The Big Trail

[W. Gray]

Sometime ago, I mentioned, I think, the 1930 movie, The Big Trail starring John Wayne was the first wide screen and first 70 mm production to come out of Hollywood.

It was actually released in 70mm and 35mm formats.

I just recently obtained a DVD of the 70 mm wide screen version and it is sharp. The acting is typical of the time and features Tyrone Power Sr as the heavy.

The movie was produced by Fox pictures about five years before the company merged with Twentieth Century pictures.

Each action scene without lines was filmed twice, once in Fox Grandeur, the 70 mm widescreen process and once in 35 mm standard format.

The result was that each scene was not exactly the same but differed somewhat in both versions. There was no way at the time to shoot once and transfer the result to different formats.

Fox, at the same time, shot three foreign language versions with different stars requiring three more versions of each speaking scene in Spanish, Italian, and German. There were no dubbing capabilities at the time. The foreign version, though, was not released in widescreen.

John Wayne was 23 and the movie flopped because of the depression sending him back to the minors until Stagecoach came along several years later.

The 70 mm widescreen version flopped because only theaters in L.A. and N.Y. had enough money to construct a big screen. It would be another 23 years before wide screen started becoming a standard.

Fox lost quite a bit of money on the production which staggers the imagination even for the time.

There were 93 principal actors and 20,000 extras in the black and white production.

725 Indians from five different tribes played the marauding redskins.

185 wagons, 1,800 bovines, 1,400 horses, 500 buffalo, and 700 chickens, pigs, and dogs took part.

The production company actually moved across 4,300 miles of landscape during filming.

The lens that shot the wide screen version was the same lens that photographed The Robe in 1953, the first
CinemaScope picture. Fox Grandeur was renamed CinemaScope.

Part of the movie house transformation problem in 1930 was that owners needed to not only widen and heighten their screens they had to install new projectors.

When The Robe came along, theater owners only had to widen their screens and did not have to have new projectors. The production company figured out how to transfer widescreen to 35mm using an anamorphic lens on the old projectors.