Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) and John Ford’s Wagonmaster (1950) are milestones in the history of the Western, although neither has been adequately evaluated. Recent estimates of Walsh’s oeuvre have concentrated on his crime films (such as The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, and White Heat), while only the noir-tinted Pursued (1947) among his Westerns has appealed to critics unappreciative of his Errol Flynn vehicles. Wagonmaster, meanwhile, has never achieved the status in Ford’s canon of Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946),The Searchers (1956), or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Andrew Sarris, writing in The New York Film Bulletin of 27 March 1961 (and quoting himself inThe John Ford Movie Mystery, 1975), may have speculated “that Wagonmaster is John Ford’s greatest film” (albeit electing “not to argue the point at this time”), but John Baxter’s The Cinema of John Ford (1971) virtually ignored it. It barely merits a page and a half in Andrew Sinclair’s 1979 Ford biography.
The critical neglect of The Big Trail, Wagonmaster and other “pioneer” Westerns stems, in part, from their sharing of an apparently simplistic, optimistic vision of the West, which became unfashionable at the start of the ’50s, just as Ford’s film made its bow and when, as Sarris has noted, “the critical community seemed attuned more to allegory than to action, and more to realism than to romance.” The era of Cold War and McCarthyism ushered in a new breed of psychologically complex Westerns focusing on tortured protagonists. Anticipated by Pursued, it was a trend popularized by Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and which– notwithstanding notwithstanding five exceptional Anthony Mann-James Stewart entries – reached its apotheosis inThe Searchers.
Sarris uses the phrase “false dawn” when he refers to Ben Johnson’s auspicious starring role as the unflappable hero of Wagonmaster, but it is equally applicable to the film itself – a poetic masterpiece that turned out to be less of a genre trailblazer than a requiem for the pioneer stories filmed through the 1930s and 1940s. By 1950, less pioneer films were emerging, and Western directors were turning more to the problems of community, the woman’s place, racism, and contemporary society. (Back in a supporting role in 1950’s Rio Grande, which completed Ford’s informal Cavalry trilogy and was his last leisurely Western, Johnson played Trooper Tyree, another amiable, philosophical horseman, but he was required to subvert his likeable persona as the 1950s wore on – in George Steven’s 1953 Shane, he plays a sneering saloon-bar thug, admittedly one who repents.)
The rolling Westward odyssey of a wagon trail of settlers, a mobile community, pushing back the frontiers of the wilderness, overcoming its natural hazards and “savage” inhabitants, searching for a promised land, was a genuine American experience that had lent itself ideally to an epic historical treatment by early Western directors. The form was inaugurated in the silent era by James Cruze, whose The Covered Wagon (1923) is a particularly ponderous Paramount “special” depicting – without establishing much of a sense of frontier history-in-the-making – a bunch of farmers heading for California. Cruze was a journeyman director who lacked Ford’s poetic-nostalgic instincts or D. W. Griffith’s facility with an epic canvas. The Covered Wagon is, however, blessed by Karl Brown’s sweeping pictorial photography of wagons crossing rivers and ploughing through mud and snow in an unyielding terrain, of buffalo hunts and Indian attacks. Together, these incidents provided the formula for The Big Trail and numerous imitations, recurring, too, in railroad and cattle-drive Westerns.
Inspired by the box-office success of The Covered Wagon, Paramount went into production with Irvin Willat’s North of ’36 (1924) and Cruze’s Pony Express (1926), while William Fox financed Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), a superior film about the transcontinental railroad – shot on extensive locations under impossible conditions in the Sierra Nevada – which earned the director his international reputation and Fox a fortune. Probably less innovative than The Covered Wagon, it was important for its broad theme of the building of a nation, ignored by Cruze, and the smaller one of George O’Brien’s railroad scout avenging his father’s murder by bogus Indians: this was the seed of The Big Trail’s Breck Coleman (John Wayne), who only hires on with the wagon train to avenge the killing of his mentor, Old Ben, by renegade whites, wagon boss Red Flake (Tyrone Power Sr.) and Lopez (Charles Stevens).
