Box office failure


One critic called it a "noisy Covered Wagon," a poor relation of the silent Western epics.

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Sounds like that one critic didn't know what he was talking about.

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I'm a big fan of John Wayne westerns throughout his film career, and I like very much the 1939 film "Stagecoach" that finally made him a star. But frankly, I found this slow-moving, creaky, early-talkie to be almost unwatchable. Young John Wayne's presence is fresh and he's one of the best things about "The Big Trail," but apparently this movie was not a hit with movie-goers of the time. After the the lukewarm critical and box-office response to "The Big Trail," John Wayne faded into relative obscurity for nearly another decade, honing his craft laboring in dozens of "B-grade" small-studio quickie westerns, until he finally had his breakout role as the Ringo Kid.

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The film was shot with a new wide-screen format. Just as it was ready to be released, the Great Depression hit the USA, making it very unlikely that theatres would spend the money on new format projectors. So the film got very limited release, thereby taking in very little money. Victim of bad timing.

"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae

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True, plus movie theaters had just retooled for talkies.

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Fantastic camera work for 1930, with great panoramic shots. The mise-en-scène is some 30 years ahead of its time. The wagons look very authentic indeed. My only carp is that at the end Wayne emerges from the forest, after presumably weeks of privation, very cleanly shaven!

Wayne certainly looked very good, but his acting wasn't great and perhaps this contributed to him spending the next years doing Poverty Row films.

Tyrone Power really chewed the scenery, no doubt because of his stage-acting career.

I was very pleased to view the courtesy of YouTube (though the sound wasn't great); however the film did drag a bit, especially when the pioneers were preparing to set out.

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