THE COLLECTION
The Big Trail
Raoul Walsh (American, 1887-1980)
1930. USA. 35mm print, black and white, sound, 135 minutes. Gift of Twentieth Century-Fox. Restored with funding from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation and The Film Foundation
F551
Filmed simultaneously in both standard 35mm and Grandeur, an early wide-screen process, and with versions shot in German, Italian, French, and Spanish for foreign markets (in standard 35mm only and with alternate casts), this 1930 sound feature by veteran silent director Raoul Walsh is an impressive epic of the Oregon Trail. Although hampered by difficult locations and the new and unwieldy Grandeur apparatus, cinematographer Arthur Edeson succeeded in filling the screen with breathtaking natural vistas as well as beautifully composed close-ups of the young stars, Marguerite Churchill and John Wayne (in his first starring role). Moments of low comedy are woven awkwardly into the narrative, but the overall effect is one of high drama. The Museum of Modern Art spent many years on the preservation of this film, working with original elements in its Fox Collection; the result is the first restoration of the complete 70mm wide-screen Grandeur version, copied to anamorphic 35mm.
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