Acting Out Their Dreams, It Came To Be: How The West Was Won (1962)

Epic of epics...all is epic.  I begin with this play on the classic Bible verse because I am rather certain that How The West Was Won may well define the greatest of filmic endeavors.  Sure a ton of people love Gone With The Wind, but it also has a tone of social problems and suffers from historical detachment, where as this sprawling western, even in its set of troublesome imagery, is so grand and epic in proportion that it required an entirely new filming style all its own to be undertaken.  Shot in Cinerama, a film and projection style that required three cameras of film to be recorded and, subsequently, projected separately, to view this film is to see something break the very wide boundaries of the cinematic western landscape.  I have a nice television and one of decent size and even I found myself hoping that it would extend beyond the edges just a bit more, as though my widescreen television was somehow preventing this film from reaching its full potential.  If this new style were not enough, How The West Was Won is also set up in an episodic format showing a somewhat connected history of information answering the statement in the title.  With directors like John Ford offering segments, as well as sections including a veritable who's who of Classic Hollywood stars, How The West Was Won is easily one of the greatest achievements in the dwindling days of the old style system that would be turned on its head only years later.  Borrowing heavily from the cinematic experimentation of Abel Gance and the desire for the grand of D.W. Griffith, How The West Was Won is definitively and undoubtedly a masterpiece.  I really wish I had saved this as the last film of the marathon, because it is easily the culmination of all that is glorious and adored about the western as genre, is a what one should think of when considering a film to be "sweeping" in its narrative.  It has a two and a half hour runtime, but with the intermissions, fully realized storyline, even if segmented and some of the most awe inspiring cinematography I have seen in a film in quite some time, the winding down of this film and its brilliant burst into the future came all to quickly and left me hoping for another set of stories.

How The West Was Won, as noted, is a series of stories, all focused on creating narrative as to how the west, or more specifically, the expansion westward influenced the persona and history that would be America.  The film begins with a story entitled The Rivers focus on Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden) and his family as they make their way west via a large raft, making said journey along with another family.  Along the way they meet a fur trapper named Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart) who one of Prescott's younger girls takes a liking to, despite Rawlings's suggestion that he is not the marrying type. Although when their paths repeatedly intersect it becomes clear that marriage is a necessity. The next story The Plains  centers on another member of the Prescott family Lilith (Debbie Reynolds) living as a showgirl in St. Louis, only to discover that she has obtained through the donation of a wealthy admirer a stake for gold in California, which leads to her being followed by gambler and pseudo-admirer Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck) whose debonair manners woo many women, but he proves to need real feelings to eventually win over the suspicious Lilith.  The next section focuses on The Civil War and the experiences of young soldier Zeb (George Peppard) whose parents are Linus and Eve (Carroll Baker) of the earlier river story.  He, despite Eve's reluctance joins the war effort and becomes a hero after taking down a rebel deserter who infiltrated the ranks of the Union in order to assassinate high ranking officers, one of which is played brilliantly by John Wayne.  Next the section called The Railroads focuses on the invasion of the "iron horse" into the plains and its particular affect on the native populations, a group which wild man Jethro Stuart (Henry Fonda) attempts to protect, only to realize that he can only promise natives safety and trust for himself and not the entirety of the colonizing white man.  Finally, the film ends in a section titled The Outlaws in which Zeb who is now a marshall in a western town takes on an infamous enemy and outlaw named Charlie Gant (Eli Wallach) resulting in an intense and high-paced shootout on a moving train.  After Zeb slays Gant the film focuses on Lilith and the rest of the Rawlings family returning home, before the film takes to a visual flight from the desolate landscapes of the old west to the modernized and skyscraper heavy modern world of Los Angeles suggesting an evolution over a length of time, but one that is always tied to the endeavors of the early settlers.

I cannot get How The West Was Won out of my mind and it is almost entirely due to its unusual cinematic style.  The triptych style of Cinerama filmmaking allows for the narrative to unfold as something very much out of a story book, each character moving throughout the space from being minor almost incomprehensible characters in the background of shots to larger than life figures occupying the space at the center of the screen.  The sort of wide-angle/fisheye visual style that results form this particular filmmaking style also intensifies the emotions of characters within the narrative, Jimmy Stewarts fumbling suaveness heightened to a point of inescapable charm, or Debbie Reynolds's ethereal beauty consuming the entire space of a shot, making each scene melt behind her.  Similarly, it allows for an understanding of how truly consuming the landscapes of the west would have appeared to  the initial settlers, with plateaus and valleys seeming to stretch on into some eternal distance, again a result of the way the juxtaposed images create a new degree of depth.  What is also magical about this particular style is that it captures action and movement in a degree that arguably has the same effect as 3D or IMAX in that the images pop-out of their space when coming into the screen, although Cinerama has an extra layer, because it will also as easily pull a viewer into the centrifuge of a piece of action, the oncoming train scenes and the barrel rolling wagon scene serve as two opposing examples of the possibilities that this new depth allowed.  It was a brilliant choice to cast huge names in these roles, even in uncredited parts, such as Lee Van Cleef and Harry Dean Stanton, because their larger-than-life personas match the intensity and grandiose nature of the filmmaking.  Think here of John Wayne's presence, even if incredibly brief, he steps into the room occupies the space and seems so at ease that one forgets that he is only occupying one of three possible frames.  However, what proves to be the most rewarding element of this style is the moments when the films flicker differently if ever so briefly. My favorite one being a moment when Lilith is dancing and she appears to leap through a frame without touching the ground, these accidents, could be chastised as problematic, but in this context they add a layer of mythology and adoration to something that is decidedly larger than life.  Cinerama aimed at blowing the lid of of filmic possibilities, and in the same vein How The West Was Won aimed to do the same for the genre.

