often led them to be impressive in scale, but weak on story or characters.

How the West Was Won was one of only two commercial movies produced in the Cinerama format. Filmed with three 35mm cameras simultaneously, and then projected onto a 146-degree curved screen from three projectors, it was an expensive and restricting format for both production and projection. A weird trivia fact is that Cinerama was also made at 26 frames per second instead of 24. 

In making a Cinerama film, each camera photographed one-third of the picture shooting in a crisscross pattern, the right camera shooting the left part of the image, the left camera capturing the right side, and the center camera shooting straight ahead. The three cameras were mounted as one unit, and a single shutter in front of all three lenses made simultaneous exposure on each of the filmstrips possible. A further evolution of this idea would lead to Disney’s Circle-Vision 360°, still in use today at Epcot. But this meant that any indoor scenes would have to be shot on massive sets, and outdoor locations required additional planning for framing and set dressing. Perhaps the biggest restriction was the way actors had to be blocked, because sight lines needed to be adjusted for the curved screen in order to appear they were actually talking to each other. Zoom lenses could also not be used.

On the projection side, any issues to one of the films running through any of the projectors would break the image. When splicing sections, each of the three films needed to be identical, or a third of the image would be out of sync. The spots where the images met would make any judder or shaking from the projection obvious as well. Not to mention the expense of setting up two additional projectors, sound equipment, and the specialized screen. 

Even as How the West Was Won was being shot, the three camera, three projector version of Cinerama already showed signs of being an unneeded expense, as some of the sequences were shot in Ultra Panavision 70. While not as high fidelity as the Cinerama image, Ultra Panavision produced an extremely wide image but did not require additional cameras, projectors, or the curved screen. So this movie comes at a sort of unique moment in time. Cinemara was like the 4DX of its day, although instead of bubbles and physical seat movement, these were often occasions for dressing up and experiencing a higher form of movie culture than usual. Of course the number of locations was quite limited, but I couldn’t get an idea of how many people actually saw the Cinerama version of How the West Was Won, though it was the second highest grossing movie of 1963 behind Cleopatra. How we make and watch movies has never been a static thing, and this is a great example of an experiment that worked well but was quickly replaced by a more cost-effective version.

For this article, I watched on Blu-Ray, which means it was about as wide as most things these days (with some generous letterboxing), and the ‘seams’ where the images overlap were sometimes noticeable. But so many aspects of this are stunning, and the stationary cameras make everything feel like a tableau. I mentioned Circle-Vision 360° earlier, because How the West Was Won feels like a 2.5 hour theme park ride. The ending montage of the modern west especially evokes those films at Epcot and the Soarin’ ride. The stories are engaging enough, and there are great moments throughout, but because of the way the segments are broken up, there’s not a lot of depth to the stores. It often can feel like you are passing through a scene not unlike the Pirates of the Caribbean or Spaceship Earth rides. Which isn’t an entirely bad thing. It’s a fun watch, even though the details in the images are more interesting than the compositions themselves. The depth of field is impressive, and the locations used do make the most of this unique filming style. But while it boasts an impressive cast, many of them seem lost within the frame and it lessens their impact. 

How the West Was Won remains an interesting artifact of a certain place and time. One of the final films of John Ford’s career (the Civil War segment is his), it is wild to think about his career starting 50 years before, in the silent era, and then coming to a close after so much change in all aspects of Hollywood. All westerns are either building up or deconstructing the myths of the frontier, and the entirety of this project belongs in the former, at the twilight of the Hollywood western itself. The swooping shot over the Golden Gate Bridge in the finale feels like a farewell before riding off into the sunset.