--- title: "How the West Was Won" year: 1962 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/how-the-west-was-won" fi1m_score: 62 critics_score: 58 critics_reviews: 6 published: "2026-09-20T04:14:20.638178+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T04:14:21.175276+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # How the West Was Won (1962) Directed by John Ford, George Marshall, Henry Hathaway · 2h 44m · MPA G · Western **Fi1m score: 62** · Critics 58 from 6 reviews *In a sentence:* Twelve stars, three directors and a screen so wide the straight lines bend > This Cinerama western follows one family across five chapters and 164 minutes, and it is more parade than film. But the train robbery is a proper set piece, and John Ford’s Civil War chapter shows what the rest might have been. ## Synopsis The 1830s. Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden) sells up in the east and takes his family west along the Erie Canal, bound for the Ohio River and land of their own. His elder daughter Eve (Carroll Baker) wants a farm and a husband; the younger, Lilith (Debbie Reynolds), wants a city and an audience. On the riverbank they meet Linus Rawlings (James Stewart), a fur trapper heading the other way to see the ocean, with no plans to be anybody’s husband. There are river pirates at a trading post, a raft on the Ohio and rapids the Prescotts cannot handle. Four more chapters follow the family across fifty years: a wagon train, the Civil War, the railroad and a train robbery. ## Review Three directors, four cinematographers and a dozen stars were assembled by producer Bernard Smith to tell the story of the American West through one family, the Prescotts, across five chapters and roughly fifty years. Henry Hathaway takes the rivers, the wagon train and the outlaws; John Ford takes the Civil War; George Marshall takes the railroad. James R. Webb and John Gay wrote it as a relay, each generation handing on to the next. The result runs 164 minutes and looks like nothing else, and about a third of it is worth the trouble. The rest is a parade, handsome and slow, with the family waving from the floats. The look is the reason it exists. It was shot in three-strip Cinerama, three cameras side by side making a picture more than twice as wide as it is tall, and Milton Krasner, Charles Lang, William H. Daniels and Joseph LaShelle fill that width with river, prairie and mountain. A raft drifts down the Ohio with wooded banks on both sides and sky in the middle. Wagons cross a plain that runs off the frame in either direction. Seen flat, the picture has two visible joins, and anything straight that crosses them, a railway line, a fence, a canal bank, bends slightly at each one. The actors are kept to the middle panel, and whenever two people talk the camera stands well back, as if it would rather be looking at the hills. Hathaway’s opening chapters set the pattern. James Stewart plays Linus Rawlings, a trapper, with his usual ease, and Carroll Baker’s Eve decides to marry him more or less on sight; Stewart is well into middle age and the film hopes we will not notice. Then Debbie Reynolds’s Lilith takes over for the wagon train, courted by Gregory Peck’s gambler Cleve Van Valen and Robert Preston’s wagon master Roger Morgan, who proposes marriage the way he might buy oxen. Reynolds sings a song to the tune of Greensleeves by the fire, and it is the chapter’s best minute. We were bored through most of the rest, and we can say why: Peck and Preston are given nothing to do but wait for her to choose, and the attack on the wagons that should be the climax arrives with less force than the buffalo do an hour later. Ford’s chapter is short, dark and different. George Peppard’s Zeb Rawlings goes to war and finds himself, on the night after Shiloh, near a campfire where John Wayne’s General Sherman is talking his exhausted commander out of quitting. Ford shoots it close and low, faces in lamplight, and for the length of the chapter the wide screen is used for people instead of scenery. It moved us more than the previous hour had, and we think that is because Ford is the only one of the three who lets a death slow the film down. Marshall’s railroad chapter has Henry Fonda as Jethro Stuart, a buffalo hunter who has seen what is coming, and a stampede through a railhead camp that is loud, long and impressive without ever being frightening. Hathaway returns for the outlaws, and here the film finally earns its width. Eli Wallach’s Charlie Gant, all grin and grievance, plans to rob a train; Lee J. Cobb’s Marshal Lou Ramsey would rather not be involved. The robbery becomes a running fight along a moving train, logs sliding off flatcars, wagons tearing loose, men going under the wheels, and Harold F. Kress cuts it fast and clean so that we always know which car we are on. We sat forward for the first time in two hours. Carolyn Jones, as Zeb’s wife Julie, is on hand mainly to be worried. Alfred Newman’s score is the film’s spine, a big open main theme for chorus and orchestra and a run of folk tunes arranged so that even the campfire songs sound like a procession. It plays under almost everything and it is often better than what it plays under. Walter Plunkett and Ron Talsky dress fifty years of change so that we can read the decade off Reynolds’s skirts; the men stay in buckskin and dust, which is about right. Ford’s own *The Searchers* (1956) covered less ground and said more about the same country. This one covers far more and says less, and it seems to know it, which is why it never stops moving. Watch it at home with the seams showing, go briskly through the wagon train, and do