With the Western less popular by 1926, Ford’s 3 Bad Men proved less successful, no matter that it included remarkable footage of hundreds of wagons thundering across the prairie in the Dakota Gold Rush of 1876 (reminiscent of the land-rush sequence in King Baggot’s 1925 Tumbleweeds, starring W. S. Hart). The technical restrictions of the early sound era, meanwhile, brought problems for location shooting, and the historical Western epic became an endangered species. While the Western as a genre would be eclipsed in the 1930s by gangster films and contemporary urban dramas that grew respectively out of the Prohibition and the Depression, it would survive through the decade in the form of low-budget “B” productions, but not before a flurry of prestige Westerns had eased the transition. The films belonging to this cycle were Victor Fleming’s The Virginian (1929), King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930), Wesley Ruggles’ Cimarron(1931), and Edward L. Cahn’s Law and Order (1932), the latter, in its gritty retelling of the Wyatt Earp story, reminiscent of Hart’s realistic Westerns. The best was The Big Trail, a more mature and fully realized pioneer saga in every way than The Covered Wagon.
In 1929, Walsh had made In Old Arizona, the first Western talkie shot on location and a film expanded from two reels to five at the behest of the Fox executives. Despite losing an eye in an accident during production, Walsh was the obvious choice to make Fox’s next Western spectacular. The Big Trail originated in a silent Western script called The Oregon Trail, passed by Ford, who wasn’t satisfied with the writing, to Walsh, along with his choice of lead, Marion Morrison. (The screenplay is credited to Jack Peabody, Marie Boyle, Florence Postal; story by Hal G. Evarts and Walsh.)
Still unknown after appearing in or assisting as a prop man on ten films, Morrison was made to grow his hair long by Walsh, who changed the actor’s name to John Wayne and that of the film toThe Big Trail. “I selected Wayne,” the director is quoted in Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness, “primarily because he is a real pioneer type, but most of all because he can start over any trail and finish. The Big Trail means that everyone who goes over it while the cameras record will go through just as many hardships as the pioneers of 100 years ago encountered.”
He had noticed Wayne carrying props on the set of the 1930 crime comedy Born Reckless, directed by Ford and Andrew Bennison, and offered him the part of Breck Coleman when Gary Cooper (who wouldn’t work with Walsh until Distant Drums in 1951) turned it down. Wayne dutifully took lessons in knife throwing for the role, but resented the fancy buckskins (a hangover from the silent era) the wardrobe department dressed him in, and the producers’ insistence that he take lessons from the Fox sound coach, Lumsden Hare, in speaking like an Englishman. Instead, he used, with Walsh’s approval, his normal speaking voice.
Brownlow has noted how the film was partly a response to President Hoover’s request “for universal observance of the march of the pioneers from Independence, Missouri, on 10 April 1830…and, appropriately, on 10 April 1930, a bugle call set in motion a long line of specially constructed prairie schooners.” Shot in seven states, “from the blistering heat of the desert at Yuma, to the stinging blizzards of the Teton Pass,” in Fox Grandeur 70mm as well as 35mm, and in French and German language versions, The Big Trail was a massive logistical operation. As Wayne recalled, it also created a small township – Moran, Wyoming – which still exists today: even in its recreation of pioneer events, the film production was augmenting the frontier.
The Big Trail opens on a pair of titles that prepare us for the visually rich history lesson that will unfold and is “Dedicated to: The men and women who planted civilization in the wilderness and courage in the blood of their children…Gathered from the North, the South and East, they assemble on the bank of the Mississippi for the conquest of the West.” Titles also appear at the end of various episodes, usually after a major hardship has been conquered. Initially reluctant to “play wet nurse to a bunch of pilgrims,” Breck later becomes the instrument of Manifest Destiny when, during the snowstorm that nearly turns the wagons back, he spurs the pilgrims on: “We’re blazing a trail that started in England. Nothing can stop us – we’re building a nation.”
Presumably this acknowledgment of the pioneers’ English origins is a reason why the Fox executives wanted Wayne to speak like an Englishman (another might be exportability), whereas, in fact, the buckskinned Breck is a primitive. When, at the start of the film, he rides into the pioneers’ Mississippi encampment and greets his fellow scouts, Zeke (Marshall) and Windy Bill (Russ Powell), it’s revealed that he has materialized straight from nature: “He come from the plains, the mountains, where he lived with the Indians. He can throw a knife in the heart from twenty feet. He knows everything.” Here, then, is the first incarnation of Wayne as a noble savage beyond every law except that of his own making (like Stagecoach’s Ringo Kid, The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards, and Liberty Valance’s Tom Doniphon).
