.
.
Huge, epic, but a bit of a clunker
.
.
Among the Western things I’m not overly keen on are covered-wagon stories, Andrew V McLaglen Westerns and pre-Civil War tales. All of these are present in The Way West, so it isn’t going to get too many plaudits from this blog.
.
.
Huge, epic
.
On the other hand, I love William H Clothier photography, Robert Mitchum (when he’s not on auto-pilot and even sometimes when he is) and Jack Elam, and this movie has those too.
It seems to have been an attempt to do for pioneer settlers what The Big Sky had done for mountain men and trappers, namely to produce the ‘definitive’ movie. (AB Guthrie Jr had, of course, written the novel that was adapted for RKO’s The Big Sky in 1952 and Kirk Douglas had starred in that.) Given The Way West‘s predecessors such as The Covered Wagon, The Big Trail and so on, that was quite an ask.
The project was scuppered from the start, really, by the attempt to do Peyton Place on the Prairie, and though the AB Guthrie Jr novel probably was ‘the’ covered-wagon story, the highly complex soap-opera plot of the movie and Ben Maddow/Mitchell Lindemann adaptation doomed it to box-office and critical perdition despite its huge budget.
Harold Hecht, the producer, and Andrew McLaglen, the director, had lunch with Robert Mitchum, who had agreed to take part (the fishing was good in Oregon) and asked him which role he would like. He gave his famous ‘Baby, I don’t care’ answer and was assigned the part of the scout. It was ideal casting though and Mitchum in his buckskins was the best thing about the movie. He was to play a man indifferent to his fate. Perfect. Apparently Bob had a fishing rod in the grass and cast his line between takes.
.
.
Driven senator, reluctant scout, angry farmer: Douglas, Mitchum, Widmark
.
.
Richard Widmark took the role of the farmer, populist challenger for the leadership. Is it me or does he shout too much in this one?
Kirk Douglas histrionically played the Bligh-like boss of the wagon train and apparently tried to be the boss of the film crew too. He was as competitive and driven as always. Assistant director Terry Morse (quoted in Lee Server’s 2001 biography of Robert Mitchum) said, “Kirk was arrogant and rude to everybody. That’s the kind of guy he was, and nobody really liked Kirk. He wanted everything his way. He was not a pleasant person to be around.”
.
.
Competitive, demanding
.
Harry Carey Jr also has a small part.
British-born McLaglen, Victor McLaglen’s son, was a kind of Ford/Wayne protégé, and he obviously tried for a Fordian movie here. But while he was workmanlike and experienced (especially with literally hundreds of episods of Gunsmoke and Have Gun – Will Travel under his belt, he would never be John Ford, or anything like it. For me, AV McLaglen was always essentially a second-rate director of feature Westerns.
.
.
Wide screen
.
The Bronislau Kaper music is appropriately grandiloquent and swelling but finally rather tiresome, and the theme song is really grim. The widescreen Clothier photography of the Oregon locations is splendid and one of the highlights of the movie, and there is very little interior or sound-stage stuff. Some of the activity is pretty impressive. Rivers were forded and wagons were lowered from cliff tops (all wagon-train movies loved that bit). McLaglen must have been one hell of an organizer anyway. Jack Elam, who played the preacher, said, “Physically, [the movie] was as tough as it could possibly be. Working on the cliffs and in the sand and all that shit. On top of a mountain, the top of a ski-run that was bone dry in summer. Everybody had to take a ski-lift to the top … You’re up there, hundreds of feet up, nothing but rocks to fall on. Goddam scary … So the whole picture was one tough son of a gun.”
Elam added, “We worked so hard on The Way West, it was a shame it got such mixed reviews and kind of died somewhere on the vine. At the time we were shooting it, we really thought we were making a damn great picture.” But they were trying to make a 1950s Western in 1967 and it didn’t work. If you look at the other movies that came out in 1967, this one was an anachronism.
.
.
Variety said it was “washed out in scripting, direction and pacing” while The New York Times called it “hackneyed hash”. Huge, epic, nice to look at, it was nevertheless a bit of a clunker. The movie is (marginally) shorter than the trek down The Oregon Trail would have been and certainly less dangerous, but probably just as dreary.
.
19 Responses
This comment has been removed by the author.
"Filmed on location in America's National Parks"
What thoughtest ye of THAT credit? Or of the vocal chorus that accompanied the prologue? Elam's quote may be telling; I think they tried a bit TOO hard on this one.
Also, it's ironic that Terry Morse's comments about Douglas's behavior echo Douglas's own about John Wayne's on the location of "The War Wagon" the same year. I wonder if the total effect of months spent on remote locations engaged in the often frustrating work of filming period outdoor pictures doesn't amount to a certain loss of self-awareness?
Not sure that one of the problems Hollywood actors had was a loss of self-awareness…
The credit reminds me of those movies that said "filmed on location", about the dumbest credit ever.
Jeff
This was on a couple of days ago. It's one of the dullest pictures I have ever seen. But why? The stars are top drawer. The photography is good. The props and costumes good. But the whole thing is like a lead weight. The music doesn't help. It's obvious and mediocre and sounds thin. Would it have been better filmed 10 years earlier with that 50s shine to the photography and a full-bodied Dimitri Tiomkin score? No character interaction seems to be properly developed and each dramatic situation is quickly telegraphed and forgotten. Was it brutally cut from an intended 3 hours? Types that are usually entertaining in a Ford or Wayne picture are just boring as if all McLaglen can do is copy clichés without an iota of creativity. It doesn't show so much in some of the pictures he did with Wayne: is it because in effect Wayne was doing the directing? Paul
Yes, lead weight is right. Chiefly to blame, I think, were the soap-opera plot and McLaglen's direction.
