How the West Was Won

A vast, sprawling Western, shot in the short-lived three-strip Cinerama process, which chronicles the development of the American West through the adventures of one family over three generations. Hathaway's sequence, 'The Rivers, The Plains, The Outlaws', comes off best, while Ford's section on the Civil War looks as much a survey of his own career as of the war. The main problem remains the impossibility of subjecting a film that is fundamentally about landscape and history to the demands of such a coarse dramatic form.