\u201cHow the West Was Won\u201d is a Western extravaganza with enough Hollywood stars for five films.\u00a0 It consists of five vignettes that are strung together out of the fortunes of a family from the East caught up in the settling of the western frontier.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n Karl Malden is Zebulon Prescott, a farmer in New York State who becomes disgusted with his rocky unproductive land and sells it to go west with his wife Rebecca, (Agnes Moorehead) and two daughters Eve (Caroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds).\u00a0 Along the way they meet fur trapper Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart) who saves them from some nefarious river pirates led by Col. Jeb Hawkins (Walter Brennan) but finally Zebulon and Rebecca are killed going over the rapids on their raft and Rawlings reluctantly gives up his wandering ways to marry Eve and start a farm by the river.<\/p>\n In the next vignette, Lilith has become a show girl and does a song and dance act in St. Louis.\u00a0 A messenger informs her that a former admirer has left her a gold mine in California.\u00a0 She joins another woman Agatha Clegg (Thelma Ritter) in a wagon train headed west.<\/p>\n When gambler\/fortune hunter Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck) overhears her good fortune, he follows her to California.\u00a0 At first reluctantly and then gratefully, after he saves her life during an Indian attack, Lilith partners with Cleve.<\/p>\n But when they get to California, they discover that Lilith\u2019s gold mine is played out.\u00a0 Cleve leaves Lilith in the lurch to pursue his gambler\u2019s life.\u00a0 She receives a proposal of marriage from wealthy rancher Roger Morgan (Robert Preston) but rejects him because she doesn\u2019t want a conventional life as a wife and mother.\u00a0 But when Cleve overhears Lilith singing on a river boat, he realizes that they will both be happiest if they marry and combine their two adventurous lives together into a partnership.\u00a0 And they do.<\/p>\n In the next story the Civil War has begun.\u00a0 To dramatize this we even have a brief look at Raymond Massey portraying Abraham Lincoln.\u00a0 Eve\u2019s son, Zeb Rawlings (George Peppard) wants to follow his father into battle on the side of the Union.\u00a0 Eve tearfully says goodbye and Zeb is swept along by the tides of war.<\/p>\n During this episode he manages to save General Grant (Harry Morgan) and General Sherman (John Wayne) from a Confederate soldier who was trying to convince Zeb to desert.\u00a0 After the war Zeb returns home to find that both his parents are dead.\u00a0 He leaves the farm to his brother and heads west as a cavalry soldier.<\/p>\n In the next vignette Zeb is a cavalry officer tasked with helping the Union Pacific Railroad cross the Great Plains.\u00a0 The ruthless railroad boss Mike King (Richard Widmark) is angering the Indian tribes by laying down the track through the Indian hunting grounds.\u00a0 Zeb has help from buffalo hunter Jethro Stuart (Henry Fonda), an old friend of his father.<\/p>\n They convince the Indians to accept the latest route but finally when settlers start filling up the area the Indians revolt and we watch as they stampede a herd of buffalo through the railroad worksite.\u00a0 Disgusted with the railroad\u2019 treachery, Zeb and Jethro leave for happier circumstances farther west.<\/p>\n In the last episode, we see Lilith as an old woman in San Francisco.\u00a0 Cleve has died and an auction is proceeding to liquidate their estate to pay off debts.\u00a0 All that will remain will be a ranch in Arizona that she hopes to retire to with her nephew Zeb Rawlings and his wife Julie (Carolyn Jones) and children.<\/p>\n Zeb was a sheriff and while meeting his aunt at the train in Arizona he catches sight of an outlaw Charlie Grant (Eli Wallach) that Zeb put in prison years ago.\u00a0 He figures out that Grant means to rob the train when the next gold shipment is aboard.\u00a0 Zeb recruits his old friend Marshal Lou Ramsey (Lee J. Cobb) to go with him to guard the train.<\/p>\n The train robbery scene involves Grant and eight or ten of his men boarding the train and battling Zeb and Lou as they fight them off with rifles and hand guns.\u00a0 In the ensuing violence the train is battered to pieces and finally derails in catastrophic fashion but Zeb puts a final bullet in Charlie Grant.\u00a0 Then he returns to take up a peaceful life as rancher with his family.<\/p>\n The movie ends with a panoramic view of California including Los Angeles freeways and the golden Gate Bridge with a stirring speech by the narrator (Spencer Tracy) about the epic adventure that was the taming of the west.<\/p>\n So, you get the picture.\u00a0 This is an extravaganza.\u00a0 They put every actor they had into it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve even left out a few other for the sake of brevity.\u00a0 So, what do I think?\u00a0 As far as spectacle, the scene of the raft on the rapids and the buffalo stampede are exciting and in the wide screen of a theater must have been fun for the audience.\u00a0 Some of the landscapes are truly beautiful.\u00a0 The plot is very straightforward.\u00a0 It covers the various stages of the westward expansion of the United States with a personal story.\u00a0 The performances vary from competent to perfunctory.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t high drama.\u00a0 I would restrict my recommendation to saying if you\u2019re in the mood for an epic western movie (and you have three hours to spare) this movie would be fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cHow the West Was Won\u201d is a Western extravaganza with enough Hollywood stars for five films.\u00a0 It consists of five vignettes that are strung together<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[998,3611,3610,2829,1228,3218,3176,3562,43,38,1355,3612,3434,97],"class_list":["post-18403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-debbie-reynolds","tag-george-peppard","tag-gregory-peck","tag-henry-fonda","tag-jimmy-stewart","tag-john-wayne","tag-karl-malden","tag-lee-j-cobb","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-robert-preston","tag-walter-brennan","tag-westerns"],"yoast_head":"\n