The Big Trail

Mark East

John Wayne plays Breck Coleman (his first starring role) in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 The Big Trail. The movie opens on a large Mississippi River trading post in the then barely settled state of Missouri. Coleman has just arrived from scouting the Santa Fe Trail and is haphazardly searching for the killers of a scout-friend while he looks for work. He is almost immediately offered the job of scouting for a soon-to-be-departing Wellmore party wagon train headed a rudimentary form of the famous Oregon Trail. Coleman turns down the offer because he just arrived from the wilderness and wants to spend some time in civilization.

While perusing the Wellmores’ encampment, Coleman discovers two driving plot devices: he comes across the wagon boss, a surly fellow named Red Flack (Tyrone Power, Sr.). Perhaps surly is an understatement; Flack looks like a wolfman whose face has been smashed in by a boot heel. Coleman also accidentally kisses a woman resting in an acquaintance’s parlor. The girl, and Coleman’s love interest for the remainder of the film, is Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill). Coleman’s interest in Flack is that he believes, after seeing a familiar arrow shaft, that Flack and his henchman, Lopez (Charles Stevens), are the culprits behind his friend’s murder.

Out for justice and hot for love, Coleman finds Wellmore and agrees to scout for the party: the dangers that loom are harrowing cliffs, raging rivers, a buffalo hunt, Indian attacks, a blizzard in the Sierras, and a black-hatted, sneak-about, riverboat gambler named Jim Thorpe (Ian Keith). Thorpe joins the party to avoid the hangman’s noose and also because he was thrown off his last boat where he met Ruth and decided she was worth a couple of Pawnee arrows in the chest. Thorpe is also somewhat coerced into the decision by Flack, who is seeking some protection from, and perhaps an assassin for, Coleman. Coleman is great with a knife, but Thorpe can drive a nail with his pistol from thirty yards.

Coleman fights all the fights he needs to, with a little help from a friend who shoots Thorpe in the back as Thorpe attempts to do the same to Coleman, and in the end dishes out a John-Wayne-sized wallop of frontier justice on Red Flack (he shoots him in the snow). Lopez freezes to death after being abandoned by Flack – cold death for cold men.

The goal of this movie wasn’t primarily to instill a sense of Americana in Americans, though we do love that, and certainly some of the dialogue does produce this effect. Upon reaching the destination Coleman exclaims, “Land clear ahead, all gentle folk. Now go down and settle it!” I believe the goal was, as with many westerns, to be a spectacle. The Big Trail is a 1930’s Die Hard sans explosions. What you get in lieu of big bangs and oxygen sucking fires is . . . Fox Grandeur.

Fox Grandeur was a type of 70mm film meant to be seen in cinemas with widescreens, as opposed to the standard 35mm film regularly used. There is also a sense of size in the opening scenes that owes itself to having a seamless backdrop. While in Missouri, it appears as if the action is going on miles into the background, and the set painting, if there is one, isn’t readily noticeable. The same cannot be said for most of the rest of the film, but it does appear as if quite a lot of on location filming was done (sideways snow aside.)