The Worst Film Ever

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

I am a truly big fan of a good western, and not so much an enthusiastic fan of a musical themed western but "How the West Was Won" combined an all star cast of veterans such as Karl Malden, James Stewart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, George Peppard and the always nasty screen villain Eli Wallach with just the right mix of a very boisterous and cantankerous singing Debbie Reynolds which made this 164 minute film a memorable western classic.This film is the way all great and classic films should be made with a grand musical score opening the film, another musical score to allow for a short break/interlude at the mid-point of the film, and to close with a memorable music score as this great western film classic ended with.Yes, this film depicts the struggles of four generations of the Prescott family as they travel by make shift rafts, horse and buggy, wagon trains, and the earliest designs of locomotive engines on freshly laid railroad tracks. The four generations of the Prescott family fought Indians, the U.S. Civil war, gunslingers, bandidos and corrupt businessmen, and what the viewer is left with by the end of the film is a good reminder of what many of our own families predecessors endured to allow us to live a good life that we live today.How the West Was Won combined the experience of four directors of which one director managed the films musical scores and the other three directors basically directed one generation of the Prescott families life until the story line was passed on to the next generation of the Prescott family.Although the films length at 144 minutes is approximately one hour longer than most feature length films, I for one would have gladly paid a premium to have been able to see this film in one of the classic movie theaters on the large panoramic movie screens that were ever present in all large cities and even in smaller towns during the 1960's era before VHS/DVD/BluRay/HBO/NetFlix/streaming swallowed up the now long forgotten true movie fans atmosphere of the physical movie film theaters. Don't even get me started on how limited the availability of the Drive-In theaters are lacking today.I digress, but there is a parallel that I draw from the pioneers such as the four generations of the Prescott family depicted in How the West was Won and our waning film industry. It now seems to encourage rather than discourage the flagrant pirating of film producers intellectual property and the ridiculous costs associated with the more simple and in my opinion cartoonish CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) so-called action/adventure films that are so popular at the box office today. As the buffalo and native Indians disappeared from the western prairies and plain fields, so too will great films such as How the West was Won, so take the time and enjoy their simplistic but more factual story lines because in a few decades the art of film making may be lost to future generations and replaced with films based on CGI games like Donkey Kong. I rate How the West Was Won a 9 out of 10 rating and I hope that future generations will grow to appreciate the picture quality and the history of the great old western for what it was intended. Rolling, rolling, rolling, ♬♪♩ keep those wagons' rolling ♬♪♩ rawhide!!!

Very much like IMAX's grandiose stand against the emergence of internet streaming, Blu-Ray and the 'Golden Age of Television', the 1950's saw studios battling against the arrival of a television in every home, and used the likes of 3D and 'Spook Show Spectaculars' to draw the public in. Another short-lived fad was Cinerama, a process of shooting with three synchronised cameras and creating an ultra widescreen effect in the process. It was a headache for film- makers, notably John Ford, and special cinemas had to be built to house the format that required three projectors and a deeply curved screen.Also like IMAX, Cinerama was intended mainly for documentaries, but its immediate success meant that it wouldn't be too long before studios started to turn to features. The first was The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm in 1962, and How the West Was Won came later the same year. The latter is the most ambitious, telling a story stretching 50 years across three generations and boasting a cast of '24 great stars' (as the poster informs us), taking us through the major events of America's expansion further west and employing four first-rate directors - John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and the uncredited Richard Thorpe - to bring it to life.Whilst the ambition can only be admired, How the West Was Won is a mixed bag. In part a rough-and-tumble, old-fashioned western that offers differing perspectives of America's venture out west, as Henry Fonda's grizzled buffalo hunter Jethro Stuart laments the bloody consequences of the railroad's arrival under the command of Richard Widmark's ruthless and treaty-dismissing overseer, the film also cannot resist the lure of grand song-and-dance numbers, with Debbie Reynolds husky voice and knee-slapping becoming tiresome very quickly. It also keeps the audience at a huge distance, both emotionally and literally. With so much picture being captured, actors are routinely squeezed into the centre of the frame with their facial expressions too far away to see.Broken up into 5 segments - The Rivers, The Plains, The Civil War, The Railroad and The Outlaws - we follow the Prescott family, led at first by Zebulon (Karl Malden), as they head for the frontier and encounter mountain man Linus Rawlings (a woefully miscast James Stewart). Rawlings falls for eldest daughter Eve (Carroll Baker), and the family spread out from there. Hathaway directs three of the five, with the best being the Outlaws section, which pits George Peppard's Zeb Rawlings. a marshal, against bandit Charlie Gant (Eli Wallach), and delivers a set-piece on top of moving train which is as technically impressive as anything made today (a stunt-man almost died during the filming).Ford's Civil War segment is the slightest but offers an interesting insight into the war. In one fantastic scene, General Ulysses S. Grant (Harry Morgan) drunkly ponders his effectiveness to General William Sherman (John Wayne) as the young Zeb Rawlings listens, demonstrating Ford's lack of fear in showing a brittler side to a man considered an unshakeable American hero. But Ford and the film in general never really commits to the themes it hints at, and this is ultimately what makes How the West Was Won such a frustrating experience. As the camera sails across modern America before the closing credits, I felt slightly appalled at what had been done to this once-beautiful country but couldn't really figure out if this was how the film intended I feel. As a visual experience, it is truly like no other, but it remains oddly hollow emotionally and thematically.

