If I had seen this poster prior to watching the opening credits of How the West Was Won, my jaw might not have dropped so much in seeing the names listed.
Now, I'm not as versed in classic cinema as I wish I was -- more than the average person, less than the average cinephile -- but even I knew almost every name in these opening credits, for a movie released 63 years ago. And with each new name, my anticipation for what lay ahead increased.
(Incidentally, they don't make movies like this anymore, where the very studding of the stars is kind of the point. I'm thinking of something like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which came out one year later in 1963.)
In fact, so studded is it with stars that the movie needed three directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, though I must admit I was not previously familiar with the last two. (I see Hathaway directed the original True Grit, which I haven't seen.)
And I can't help wondering if part of the reason Harold F. Kress won the Oscar for How the West Was Won was because he was working with the material of three different directors who each directed multiple individual sequences, and yet he wove it all together to feel like a cohesive whole. While we're on the topic of Kress, let's get his bonafides out of the way now: He also won the best editing Oscar 12 years later for The Towering Inferno -- another movie studded with stars -- and received four other nominations.
To be sure, there are sequences in How the West Was Won that required top-notch editing skills, similar to the ones I've been pointing out in the first six months of this series, involving fast-paced action and the threading together of multiple camera angles on that action to great a fluid sense of momentum. These include a big fight scene at a trading post, a harrowing sequence on white water rapids, a horse chase right out of something like Stagecoach, a cattle stampede, and a train robbery sequence, where the uncoupling of trains is captured with high intensity.
But I'm rattling those off in one paragraph, rather than devoting special time to each, because I'm not sure if any of them rises to an inarguable level of impressiveness, and I also think there is something more insiderish going on in the awarding of this award.
I don't mean that in a bad way, but I do expect that there was a lot of respect accorded Kress for his work with the multiple directors. You might expect each director to have his own editor, someone he was comfortable working with over the years. And in many films where multiple directors contributed, each director would submit his (or her) own work as a completed unit with its own complete production team, whereas Kress was taking submitted footage and finding a way of making it all work as one.
What's more, Kress had only worked with one of these directors, and only once before, if the handy dandy listing of his filmography, with directors listed next to each, on Wikipedia is to be believed. He editing Marshall's Imitation General four years earlier, but had never worked with either Ford or Hathaway. (Interestingly, though, he does not appear to have worked with any of them again afterward, so maybe it wasn't a perfect experience for everyone, despite the accolades.)
When I set out to do this series, I expected to be learning only about the craft as it appears in the final product, which seems rather obvious. But How the West Was Won reveals something a bit more ineffable about the craft of editing, an ability to take disparate material and present it as a grand unifying whole, in ways you can't necessarily point to or pick out.
If the cinematographer had been doing the same thing, that might be even more impressive -- but there are four credited cinematographers on this movie, such that I suppose you couldn't refer to any of them as a "director of photography." Each director had his own DP, it seems, or in some cases, even more than one. But one guy did all the editing, and he surely helped make this movie proceed forward as briskly as it does, making the 2.5 hour running time pass quickly.
I haven't said much about the story, but indeed it is a decades-spanning epic, in which several generations of one family do play a central role, appearing in a succession of approximately 35-minute sequences exemplifying various old west paradigms. The parts of this film, though never listed on screen, are described in the credits with such titles as "the rivers," "the plains," "the Civil War" and "the outlaws." It's like a taste of everything you could want in a movie about American expansion westward, replete with the biggest stars of the day. And all narrated by Spencer Tracy, a final unifying detail that brings it all together.
One last comment about the film has to do with its look. This was shot in a widescreen format called Cinerama, and it's still astonishing to look at, even on the small screen. At the time it was first screened, it played on screens so wide that they curved at the edges, and you can sometimes see this curvature in the shots. Kind of reminded me of watching some of the first IMAX films in the giant Omnimax Theater at the Boston Museum of Science, way back in the day.
And you wonder why this got craft-related awards? (It also won for its sound, and was nominated in all the other major technical categories.)
Time for my next rewatch of a previously seen movie in August, and that will be William Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection.
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