An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a solid cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, first of all, it was a pretty badass title, that’s for sure, and it was also a really ambitious Western epic. Indeed, it was involving no less than 4 directors (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, Richard Thorpe). It was also one of the very few fictional features shot in Cinerama which was a short-lived widescreen process involving a complicated three synchronized cameras and the projecting of the actual film on a huge deeply curved screen. Obviously, I didn’t see in its original format and, if you watch it nowadays, since it has been formatted so you can watch it on a regular TV, there is nothing really peculiar about it except that it was with a very widescreen aspect ratio. Anyway, from an historical point of view, this movie was still pretty neat since you get to see 60 years of the US history in a fairly accurate way. However, even if their approach was fairly neutral, the tone was just too light for me. Seriously, it was even borderline cheesy at some point. Concerning the cast, of course, there was the issue that James Stewart was at least 20 years too old to play his part and was therefore really miscast (Stewart did acknowledge this fact himself). At least, the rest of the cast was really neat and was actually pretty much spot-on (James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Karl Malden, George Peppard, Eli Wallach, Russ Tamblyn). Unfortunately, I didn’t care much for any of these characters though. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.