How the West Was Won

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How the West Was Won

• History, Spectacle and the American Mountains
• Sheldon Hall

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Epic Westerns

• Definition Epic Westerns are generally the most
  conscious of the genres basis in an actual, as
  opposed to mythic, past, although they are no
  more scrupulous than most in their fidelity to
  documented facts (255).

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Historical Pageant

• Historical Pageants The function of such
  phenomena is not to interrogate history, but to
  offer a fanciful, consensual representation of
  the past as a spectacle for the entertainment
  (and patriotic edification) of the present
  (255).
• Fredrick Jackson Turner Pageantry exists for
  the purpose of satisfying our curioisity (255).

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Films Narrative

• An account of the fortunes, through several
  generations, of a single (White, Anglo-Saxon)
  fictional family chosen as representative of
  pioneer stock, taking in as many facets as
  possible both of nineteenth-century American
  history and of the Western genre (256).
• The intent of How the West Was Won was clearly
  not just to make a Western, but to produce a
  definitive Western, one that could embrace all or
  most of the genres historical time-frame and
  repertoire of narrative situations (256).

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Films Directors Cast

• Actors John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda,
  Gregory Peck, Robert Preston, Eli Wallach
• Directors
• Henry Hathaway (The Rivers, The Plains, The
  Outlaws)
• John Ford (Civil War)
• George Marshall (The Railroad)

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Films Genre

• In a period when the genre was moving
  increasingly towards revisionist
  self-consciousness and the meaning and
  ideological function of the West and the Western
  were being examined critically by Ford (in
  another, more personal and intimate - though no
  less Turnerseque - context that of The Man Who
  Shot Liberty Valance, 1962), Peckinpah and
  others, Webb and Hathaway/Ford/Marshall attempted
  to fix the Western purely in terms of its
  repertoire of external signs and conventions, its
  iconography, rather than through a dramatic
  analysis of its historical significance (256).

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Production Presentation

• The name Cinemara is an anagram of American
  (Greg Kimble).
• First film to be shown in three-strip Cinerama
  (aspect ratio 2.761)
• The film functions partly as a showcase for
  technology (257).
• Use of extreme wide-angle lenses creates
  excessive depth to the image. Characters looms
  into close-up or recedes into long-shot in a
  single step (257).

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Production Presentation II

• Each of the five narrative episodes (with the
  partial exception of Fords), is built around a
  sequence of action or spectacle that is designed
  to focus attention on the format and its capacity
  to evoke empathetic sensation in the spectator a
  raft coursing down a wild river, a wagon train
  chased by Indians, a buffalo stampede, a runaway
  train (258).

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Critics

• Fairground sideshow, carnival, a circus or a
  pagaent
• Spectacle without substance
• Inversion of economy to excess, story to spectacle

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Apologists

• Apologists
• Classical vs pre-classical cinema (cinema of
  attractions)
• Sergei Eisenstein montage of attractions as a
  response to, and rejection of, the dominance of
  classicism
• Film scenarios as pretexts for tricks and
  theatrical/cinematic effects
• Cinema as a way of showing rather than of
  narrating
• The form of cinema itself is the chief attraction
• Experience of watching the film may be
  accompanied by extra-cinematic attractions (HTWWW
  accompanied by live orchestral overtures, drinks
  at intermission, lavish theatrical surroundings,
  souvenir brochures, etc.)
• Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects

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History as Spectacle

• Webbs screenplay does try, at least partly, to
  reproduce his conception of American history in
  terms of social, rather than heroic-individualist
  ic concerns (259).
• Winning of the West proceeded in a series of
  phases, each of which necessitated a partial
  return to primitivism, to year zero, with the
  prospect of renewed growth at each stage (259).

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Episodes

• Each episode is founded on a pattern of westward
  travel and movement, and in each a mode of
  transport figures as defining motif raft, canoe,
  riverboat, covered wagon, railway train, horse,
  buckboard. Each miniature narrative concludes
  with the protagonist(s) moving on, anticipating
  some new future (259).

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Episodes II

• The River (Hathaway) Eve Linus
• The Plains (Hathaway) Lilith Cleve
• - Intermission -
• The Civil War (Ford) Zeb
• The Railroad (Marshall) Zeb Jethro
• The Outlaws (Hathaway) Zeb

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Race Ethnicity

• No black characters, not even in Civil War
• Very minor appearance of Chinese
• Very minor appearance of Mexicans
• Inconsistent treatment of Native Americans?

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First episode

• Briefly seen as friends and peaceful trading
  partners

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Second episode

• Unmotivated hostiles attacking the wagon train

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Fourth episode

• Victims of technological progress and corporate
  capitalist expansion in the form of the railroad

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Contextual Limitations

• Blockbuster Cost 14 million, the average budget
  of a Hollywood picture in 1961-62 is 2 million
• The desire not to offend White conservatives?
• Films heritage-industry conception of history
  all water under the bridge now (260).
• It is all regretted, but the railroad must be
  built. Nobody really questions that nothing
  must stand in the way of progress whatever the
  cost (260).

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Sexual politics

• Lilith Eve
• Eve tames the mountain man Linus Rawlings, only
  for him to leave when the first bugle blew
• Lilith marries Cleve, but remains childless.
• Linus and Cleve are allowed to disappear into
  domesticity (literally once they have agreed to
  marry, they are dead to the narrative and cease
  to play a part in it) (261).
• Lilith part of the railroad plot that Zeb
  dislikes
• Eve dies when Zeb leaves and Linus dies

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Zeb and Americanness

• Zebs horizons are left open he crosses one at
  the end of each the films second-half episodes.
• Thats what I like about this country - theres
  always greener grass on the other side of the
  hill . . . May be Ill just have to climb a
  higher hill to find it. --- Rationale for the
  films ideological incoherence?

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Questions

• So what of the five sections?
• Elements of Mise-en-scene and Framing in the film?