Jeff
Too Slow, too long and dragging, the film had probably too high expectations to live up to in spite of many assets well underlined by Jeff and previous comments. Andrew McLaglen was maybe a good second unit director but that’s about it.
Strangely enough Jeff did not say anything about the actresses.
Apple-cheeked Sally Field in her debut was 19 years old.
Elsewhere on the blog Jeff speaks of Lola Albright (1924 – 2017) as “the sultry nightclub singer (she was originally a jazz singer) Edie Hart in Peter Gunn, best known in the wonderful world of the Western for her role in The Way West…”
She appeared as the obligatory blonde in several minor westerns of the 1950s:
Tulsa (1949 – Stuart Heisler, a “modern” one), Sierra Passage (1951- Frank Mc Donald), The Silver Whip (1953 – Harmon Jones) in which she is a singer again, Treasure of Ruby Hills (1955 – Frank Mc Donald), Pawnee – (1957 – George Waggner), Oregon Passage (1958 – Paul Landres), Seven guns to Mesa (1958 – Edward Dein) and last but not least, much later, The Way West. Most of them have caught Jeff’s attention.
She was in a lot of TV shows, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Wagon train, Branded, Laredo, Cimarron Strip and Bonanza. In 2 episodes, she showed how effective she could be in westerns. In “The Search”, she played a saloon girl hired to track down Adam Cartwright. And in “A Bride for Buford”, a saloon singer with a shady boyfriend.
Katherine Justice has played in The Big Valley, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, 5 Card Stud being probably her only feature western.
The film was not shot in the National Parks but the National Forests as written in the opening credits and mostly in Oregon (Bend and Madras regions). The sand dunes are in the Christmas Valley. The most spectacular sequence showing the wagons lowering the cliffs with ropes is set in the Crooked River Gorge, southeast of Bend. We can see at the beginning of the trek what looks like Chimney Rock in Nebraska but it could be a transparency. But we will never see the Willamette Valley as once the wagons are floating the river on the rafts, this is suddenly THE END.
A good publicity for Oregon even if the film should have been better.
Right to mention Sally Field. She was very cute!
With such a cast, photo and locations (same Mount Bachelor / Three Sisters mountain backdrop as in The Day of the Outlaw…) it should have been called The Way Waste…!
Yes, just not good enough. Walsh’s ‘The Big Trail’ with Wayne from ’30 is spectacular at times and whips it. The widescreen is so impressive and the action feels real.
Last time I tried to watch it I was briefly aroused when I started to wonder why it is people sleeping in westerns always have to be woken up by a bucket of water thrown over them. I think it’s Richard Widmark getting a soaking in this which seems unfair because if an actor ever deserved to have a bucket of water thrown over him it would have to be Kirk Douglas.
Yes, Kirk really overplays his hand here. Even getting whipped by his servant. I like Kirk. I like his Westerns. This was not his best. I much prefer Mitchum’s underplaying in it.
Kirk Douglas is as often synonymic of overplaying as Robert Mitchum is synonymic of underplaying. Some even may say that Michum tended to overplay his underplay… Jeff has written a very good text for each of them.
A thing that really turned me on to Robert Mitchum’s acting was watching him in ‘River of No Return’. I felt you could see him supporting Marilyn Monroe by really listening to her. It came across to me as a very generous performance.
Yes, he had a very moving understanding of Marilyn. He knew her when she was just Norma Jean and made sandwiches for lunch for her first husband who worked with Mitchum at a factory, I believe. They are two of my favorites.
That’s really interesting to learn, Chris – thanks. I have been curious about it ever since I noticed it watching the movie. He’s really supporting her.
That title feels popping up in my movie reading–“River of No Return” (1954). I’ll definitely have to see it. It’s directed by Otto Preminger, who directs the film noir classic, “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1950, candidate for my all-time Top 25, all genres).
I see that Preminger uses the same cinematographer as he does in “Where the Sidewalk Ends”: Joseph LaShalle. I’d love to see if that duo brings the same cinematic thrills to “River of No Return.”
Hello overdrive – I haven’t seen ‘River of No Return’ for a while but I remember it as an enjoyable movie as opposed to a great one, it looks good and (for me) the ending is quite touching. Marilyn Monroe could have been a disaster (I’m not a fan) but Mitchum makes her look good by his generous performance. There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes or so.
Thanks, Paul. I always enjoy your comments, as well as those of Chris Evans, Thomas Leary, Jean-Marie, and of course Bud and RR.
This has been a fun blog ! ! !
Some of my opinions are bonkers, overdrive. For example, I think ‘The Fastest Gun Alive’ is about males being emasculated by women and living in towns. Also, I think it’s a toss up which movie is more silly, Randolph Scott’s ‘7th Cavalry’ or ‘Anchorman 2’. I have watched both this week and I think it’s a close call. The last gem of wisdom I would pass on – while I’m going off on one – is the important thing to always remember about Wayne’s ‘The Alamo’ is at least it isn’t ‘McLintock’.