Pioneering in the Wide West: Fox Grandeur and The Big Trail (1930)
In the latter years of the American silent era, epic historical Westerns such as The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924) enjoyed a level of popular success and critical acclaim hitherto unseen in the genre. At first glance, Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930)—a wagon train spectacular, of...
Sábháilte in:
| Foilsithe in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/erea, |
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| Príomhchruthaitheoir: | |
| Formáid: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Teanga: | Anglais |
| Foilsithe / Cruthaithe: |
E-rea
2026
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| Ábhair: | |
| Rochtain ar líne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Achoimre: | In the latter years of the American silent era, epic historical Westerns such as The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924) enjoyed a level of popular success and critical acclaim hitherto unseen in the genre. At first glance, Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930)—a wagon train spectacular, of nineteenth-century pioneers “making” a nation in the West—might be expected to have followed suit. Arguably the most ambitious epic Western yet, it was to introduce not only sound to a celebrated American story but also a new leading man in John Wayne and an unprecedented sense of scale via Fox’s proprietary Grandeur 70mm widescreen system. Yet, rather than leading to a resplendent new era of lavish epic Western filmmaking, in most accounts, its release instead signals the end of its heyday. It became a notorious flop, and the A-Western fell into a steep decline for several years, before returning in a matured “classical” form at the end of the 1930s. This article approaches The Big Trail as both an untimely release and a timely one, acclaimed in the decades since for some of the very reasons for its original struggles. It explores how, with the transition to sound just about completed and the Great Depression taking hold, the Grandeur epic that has come to be held in such regard by many critics since in fact went largely unseen. |
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