A family saga covering several decades of Westward expansion in the nineteenth century -- including the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the building of the railroads.This may be the western for those who do not like westerns. Although I could have done without the overture and intermission (which would cut off ten minutes), the rest is excellent and has more big name stars than can be counted on two hands. For those who love westerns, we have John Wayne (and Lee Van Cleef), and for everyone else we have Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck and more...I loved the historical nature of this. It was sort of like the old west version of "Centennial". And the connection to modern Los Angeles was a tad hokey, but at the same time had a good bit of truth to it... a mere 100 years before this film was made, Hollywood was wilderness.

Epic western filmed in Cinerama. I wish I could have seen it in that format. I saw it on TV and, while it's still a beautiful-looking movie, I can only imagine how much richer the experience would have been to see it in theaters. While not an anthology film exactly, it's similar in that it is a series of different stories tied together by one family over about forty or fifty years of American history. It's all narrated by Spencer Tracy. The first segment deals with a family of settlers heading west. They encounter a mountain man (James Stewart) and one of the daughters (Carroll Baker) falls in love with him. But they all run afoul of a gang of river pirates run by Walter Brennan.The other daughter (Debbie Reynolds), scared away from the West by the hardships her family had to endure, eventually becomes a dance hall girl and is the star of the second segment. Reynolds is left an inheritance by a former customer but in order to collect it, she must head to California. So she joins a wagon train across the plains to the West and is romanced by Robert Preston and Gregory Peck. These first two segments were directed by Henry Hathaway. The first is probably the film's best but the second is the weakest.The third part is directed by John Ford. Stewart and Baker's son, played by George Peppard, follows his father into the war and fights in the Battle of Shiloh. John Wayne plays William Tecumseh Sherman. This is a good segment but seemed short. The fourth segment follows Peppard after the war as he is now part of the U.S. Cavalry. This part deals with the construction of the railroads west, as well as the Pony Express and the telegraph. It features Henry Fonda as a buffalo hunter and Richard Widmark as a railroad tycoon. This segment was directed by George Marshall. It's decent but not the strongest.The final segment is again directed by Hathaway. Debbie Reynolds' character is now a widow and moves to Arizona, where she has invited Peppard and his family to live with her on her ranch. But Peppard, a former lawman at this point, must stop outlaw Eli Wallach from robbing a train. Lee J. Cobb and Carolyn Jones are also in this part. Not a particularly strong segment but a little better than the second one. All in all, a good movie but perhaps it doesn't reach quite what it was aiming for. It definitely has one of the most impressive casts in film history.