How the West Was Won

I wandered through a used book/cd/dvd store this afternoon and found a copy of MGM’s 1963 epic How the West Was Won. This was one of the last movies with huge casts of big stars. It included 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, and Richard Widmark. To top it off it’s narrated by Spencer Tracy. It also had four directors — John Ford directed one storyline, Henry Hathaway directed three, and George Marshall directed one. A fourth, Richard Thorpe, directed the transitional sequences.

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It’s a long film at 162 minutes, but it was beautifully shot and had some very memorable scenes in it. The gunfight on the train at the end of the film is a sequence I still remember, and I haven’t seen the movie in 25 years.

For five bucks, this was a good buy.