Even without its wall-to-wall spectacle of manifest destiny, Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) is an invitation to alternate history. I had no idea a Depression-era 70 mm widescreen format had ever existed. It had never occurred to me that among the wishful stock of the hell of a good video store next door, I would want the pre-Code star career of John Wayne.

In the spring of 1930, Marion Morrison, who preferred to be called Duke, was twenty-two years old. For the last four years, he had been employed by the Fox Film Corporation as an assistant prop man and bit-part player; he had about twenty roles to his name and only one of them credited. Casting around for a leading man to anchor the studio's million-dollar gamble of American migration, the veteran director is supposed to have spotted the former college tackle shlepping furniture on the lot and promoted him for a part originally envisioned with Tom Mix or Gary Cooper. One Hollywood rebranding and a boot camp in frontiersman's skills later, the freshly monikered—after Mad Anthony—Wayne was front and center of a five-month shoot across seven states, a Fitzcarraldo-class exercise in rugged documentarianism. "No great trail was ever blazed without hardship." Despite the primally Western setting, the effect is much less a screen persona in embryo than a non-actor carrying a film. Still coltish at six foot four, Wayne in The Big Trail has a raw, aw-shucks voice and a long-limbed lope as well as a charming habit of slinging one leg over his horse's neck to perch sideways in the saddle; he moves sometimes with self-conscious stiffness, sometimes as easily as if he's forgotten the camera he does not yet know how to play to. Once on his way out of a crowd scene he seems to check his heading against the fourth wall. He's beautiful. Except that the picture is an ambitiously open-air talkie, he wouldn't need line readings with his long-lashed cat-eyes and his thick-tousled hair, his face pointed around its big bones that would look more conventionally handsome and less ferally attractive once he finished growing into them; it's incredible that no one put him up for a screen test before Walsh. Even his inexperience fits right into the cinema vérité ethos of a film that devotes more attention to the quotidian details of life on a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon than the beats of melodrama which propel the rudimentary plot. He doesn't sound like a stage-trained actor, he sounds like the production scooped some kid out of the backwoods around 1840 and there he is in his sweat-worn buckskins, throwing his Bowie knife with the dead-eye accuracy of long winters trapping on the Snake River all in one shot so that we can see it was done without doubling or trick photography.

For those lucky audiences who managed to catch The Big Trail on the eye-filling high-definition silver nitrate of the Fox Grandeur process, it must have been possible to enjoy the film as a kind of panorama, unscrolling westward through the dust of plains and the drag of rivers, snow-flocked mountains and salt-cracked deserts from the banks of the Mississippi to the Willamette Valley. It is not impossible to enjoy it as such even digitally. The scale of filming is legitimately, epically stunning. Just the depth of field allows Walsh to stage a world always packed and bustling with action, meticulously ceaseless tableaux before which the principals may be conversing or flirting or facing off while around them any number of other lives are going on. Men check the iron-hooped wheels of a Conestoga, women chop wood and scrub clothes while behind them a fleet of prairie schooners fades nearly to the horizon without mattes or models and between the two distances other pioneers are loading provisions or cleaning tack or just leaning over the back of the nearest ox to watch the scene. Dogs trot and children run wherever the wagon train halts for the night; mules balk and horses jink; the oxen are whacked onward and the swaying surge of cattle herded through the veils of dust that fog the sunset so spectrally, the settlers could be their own ghosts imprinted like wheel-ruts on the land, speckling into daguerreotype. Downstream of the current-tugged mass of canvas and horses jostling across a deep-swirling river, the team and contents of a capsizing wagon are borne as swiftly as escaping breath; as the trail trudges on through dunes weathered with sagebrush and the broken-down evidence of prior travelers, a pale hollow of stones comes visible from human attention to it as a grave. It's like Pieter Bruegel painted a Western. It never feels overly busy, all the planes of motion through which the eye can wander as if selecting its own narrative. It doesn't slacken when the cast pares down, either: Wayne riding after buffalo with a pair of Pawnee scouts is part of the same charged immensity of space as the grasslands and the light-limned clouds. One lovely, unexpected interlude shows a human mother nursing her child matched by succeeding shots of a mare with her foal, a bitch with her puppies, a cat with her kittens, a sow with her piglets. The domestic work of cooking and mending is photographed no less squarely than Herzogian efforts like the felling of great trees to construct the blocks and tackle by which precariously upended wagons and livestock bawling in slings may be safely winched down the precipitous rimrock while the settlers themselves work hand over hand down the slope and occasionally watch all their worldly goods crash bouncing to the white water below. As often as it holds the long shot of the sparrow's fall, the camera—the DP behind it was Arthur Edeson, who worked wonders on this production and never worked with 70 mm again—can cut in close to the slippage of hooves and feet in sand or mud; it is trampled directly over by a Cheyenne charge. Nothing in this film, no matter how familiar from generations of the Western mythos, looks like anything else for decades through the sheer demands of the format, the huge deep-focus of every shot. The tensest moment of action does not belong to the corral of wagons under attack, but to winter light scudding across the snow-crusted trunk of a long-fallen sequoia, the wind whistling louder than even a well-projected voice in the forest's cold cathedral. The Grand Canyon plays itself.