Stagecoach is generally cited as the film that made Wayne a star (as announced by Ford’s dollying close-up introducing him in that film), coming as it did after his nine-year apprenticeship in “B” Westerns during the 1930s. Wayne was unfortunate that The Big Trail’s commercial failure contributed to the “A” Western’s temporary demise; this was partly attributable to the $4 million budget for the three versions, and inadequate pre-production that enabled MGM to release Billy the Kid before Walsh had completed his five-month shoot, as well as the theatres’ inability to adapt to the widescreen format. Nonetheless, the characteristics of his monolithic screen persona are all visible in the film. David Thomson suggests in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that, in Red River (1948), Howard Hawks “was the first to see the slit-eyed, obdurate side to Wayne’s character,” but consider the scene in which Breck ruefully thwacks his knife into a wooden post and contemplates (in the film’s only flashback) his discovery of Old Ben’s corpse and the revenge he will wreak on Flake. Walsh closes in on Breck’s narrowed gaze and dark thoughts. Two hours later, he throws the same knife into Flake. Like fellow avengers Ringo, Tom Dunson (Red River), and Ethan, Breck is obsessively driven. (Like other Wayne heroes, he is also old beyond his years, and so the callow pioneer Dave Cameron, not much younger, is “son” to him.)
Breck also shares the romanticism of the young Tom Doniphon in Liberty Valance. Mistakenly kissing Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill wore no makeup in accordance with Walsh’s quest for realism) on the lips while she’s waiting to join her brother on the wagon train, Breck initially pursues her to apologize, then for love. He finally wins her with talk of spring (cueing a soupy melody in a score otherwise admirable for its sparing use of music and brilliant sound effects) on the prairie and “laying out there ‘neath a blanket of stars.” The prissy Ruth – also pursued by the smooth-talking Southern thimblerig Bill Thorpe (Ian Keith) in a pre-echo of the Lucy Mallory/Hatfield relationship in Stagecoach – succumbs to the rough-hewn, nature-loving scout rather than to the corrupt urban predator.
Thorpe, who’s in league with Flake and tries to kill Breck, fails to seduce Ruth with the lure of a Louisiana plantation that he patently doesn’t own. Ringo and Wagonmaster’s Travis Blue (Ben Johnson, who, like Wayne, wears workman’s suspenders) have a similarly “settling” influence on, respectively, Dallas (Claire Trevor) and Denver (Joanne Dru) – golden-hearted Western whores with big-city names who are thus “saved” by the “natural” Fordian hero. Travis (like Ringo, he may be an outlaw, but one untainted by society) even gives Denver a pair of stout walking boots to replace her frowzy high-heeled slippers in one symbolic moment on the wagon trail. At the end, like Ringo and Dallas, they are finally “safe from the blessings of civilization” even though the suggestion that they will settle – in Travis’s dreamed of valley – will be helping to create it.
By the end of The Big Trail, Breck and Ruth, too, have found their little pocket of the wilderness to civilize: as they embrace beside a giant redwood, the camera crames away from them into the leaves. The film’s accomplishment, however, resides in the odyssey that has led them to this conclusion, one magnificently photographed by Arthur Edeson and Lucien Andriot. Walsh and his cinematographers bring a painterly quality to the images, sometimes astonishing in their detail. In the long preamble to the journey, set on the banks of the Mississippi (where the train awaits a linkup with the riverboat bringing Ruth, Thorpe and other voyagers transferring to the prairie schooners), the camera plays around foregrounded groups of figures in front of their wagons, or on the edge of town: the grizzled scouts lounging outside the trading post; old and young frontierswomen washing their hair; Breck and a gang of admiring boys. Behind them, in what at first seems like a painted backdrop until it ripples into life, are ranks of wagons, moving hither and thither, and “friendly” teepees by the waterside. Instead of leading the train out with the first wagon, the camera meanwhile “remains” in camp as the flotilla – spread across the screen, not in the customary single file – appears to recede on the horizon. Walsh simply observes, like a documentarist, and the effect created is one of a Western newsreel.
Once on the trail, however, the film acquires a rhythmic ebb and flow as each obstacle is surmounted, only to be replaced by another. The river crossing and descent down the cliff wall, in which many wagons are wrecked in the current or splinter on the rocks, were genuinely dangerous incidents in the filming, on which Walsh kept his cameras trained. (There’s a revealing still of Walsh pondering the problems of the cliff sequence in The War, the West and the Wilderness.) The images of the wagons pulling through the mud in a lightning storm or heaving through the snow are virtually vérité. In this way, the film’s own arduous production was redolent of the history it was recreating.