Key Scene:  While every moment is excellent, I would say to get a full feel for what is made better by the choice to use Cinerama then The Railroad section is perhaps the best example of all the elements working simultaneously.

While I watched this on the DVD version, I cannot begin to imagine how much better it would look on bluray, particularly since it offers the option to watch it is "smile box" format which aims to recreate the feeling of attending an original Cinerama screening of this work.  I mean look how much I had to minimize these pictures just to fit them into the blog format.

Being Normal Is Vastly Overrated: Halloweentown (1998)

I promised to give a vast study of horror films in my themed month for October and certainly intend to deliver on that promise, which helps to explain the next film on my tour, the 1998 Disney television movie Halloweentown, a pick by my girlfriend for the list and probably the biggest genre stretch on my list.  However, to say that it is a stretch is not an attempt to undermine the work in the slightest, there are moments in this film that I recall from my younger days as being genuinely scary and ones that could still be frightful to the right group of youngsters.  It was fun to revisit this film, as I only had fleeting memories of the plot and had no idea the film included the consummate Debbie Reynolds.  Of course the plot is a bit fractured, but one can expect such occurrences when, firstly the film is made for television and secondly it is directed towards a youth audience.  Many of the characters exist a plot devices and manage to have a very cursory place in the brief movie, only clocking in at a bit over eighty minutes.  The plot it does possess though is well-executed and contains some moments of comedic brilliance as well as a few genuine scares, all culminating in a great commentary on embracing ones uniqueness and accepting even against stalwart reasoning that some things are, in fact, magic.  Finally, the make-up and costuming in this film are stellar, particularly the various beasts and creatures shown throughout the film and one scene of exceptionally good stop motion animation.  It is probably going to be the only family friendly movie blogged about this month, and one of the few I have blogged about to date, but it is certainly a movie for persons of many age groups as its humor ranges from simple slapstick, to some clearly adult oriented humor.

The story in Halloweentown begins on Halloween, as should be little surprise as three kids look longingly at the festivities from inside their house.  The children include a young girl named Sophie (Emily Roeske), an incorrigible nerd named Dylan (Joey Zimmerman) and the oldest daughter and eccentric Marnie (Kimberly J. Brown).  Despite their constant pleas to partake in trick or treating, their mother Gwen, played by Judith Hoag (who is likely better known as April O'Neil in the live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film), denies their request.  She feels adamantly that they will be somehow ruined by the events of such a day.  Viewers are uncertain as to her concerns, until it is realized with the entrance of their grandmother Aggie (Debbie Reynolds), that they are related to an ancient family of witches.  Despite Aggie's less than subtle hints at their unique nature, Gwen denies them the right to explore this alternative life, instead wishing for them to have a "normal" life, despite being without a father figure.  Upon overhearing her mother and grandmother argue about her right to be a witch, Marnie follows her grandmother to Halloweentown via a flying bus to another world, only to be joined by Dylan and Sophie who share an equal curiosity.  Upon landing the group attempts to find their grandmother, but not before running into Calabar (Robin Thomas) Halloweentown's mayor.  He aids them in transportation to their grandmother's house via a taxi ride from a wise cracking skeleton named Benny, voiced by Rino Romano.  It is at this point that the children discover that trouble is afoot in Halloweentown and their grandmother is attempting to stop its occurrence.  Followed hot on the tail by an irate Gwen, the children and grandmother end up in a theater where it is revealed that Calabar is behind the evil in the town, freezing all who disobey him.  In the process of confronting Calabar, Gwen and Aggie are frozen by a spell and the children are left to complete Aggie's spell, which requires obtaining ingredients such as the hair of a werewolf and the sweat of a ghost.  They succeed in doing so and finally get the means to confront Calabar, and with a little help from a town local the group beats him and everything is returned to normal, with a suggestion that the three children, despite their mother's original denial, will indeed be trained in the dark arts.

The movies commentary is rather simple, as it should be considering that it is essentially directed at children.  However, the lesson taught is a very important one, especially for young adults and children. Instead of simply being a horror/comedy family film, Halloweentown posits something much greater in its suggestion that one should embrace uniqueness even if certain groups in society claim it to be, in this case, demonic.  Gwen represents a troubled single mother who holds falsely onto an idea that somehow by denying her heritage and identity that her children will exist in a better world, when it is clear that her disconnect and denial are only bringing more questions up within her children and arguably raising them to be social outcasts, as an early reaction with some of Marnie's friends suggests.  Aggie, in a maternal, and somewhat ancestral sense, claims this heritage and struggles desperately to keep her grandchildren practicing long after her passing.  The film also embraces a feminist ideology in that many of the spells require a group of women to unite together to make it more powerful, made all the more pertinent in that these women are of different ages.  The brief film also tackles notions of beauty and friendship, as occurs between Marnie and Luke (Phillip Van Dyke) a "dashing" young boy in Halloweentown who takes a liking to Marine, only to betray her, in what viewers come to discover was a Devil's bargain with Calaber to make him look better.  Essentially, Halloweentown contains a series of life lessons for young viewers and even a few reminders to parents on embracing their familial identity and heritage, even if it is not the mainstream idea of normal.  If anything the film denies denial.

Key Scene:  The obtaining of ingredients montage is quite fun and probably the funniest moment in the film.

I want to tell everybody to go out and buy this film, but I know it is for only a select few, not to mention that it is unusually expensive for what it is and, furthermore, it seems to sell out quickly after being stocked, at least that is what happened repeatedly at the Target near my house.