Perhaps inevitably, the screenplay officially credited to Hal G. Evarts and unofficially attributed to eight divers hands including Walsh does not share the invention of the visuals it scaffolds. Beyond the vignettes of the trek, it offers a sturdily old-fashioned blend of romance and revenge in which Wayne's Breck Coleman figures as both panther-sure tracker of the low-down coyotes who murdered his mentor down by Santa Fe and sweetly gauche suitor to the Southern belle whom he met under such innocently disastrous circumstances that audience members with a low tolerance for misunderstanding may not make it through the first act. None of it would have been new to the silents; some of it might have worked better in one. As played by Tyrone Power Sr. in his first and only foray into talking pictures, the bearish bullwhacker Red Flack suggests a blood-and-thunder Shakespearean take on Bluto; Ian Keith really twirls his mustache as the slick riverboat gambler Bill Thorpe who makes a calculated bid for the heroine's hand; Charles Stevens' Lopez provides as weaselly a sidekick for the treacherous wagon boss as Tully Marshall's Zeke represents the wily old coot in the hero's corner. Covering the immigrant angle, El Brendel does his trademark Swedish dialect routine with bonus mother-in-law shtick and one extremely well-deployed rendition of a joke older than vaudeville—sunk to his waist in a mudhole, the straw-haired little shlimazl politely objects, "What are you kicking about? I am sitting on my mule." By contrast, Marguerite Churchill as Ruth Coleman looks straight out of a revisionist Western of the '70's with her high-boned cameo of a face; she shares a slow chemistry with Wayne when the dialogue isn't crowding them to the point that some of her most expressive contributions to their relationship are reaction shots. "You know, you can get sort of used to having somebody not like you," he observes after a moonlit dance in which the figures called have brought them awkwardly into one another's arms. Instead of wooing her like the gambler with his promises of a silken life, the rangily down-to-earth trapper draws her in for the first time with his love for the open country in which she could imagine only danger instead of "big tall pines just a-reaching and a-reaching as if they wanted to climb right through the gates of heaven . . . that old moon smiling down on you and every time you look up, there she is, sort of guarding over you, like a mother minding her young." Breck has already been established as one of these both-ways figures of the frontier in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, fluent in hand talk and respectful of indigenous ways and so surprised to be asked by the children of the wagon train if he's ever killed an Indian that he explains at length everything he learned from growing up with them instead; it makes his paean to the natural world that only his earnestness keeps from sounding like cracked corn far more persuasive than when he's called on to encourage the blizzard-daunted pioneers in the name of settler-colonialism, "We can't turn back! We're blazing a trail that started in England!" It does feel notable to me that The Big Trail does not treat its Native Americans as an undifferentiated natural hazard as opposed to an overlapping polity of nations with their own relations to one another and European invasion. With one band, Breck is able to broker safe passage for the wagon train by promising that it will not settle on Cheyenne land; later on his personal diplomacy cannot hold off being caught in an alliance with the Crow. The circling of the wagons may be archetypal, the jokes made in the Cheyenne language feel not. I may just need to see more silent and pre-Code Westerns. I can't tell if it is unusual to depict the women of a wagon train so readily swinging axes and shouldering rifles beside their men, if the dead are so often made to feel irretrievable instead of inevitably whittled down. Intertitles regularly trumpet the historical indomitability of the pioneer spirit, but the dialogue itself does almost no incluing for the viewer as far as geography or even the year except for a mention of twenty-six stars on the American flag. It's harder for me to evaluate the historicity of the clothing than the fact that all of it looks as though the cast has been wearing it for months on the road. Lines like "Somewhere our trails will cross again" could probably not have been put over even with title cards.

Needless to say, The Big Trail was a flop. By staking so much—technologically, artistically, commercially—on the success of a big-budget experiment in a brand-new film format, Fox bet and bought the farm even more badly than its shortly impending successor would fare with Cleopatra (1963). Both the studio and its founder William Fox were in parlous financial shape following the Crash of 1929 and the rollout of Fox Grandeur had been complicated by the understandable reluctance of movie theaters in the first shock of the Depression to shell out for another projection system so soon on the heels of conversion for sound. The budget by the end of the shoot had exceeded $2 million and it should surprise no one who interacted with an Apple II in the 1980's that the travails of the location shooting included a run-in with dysentery. At the time of its release, only Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and the Roxy in New York were equipped to run The Big Trail on its intended 70 mm—everyone else had to settle for the shorter and much less radically visualized 35 mm version which had been filmed simultaneously by Lucien Andriot. It made back effectively nothing at the box office of what had been spent on actors and wagons and extras and animals and reflectors and catering and trucks and film and the four additional foreign-language versions for international release. The new-minted John Wayne was busted down to B-movies on Poverty Row, where he employed the skills he had mastered for The Big Trail in low-budget Westerns until his reintroduction by John Ford with Stagecoach (1939). Widescreen formats would not reemerge in American cinema until the post-war period as part of the competition with television. I would like to know what access to 70 mm could have done for classical Hollywood cinematography, but what seems to be left really haunting me is Wayne. Was he ever so vulnerable again onscreen, so romantically attainable and alluring? His early failures to straighten out the situation with Ruth are sympathetically undignified, his climactic reunion with her among the vast sun-dapples of the heaven-reaching redwoods is breathtakingly mythic and hungrily human at once. I spent so much time ragging on him for The High and the Mighty (1954), but the radiantly awkward youngster saying without conceit or deceit, "It wouldn't be true if I told him I didn't want you. It happens I do," could have become that painfully transparent man. He lost the knack, or was trained out of it, and it was a loss to American masculinity. He looks incidentally even better grimed up from travel, which I appreciate wardrobe and makeup understanding. I caught the film on TCM, but the 70 mm version has been transferred to Blu-Ray/DVD and a decently ripped copy appears to exist in the right aspect ratio on YouTube. It should be seen in a theater, even if no original prints survive. This hardship brought to you by my great backers at Patreon.