Surely one of the most serendipitous mo­ments in film history came when Raoul Walsh was assigned to The Big Trail, the first outdoor epic to be photographed in Fox’s 70mm Grandeur process. For Walsh, who had been developing (at least since The Lucky Lady in 1926) 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, and there are many shots which, anticipating Jacques Tati’s Playtime by thirty-seven years, multiple focal points are used to lead the viewer’s eye through vast compositions, shifting our attention without the use of cutting. The film’s most spectacular sequence, in which ropes and pulleys are used to lower an entire wagon train over a mountainside and down into a valley, anticipates the Bazinian unities of time and action, capturing the begin­ning, middle and end of an unfolding event in a single, extended shot. The film is also perhaps the first of Walsh’s ‘map movies’, a format he would return to in the 40s and 50s for works like Desperate Journey, Objective, Burma!, and Distant Drums, 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 in the cinema. In Jacques Lourcelles’ words, Walsh’s pioneers are “pushed toward the horizon line by an in­stinctive, telluric force. The obey a law of the same order of those that dictate the tides of the sea, the migration of birds and the movement of the stars”. Men­tion should also be made of the film’s shy young lead, a Fox prop man named Mari­on Morrison whom Walsh found promising and renamed John Wayne.
(Dave Kehr)