Unlike Vidor on Billy the Kid, however, Walsh resisted excessive use of panoramic shots, superb through the vistas of acres of grazing buffalo are (possibly stock footage). Intimate close-ups serve to personalize the journey and keep The Big Trail on a fictional level: a victim of the desert being rolled up in a blanket coffin; bleached bones lying on the desert; a doll and a mourning dog left by the graves of the pioneers killed by the Indians; the birth of a child tenderly echoed by quick cuts to newborn foals, pups, kittens and suckling pigs; the felling of trees; a butterfly flickering across Ruth’s path as Breck returns to her. Leisurely in the Fordian manner (Walsh will later opt for speed, action and terseness), The Big Trail has time for some gentle (occasionally clumsy) humor: the Italian émigré Gussie (El Brendel) up to his neck in a pool of mud but still apparently mounted on his donkey; the Indians trying to buy Ruth with some ponies. Finally, not the least of the film’s pleasures, three years into the cinema’s technological revolution, are audible: barking dogs, howling winds, and earthy, unstylized dialogue. More than any other Western epic of 1929-1932, the trailblazing The Big Trail was a film of true girth and true grit.
The prestige Western returned in the late 1930s as the real West receded in the past and improved sound techniques liberated the boom mike for extensive location work. Meanwhile, the war in Europe conferred a new status on a genre uniquely American: Westerns like 1939’sDodge City and Destry Rides Again (with its polyglot cast headed by Marlene Dietrich) had a propagandist message in which the frontier represented a world of community, progress, and people working together for a common good; Destry, which calls James Stewart’s pacifist lawman to action, now seems like an anti-isolationist message, with America posited as Europe’s savior; there’s a similar theme in DeMille’s Union Pacific, released the same year. Led by Stagecoach, other westerns of 1939-40 include Jesse James, Frontier Marshal, Santa Fe Trail, The Westerner, Virginia City, The Return of Frank James, Arizona, and When the Daltons Rode, but this remarkable period was followed by a dearth until a more refined type of Western emerged after the war.
After the innovative, involving Stagecoach and Drums Along the Mohawk (a color “Eastern” set in the Revolutionary War era which shows settlers mobilizing in upstate New York), both released in 1939, Ford did not make another Western until My Darling Clementine (1946), his “classical” version of the Wyatt Earp myth, which extended – indeed, ritualized – his use of Monument Valley and the redeemer hero (Henry Fonda’s Wyatt), “celebrating the promise of the epic-heroic figure and the utopian community.”
During the late 1940s, he directed his cavalry trilogy – Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande, and Three Godfathers (1948), a remake of the silent Marked Men (1920) and a weak biblical allegory, and finally Wagonmaster. Small as epics go,Wagonmaster was also Ford’s last “old-fashioned” Western – in the mode of Tumbleweeds andThe Big Trail – in which pictorialism and visual storytelling are more important than psychology and sociology. In its depiction of a Mormon wagon train’s journey from Crystal City to the promised land of the San Juan River, on which they encounter the two young horse traders, Travis and Sandy (Harry Carey Jr.), who lead them there, the stranded showfolk, the evil Cleggs, and nomadic Navajos – most of them introduced in the pre-credit sequence – Wagonmasternonetheless actually backgrounds the narrative action in favour of rhythm and imagery.
Ford lyricizes the journey through the poetry-in-motion contained in the mise en scène and the folk songs of the Sons of the Pioneers. It was this scant regard for story that led Lindsay Anderson to describe Wagonmaster as an “avant-garde Western”. He added: “Ford often abandons his narrative completely, to dwell on the wide and airy vistas, on riders and wagons overcoming the most formidable natural obstacles, on bowed and weary figures stumbling persistently through the dust.” Two images in Wagonmaster, in particular, are among Ford’s greatest: the women, holding their skirts, trudging in clouds of dust beside the wagons, from which Ford cuts to their undainty boots (contrasted in the ritual dance by the river) and the rolling wheels, while their endurance and progress is harmonized by the throbbing lyrics on the soundtrack: “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ … goin’ West, goin’ West, goin’ West….”
