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Considering you have all those Hollywood legends in one exciting film. John Ford did the Civil War sequence and George Marshall the sequence about the railroad. Cobb with outlaw Eli Wallach and his gang on a moving train even on a formatted VHS is beyond thrilling. The Civil War piece featured John Wayne and Harry Morgan in a moment of reflection at the battlefield of Shiloh.
I well remember feeling like you were right on the flatboat that the Presscott family was on as they got caught in the Ohio River rapids. Webb's original screenplay for the screen won an Oscar in 1962 and it involves an episodic account of the Prescott family and their contribution to settling the American west in the 19th century. She's in the film almost through out and in the last sequence where as a widow she goes to live with her nephew George Peppard and his family she's made up as a gray haired old woman and does very well with the aging. The Indian attack and the buffalo stampede were also well done. Debbie also gets to do a couple of musical numbers, A Home in the Meadow and Raise A Ruckus both blend in well in the story. Three of Hollywood's top directors did parts of this film although the lion's share by all accounts was done by Henry Hathaway.
Morgan did a first rate job as Grant in his brief cameo and Wayne was playing Sherman for the second time in his career. Lange's part was completely left on the cutting room floor. There is a sequence that was removed and it had to do with Peppard going to live with buffalo hunter Henry Fonda and marrying Hope Lange who was Fonda's daughter. They really don't make them like this any more. They have two daughters, dreamy romantic Carroll Baker and feisty Debbie Reynolds.
I'm surprised Wayne never did Sherman in a biographical film, he would have been good casting. Cinerama was rarely as effectively employed as in How the West Was Won. If any of the stars could be said to be THE star of the film it would have to be Debbie Reynolds.
He'd previously played Sherman in a cameo on his friend Ward Bond's Wagon Train series. I was hopeful in this version we'd see Hope Lange and more of Henry Fonda. The girls meet and marry mountain man James Stewart and gambler Gregory Peck eventually and their adventures and those of their children are what make up the plot of How the West Was Won.
But the climax involving that running gun battle between peace officers George Peppard and Lee J. She dies and Peppard leaves the mountains and then marries Carolyn Jones. We first meet the Prescott's, Karl Malden and Agnes Moorehead going west on the Erie Canal and later by flatboat on the Ohio River.
James R. Debbie's performance in How the West Was Won must have been the reason she was cast in The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
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