Western Watch: How The West Was Won (1962)

Watched:  02/02/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Directors:  John Ford - Henry Hathaway - George Marshall

The word that leaps to mind watching How The West Was Won (1962) is "spectacle".  Really, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything else quite like it.  

It's a movie with an overture and intermission and exit music.  Its runtime is almost three hours.  There are three big directors!

It was shot for Cinerama - one of two movies ever shot in the format.  It's intended to be a nigh-immersive experience, with three sync'd 35mm projectors running in unison against a curved screen that surrounds you at about 140 degrees.  

The movie is actually a bit hard to watch even on a modern, large TV as the proportions of the film are so wide, it's letterboxed to just over half of a 16x9 TV's height.  And because they always intended for the movie to be seen on a movie screen and made a bit in reaction to the growing power of television, the film is positively allergic to close-ups.  Also...  this is the West, dammit.  And we're going to show you the majesty of everything from Ohio to San Francisco in terms meant to awe your eyeballs out of your skull.  So if you don't mind squinting to see how is on the screen, this is the movie for you.

The vibe is not dissimilar to when I'd go to the IMAX as a kid to see whatever was on, and it was usually some "AMERICA!" celebration, with a sweeping score and terrific vistas.  And I would actually pay to see this at the IMAX if they played it, just to see it as intended on a screen that could handle it.

The movie is also insanely full of names from the period - the closest I can point to in the modern era would be Avengers: Endgame.  Everyone from Jimmy Stewart and Karl Malden to John Wayne to Debbie Reynolds to Agnes Moorehead.  Gregory Peck.  Henry Fonda.  Eli Wallach.  Andy Devine.  Carolyn Jones.  Lee J. Cobb.  Carroll Baker.   Richard Widmark.  Robert Preston.  George Peppard is in a surprising amount of the movie.

The story is a sweeping epic from the 1830's right up to 1890 or so, following generations of the Prescott family as they move from the East to the West, get embroiled in the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the building of the railroads and the taming of the lawlessness of the frontier.  It's 100% mythmaking, a polished version of history that embraces the violence and casual racism of the actual westward expansion as a virtue of the period in which it was made. 

It's kind of a White Nationalist myth, depending on how you want to look at it.  Black people don't exist in this movie except as something vaguely of interest off-screen in the Abraham Lincoln scene.  Hispanics are exclusively seen as the defeated Mexican Army in maybe two shots, and Native Americans are shown mostly impeding progress and depicted as inscrutable savages.  There are no Chinese or Japanese immigrants in California or eastward.  And while I get that the movie can't possibly capture the scope of every single thing, you know, just acknowledging that Black and Hispanic people were there, and that maybe White people didn't save the land from Native Americans - definitely the implication - would be nice.  

But this is the sort of thing that gets politicians all full of steam, I suppose - pointing out the fucking obvious about how goofy this version of reality is, even as a movie, that people want to use it as a bible for how America happened.  What's wild is that it feels like movie-by-movie in this era, Hollywood was doing marginally better by this point, and within just a few years the Italians would travel to Spain and make fantasy movies about the American West that resonated better than this movie.  But, bottom line, this is the tip of the tip of the iceberg for the history of the West, with zero depth.  It's the Cliff's Notes of the Cliff's Notes.  But...  We're just making a spectacle here, and there's not a lot inherently wrong with the characters shown or their stories.  It's a question of what isn't shown that makes it feel like a white suburban high school rendition of Oklahoma! more than an historical review.

Also, man, they just couldn't not end the movie with a big, dumb, unearned shoot-out.  But nice stunt work!

Look, I am not going to kick this movie too hard - it's a product of its time, and Lord knows what compromises were made to get it to the screen.  There's probably a book's worth of discussion you could really get into here, including the impact of using a galaxy of stars to tell this story.  But that's for someone else.

I now accidentally own a copy as it came with The Wild Bunch and The Searchers - movies with their own issues, but the set was like $12 and I wanted The Searchers on BluRay.    

Fun fact:  We're now as far away from the release of How The West Was Fun (1994), as How The West Was Fun* was from the release of How The West Was Won (1962).  

*We sold the shit out of Mary-Kate and Ashley videos at Camelot Records when I worked there between 1996-1997