For all the image-making and surface detail of The Big Trail, it needed Ford to romanticize this similar history, and to poeticize the narrative conflicts between Mormons and Cleggs, urban worldliness (Denver, slouched in the back of the wagon puffing on a cigarette) and rural wisdom (Travis leading his horse into the river for a bath, a baptismal rite in which Denver, having wastefully drenched him in bathwater earlier on, also partakes – upstream).
That we are watching history unfold again is made apparent in the Sons of the Pioneers lyric, “A hundred years have come and gone since 1849, but the ghostly wagons rolling West are ever brought to mind.” As the shooting of The Big Trail celebrated the centenary of the Independence pioneers, so Wagonmaster celebrates the centenary of this Mormon trek, the dislocating words of the song (reminding us the film was shot in 1949) reinforce the myth.
Ford had become attached to the Mormons who had served as his cavalrymen in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and became interested in telling their story because he was impressed by their work ethic, their pride, and their apparent self-sufficiency. The Mormons in Wagonmaster, they aren’t quite self-sufficient, the director ruefully suggests, since Travis must make the sacrifice (his pacifism) for the common good made by most Ford heroes by killing the Cleggs, but then he is the instrument which the Elder Wiggs (Ward Bond) knew the Lord would provide: “I knowed you’d lend Him a hand, son!”, he says when Travis and Sandy join the wagon train. Ford wrote the story himself (the only time he would do this after 1930), his son Pat Ford and Frank Nugent the screenplay. The latter was published as one of the RKO Classic Screenplay Series (1978), and includes a number of expository dialogue scenes that never made it to the screen. That Ford was insistent on telling his story with images rather than words is apparent from Nugent’s letter to Anderson in 1953: “That was one picture in which we did not work at all closely. He read our treatment…and then did not enter the scene again until we turned in the complete first draft. His script cutting – especially of dialogue – was rather harsh.” Nugent recalled a similar experience on She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (“Ford detests exposition”), but a happier one on The Quiet Man.
Ford’s loving picture of the West was to become his favorite Western, replacing The Iron Horse. “Wagonmaster came closest to what I had hoped to achieve,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. It is “the purest and simplest Western I have made,” he told Bertrand Tavernier. But the public liked it less – its estimated domestic box-office gross of $1 million was less than half what was made by each of the cavalry film and 3 Godfathers–it was his weakest performer since The Fugitive(1947). And its legacy was small. By 1950, Ford was out of step with the new kind of Western being made by Mann, Henry King (The Gunfighter, 1950), Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, 1950), and William Wellman (Across the Wide Missouri, 1951). The future belonged to Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953) and The Man from Laramie (1955), High Noon, Shane, Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952) and Johnny Guitar (1954).
And yet, if Wagonmaster’s pans and long shots of rolling wagons seemed out of sync with the darker sensibility of these later films, there are still sequences in the film that look forward to his own most anguished work, The Searchers. Most notable is the incursion of Shiloh Clegg and his four half-witted, sons – evil incarnate (“There are no moral shadings,” wrote Sarris) – of the Mormons’ celebratory dance. In The Searchers, it is the hero, Ethan, who is permitted to disrupt one of the folk rituals – in this case Martha and Aaron’s burials – by which Ford set so much store. Like the Cleggs, Ethan interrupts a dance, too, at Laurie Jorgensen’s wedding. There is the suggestion, therefore, that even in Wagonmaster, Ford’s moral universe is not as secure as it seems.
Having said that, the film ends with Travis throwing away his gun and a fade into a moonlit shot of a virgin valley, beautifully captured by Bert Glennon’s glimmering cinematography. Ford closed with a medley of shots recapitulating some of the happier moments from the journey, and a final image of a colt leading a wagon onto firm ground after fording a river. Perhaps even these joyful images were too upbeat and life-enhancing for an audience more accustomed to associating black-and-white movies with film noir? In fact, Wagonmaster’s disappointing box office was more attributable to Ford’s deliberate non-use of stars, surely the correct artistic decision: the obvious choice to play Travis, John Wayne, would have made it harder for Ford to maintain the quiet, lyrical mode, in which the wagons are the real stars.
Nostalgic, but not tinged with the regret that accompanied or predicted the passing of the West inShe Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Ford’s 1960’s Westerns, Wagonmaster was less a film of its time than The Big Trail, although it fulfils the promise of that more naïve earlier epic, and replaces its rawness with moments of epiphany. Its lineage was that of W. S. Hart and Ford’s collaborations with Harry Carey thirty years before.
Unpublished, 1988
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