Word: cinerama
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...West Was Won. Cinerama turns from picture postcards to epic storytelling with a spectacle worthy of its wide-screen wonders. Sodbusters, Indians, outlaws, good guys, and a thousand thundering buffaloes, all but shake the balcony off its hinges...
...West Was Won. Cinerama, that megalomyopic miracle, has come a long way since it took theater audiences over the top on its initial roller-coaster ride in 1952 and infected the nation's shopkeepers with an "o-rama" syndrome. Having won its spurs at Angkor Wat, it now tries an epic with a plot. No other screen could contain all the bang-banging, choo-chooing, galloping, whooping and thundering that three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall), 13 stars, ten costars, 12,000 extras, and 1,000 buffaloes have done in How the West Was Won. Even...
...follows the Prescott family West. They set out as sodbusters in 1839, marry, multiply, get killed off along the way in drownings, fights, and wars, until at the end the only Prescott left is an octogenarian Debbie Reynolds. Many of the juiciest roles are just a drop in the Cinerama bucket. Thelma Ritter is a snappish delight as a man-hungry wagon woman. Walter Brennan is deliciously vile as a river pirate who uses his vamp-eyed daughter (Starlet Brigid Bazlen) as bait to lure fur-laden Trapper Jimmy Stewart to a temporary downfall at the bottom of a cave...
...avalanche of buffaloes comes pounding down on a railroad camp. Cinerama's seven-channel stereophonic speaker system takes over with an earthquaking rumble that sweeps through the theater and seems to shake the balcony from its moorings. Cameras in pits recorded the scene, and the results include a moment of pure impressionist cinematography: the huge screen goes black except for a dancing fringe of buffalo hoofs silhouetted along the bottom...
...same the film has faults that somehow seem three times as regrettable on three screens as they would have on one. The story, now that Cinerama has at last got around to telling one, seems hardly worth telling-the lives and loves of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the gentle German philologists who collected the famous folk tales, are scarcely the stuff of which movies are made. Furthermore, the film's interpretations of the tales, though amusing, incline to be cute and design to be sentimental. And the Cinerama process, still full of half-squashed bugs, presents at least...