OVP: How the West Was Won (1963)

Film: How the West Was Won (1963)

Stars: Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn, Raymond Massey, Mickey Shaughnessy

Director: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, & George Marshall

Oscar History: 8 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Original Screenplay*, Film Editing*, Sound*, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Debbie Reynolds: click here to learn more about Ms. Reynolds (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We cannot do a month devoted to Debbie Reynolds without talking about one of the most famous scandals of the Classical Hollywood era, her relationship with Eddie Fisher.  Fisher was a major singer at the time, on-par with acts like Fabian and Elvis Presley in terms of his popularity, and even had his own hit television program.  The two were the equivalent of what today we'd think of as Zendaya & Tom Holland (or for you older people, Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston)-America's Sweethearts, the boy and girl next door who had married each other.  Their marriage was rocky when it wasn't on the front pages, though, with Fisher a serial philanderer, including an affair with Playboy Playmate Pat Sheehan.  But it was when he had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, the rare celebrity at the time on-par with Reynolds & Fisher, that the entire world paid attention.  Taylor, who had recently been widowed after the death of producer Mike Todd, was best friends with Reynolds, but still ended up in bed with her husband.  The scandal was sensational, one of the biggest celebrity news stories of the decade, and it had bizarre implications for all involved.  Reynolds, of course, was canonized as the scorned woman, and would have five movies come out in 1959 alone.  Elizabeth Taylor, the mistress, normally would've been the one to pay the price in the public's eye, but she was fine career-wise.  Within a year she was clutching her first Oscar, and a few years later would become the highest-paid actress in film history (and the centerpiece of an equally-famous affair) on the set of Cleopatra.  Instead it was Eddie Fisher who actually paid a career price, with his show being cancelled and his music career largely being destroyed.  It's hard to grasp now, but at the time Fisher was as big of a deal as Reynolds & Taylor were...now, he's nothing but an asterisk compared to the two women, who famously years after they'd both left Fisher reconciled and even starred in a film written by Fisher & Reynolds' daughter Carrie.

(Spoilers Ahead) During the wake of the scandal, Reynolds got a lot of career mileage and a number of hit movies, one of the biggest being today's film How the West Was Won.  The movie is less a cohesive story, and more a series of vignettes that tell the tale of how the American West began as well as how it ended, but the centerpiece around the film is Reynolds, who despite not getting top-billing (it went alphabetically for all of the main stars) is the movie's main character as Lilith Prescott, a woman dragged to the wilderness by her parents (Moorehead & Malden), and then when they die, she ends up making the west her home, marrying a scoundrel (Peck) who ends up making good, and eventually settling in the West with her nephew (Peppard) after most of the rest of her family dies.  In the meantime, we get pirates (led by Walter Brennan), the growth of the railroad, and, oh yeah, the Civil War.  

The movie is BIG, and it's not afraid of it.  There's a reason it has three directors and 17 (not a typo, I counted) Oscar-nominated actors on the call sheet.  But the thing is-it's not very good.  None of the actors are giving particularly good performances, and given who they are, that's a crime.  The best in the cast might be...Wallach, only because he gets to play a villain?  Honestly, even that feels like a stretch to me.  It's more a cavalcade of cameos, each seemingly doing John Ford a favor by appearing in a movie that would be such a big hit it'd be a weird case of it being one of their signature movies of the 1960's despite only Reynolds being in very much of the picture.  It deals a lot with cliche, and trying to shove what would've been a miniseries today into a couple of hours of celluloid.

The film won eight Academy Award nominations, and they're a mixed bag, but definitely not all bad.  The movie's screenplay win is abject silliness (it barely runs together as a plot!), and the same can be said for the editors, who probably got this nomination because it was a novel concept to have unrelated stories start to blend this way, but just because it's unique doesn't mean it's good.  The art direction & costume nominations are better, but less inspired.  The art direction feels more a tribute to the beauty of nature in the film, which is definitely on-display (also, because this is shot in Cinerama there's a lot more art direction than you'd normally expect), and the costumes are fine though nothing stands out in particular.  It's the last three nominations that worked best and felt most-earned.  The film's cinematography, capturing the beauty of the west (lots of this was shot off a studio lot), and it also works really well in conjunction with the stunt and effects teams (the Civil War & river rapids sequences, in particular, are the stuff that makes you wonder why it's taken so long to get a Stunts Oscar).  This also works for the sound work, with a lot of the action set pieces feeling really in-your-face, and it works well with the film's high musical quotient.  And of course Alfred Newman's score, generally considered to be his best work, is spectacularly grand.  All-in-all, there's a lot of elements of a classic here...if only the movie itself were any good.