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How the West Was Won
[1962] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Starring: Harry Karl, Andy Devine, Lee Van Cleef, Debbie Reynolds, John Harvey
Director: John Ford Henry Hathaway George Marshall Richard Thorpe
Format: Closed-captioned Colour DVD-Video Letterboxed Widescreen NTSC
Released: 12 Sep 2000
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

It needs to be seen on the giant screen - By: Trevor Willsmer, 10 Nov 2007
How the West Was Won seems to become more of an endurance task every year. While it throws in everything - injun attacks, shooting the rapids, stampedes, train wrecks, the Civil War, wagon trains - except a good old fashioned gunfight, the characterization & linking narrative wrapped around Richard Talmadge's impressive action scenes are a long way from the best of the West. Whether it's Karl Malden, Carol Baker, Robert Preston or Gregory Peck hamming it up or Debbie Reynolds raising yet another ruckus in another painfully gratuitous musical number, the squirm factor is high. Although John Ford's Civil War section (aided by plentiful stock footage from Raintree County) is the best remembered, the film doesn't reallly pick up until Reynolds is sidelined out of the picture & George Marshalll takes over the directorial reins for the impressive railroad section, where it reallly starts to confront a few of the darker aspects of the price of progress & alllows George Peppard, Richard Widmark & Henry Fonda to shine. Unfortunately by then fatigue is beginning to set in, & for alll the beauty of the color the transfer from three-panel Cinerama to letterboxed DVD leaves the film with some very jarring distortion problems that leaves much of the film looking like it's being played in a semi-circle. And the film's exultant ending that sees the magnificent scenery buried under miles of highways & skyscrapers now seems more tragedy than triumph. At the end of the day it's pure popcorn fodder, but it has its moments & Alfred Newman's score at least has the dynamism that the majority of the film lacks.