not hurry the train. *Fi1m score 62, published 20 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics land somewhere between admiration and impatience, with the balance tipping slightly towards admiration. The praise clusters on the spectacle: the three-strip Cinerama photography, the location work, the buffalo stampede and the outlaw train chase, and Alfred Newman’s score. John Ford’s Civil War episode is singled out more than once as the best thing in it, a small, poetic film inside a much larger and louder one, though Time Out prefers Hathaway’s section and finds Ford’s a survey of his own career. The reservations are about the story. Several reviews find the family narrative winding and episodic, the guest stars decorative, and the dramatic form too coarse for a subject that is really landscape and history. The spread is wide. The New Yorker is the lone outright dissenter, seeing the pioneers as comic bunglers and the whole as noise without historical insight, while the warmest notices come later, from critics assessing the restoration. ### Reviews we read (6) - **The New York Times**, Dave Kehr (80/100, inferred): The Blu-ray restoration highlights the film's pioneering three-strip Cinerama process and epic scope. John Ford's Civil War segment stands out as a poetic miniature and near-masterpiece within the larger narrative. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/movies/homevideo/09dvds.html) - **Empire**, Kim Newman (70/100, inferred): The film is a heroically overblown grand folly that follows one pioneer family's story through the winning of the West with an all-star cast and multiple directors. Redeemable moments stand out, especially John Ford’s Civil War episode. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/west-won-review/) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The epic Cinerama western spectacle benefits from its subject matter and delivers several memorable action sequences thanks to its three directors. Standouts include the buffalo stampede and the outlaw train chase. [Read](https://variety.com/1961/film/reviews/how-the-west-was-won-1200420172/) - **Sight and Sound**, Tim Lucas (60/100, inferred): The critic praises the breathtaking location cinematography and the magnificent 5.1 sound mix of Alfred Newman's score, while noting that the SmileBox presentation gimmick interferes with appreciation of the performances and storytelling. The film itself is described as having epic pretensions but being really just a Debbie Reynolds vehicle with a tediously winding narrative and guest stars that add little substance. [Read](http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4591) - **Time Out**, CPe (50/100, inferred): A vast, sprawling Western shot in the short-lived three-strip Cinerama process that chronicles the development of the American West through one family's adventures over three generations. Hathaway's sequence comes off best while Ford's Civil War section looks like a survey of his own career; the main problem is the impossibility of subjecting a film about landscape and history to the demands of such a coarse dramatic form. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/london/film/how-the-west-was-won-1962) - **The New Yorker**, Brendan Gill (20/100, inferred): The noisy, highly colored Cinerama epic depicts pioneers as comically inept bunglers whose mishaps drive the plot and spectacle. It prioritizes chaotic action over historical insight or coherent storytelling. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/04/06/bunglers) ## Details - **Director:** John Ford, George Marshall, Henry Hathaway - **Director:** John Ford, George Marshall, Henry Hathaway - **Writer:** John Gay, James R. Webb - **Cinematography:** Milton Krasner, Charles Lang, William H. Daniels, Joseph LaShelle - **Editor:** Harold F. Kress - **Music:** Alfred Newman - **Costume design:** Walter Plunkett, Ron Talsky - **Producer:** Bernard Smith - **Cast:** Carroll Baker as Eve Prescott Rawlings; Lee J. Cobb as Marshal Lou Ramsey; Henry Fonda as Jethro Stuart; Carolyn Jones as Julie Rawlings; Karl Malden as Zebulon Prescott; Gregory Peck as Cleve Van Valen; George Peppard as Zeb Rawlings; Robert Preston as Roger Morgan - **Runtime:** 2h 44m - **Certificate (MPA):** G - **Release (the US):** 20 February 1963 - **Genres:** Western - **Budget:** $15 million - **Box office:** $76,729 - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=updl0L4Tayc ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CZ, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, IT, LT, MX, NL, NO, NZ, PT, RO, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1964: Best Art Direction, Color (nominated); Best Cinematography, Color (nominated); Best Costume Design, Color (nominated); Best Original Score (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Film Editing (won); Best Sound (won); Best Writing, Original Screenplay (won) ## If you liked this - *The Searchers* (1956): Ford at full length, one obsessive man and the same red country, shot properly. - *The Big Country* (1958): Peck again, a wide screen used for a feud rather than a parade. - *Once Upon a Time in the West* (1968), Fi1m 91: Leone takes the railroad chapter and makes it the whole picture, slowly. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west.md) - *Lonesome Dove* (1989): The generational trek this film wanted, given the hours it needed. - *Meek's Cutoff* (2010), Fi1m 82: A wagon train with the singing removed and the thirst left in. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/meeks-cutoff.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/how-the-west-was-won