The Big Trail. 1930. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Screenplay by Marie Boyle, Jack Peabody, Florence Postal, Fred Sersen. With John Wayne, Ward Bond, Marguerite Churchill. 35mm. Restored with funding from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation and the Film Foundation. 122 min.
With John Wayne in his first starring role, the epic western The Big Trail, about pioneers on the Oregon Trail, was a highlight of MoMA’s comprehensive Raoul Walsh retrospective in 1974. In the 1980s, the Museum’s preservation chief, Peter Williamson, led the restoration of this spectacular film, which was shot in Fox’s 70mm Grandeur process. For a 2012 presentation at Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, MoMA film curator Dave Kehr wrote, “For Walsh, who had been developing a distinctive mise-en-scène based on contrasting foreground and background action, as well as an elaborate choreography of actors and extras entering and leaving the frame, the Grandeur process, with its widescreen image and vast depth of field, must have seemed custom made for him. Walsh seems immediately to seize all of the possibilities of the widescreen format, creating a continuous sense of movement with the frames that makes the action (and the world of the movie) extend even further beyond the edges of the already extended screen. The film is also perhaps the first of Walsh’s ‘map movies’ in which the existential objective is to move a group of men from point x to point y, with all of the attendant dangers in between. In The Big Trail, of course, this movement is nothing less than the settling of the American West, here realized with a scale and immediacy that remains unique.”