Cinema: Buffalorama

How the 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 the troublesome match-lines where the images from three projectors come together—the process’s persistent defect—have been masked by photographers clever at lining up the joinings with telegraph poles, cabin corners and lonesome pines.

In a three-generation nutshell, West 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. Raymond Massey is, for what seems like the four-score-and-tenth time, Abraham Lincoln. Gregory Peck is a tinhorn gambler, Robert Preston a roaring wagon master, Henry Fonda a walrus-mustached buffalo hunter.

West has as many spectacles as stars, and some of them are lollapaloozas:

> An 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.

>When the raft carrying the Prescotts downriver hits the rapids, the screen is awash with churning water, boiling spray. Faster and faster it goes, swooping like a surfboard, with all hands trying vainly to keep trunks, kettles, tent, and a sick boy from flying into the foam as the raft begins to break apart.

> Instead of the usual deserted Main Street setting, West’s showdown shooting match takes place on a careening runaway train loaded with gold, bandits and George Peppard. When the whole thing cracks up at the end of the scene in a magnificent melange of flying bodies, hurtling timbers, exploding machinery and snapping chains, the audience’s wet palms explode in a burst of spontaneous applause.

>The viewer is stereophonically there at the Battle of Shiloh, with charging infantry, rearing horses, rumbling guns. Afterward, Peppard, thirsty, dazed and lost, is drinking water from a stream when he encounters a grizzled young Rebel (Russ Tamblyn). “Tastes funny?” asks Tamblyn slyly. Just then a rocket flash reveals the reason: the water is pink with blood.

As a final, visual commentary of its own, West offers an air view, not through an eagle’s eye but a helicopter’s, of what the winners won. Looking directly down on a field of Los Angeles cloverleafs, with speeding cars darting 30 ways into the smog, the camera asks a searching, unanswered question. Then the screen is filled with the silver-blue Pacific, there being no more West to win.