About The Big Trail (1930)
The story behind the film
The Big Trail was one of the most ambitious films of the early sound era. Fox Film Corporation sent director Raoul Walsh and a huge company on location across the American West from April to August 1930 — the shoot covered seven states — to tell the story of a wagon train making the first great crossing of the Oregon Trail. It was filmed in an experimental 70mm widescreen process called Grandeur, decades before widescreen became standard in cinemas, and simultaneously in an ordinary 35mm version for theatres that couldn't show Grandeur.
For the lead, Walsh chose a young prop man and bit-part player he had noticed on the Fox lot. Born Marion Morrison, he was given a new screen name for the role: John Wayne. He was 23.
Wayne plays Breck Coleman, a trapper who signs on as scout for a wagon train of settlers heading west from the Missouri River. He's also hunting the two men who murdered his friend — and they happen to be bossing the wagon train. Along the way the pioneers face river crossings, desert, storms, a Cheyenne attack, and a perilous descent down a canyon wall.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Raoul Walsh
- John Wayne as Breck Coleman
- Marguerite Churchill as Ruth Cameron
- El Brendel as Gus, the comic Swede
- Tully Marshall as Zeke
- Tyrone Power Sr. as Red Flack, the villain
- Ward Bond as Sid Bascom
- 70mm Grandeur cinematography by Arthur Edeson
Why it's worth watching
The landscapes are the star. Walsh filmed real wagons, real oxen and hundreds of extras crossing real rivers and mountains, and in widescreen the vistas are spectacular. The sequences in which wagons and oxen are lowered by ropes down steep canyon walls are still astonishing, because they were done for real.
It's also fascinating to see John Wayne at the very start of his career, lean and boyish, before the persona that made him famous had fully formed.
Fun facts
- The 70mm and 35mm versions were shot with different cameras and edited separately, so they differ in their shots and framing. The wide Grandeur version uses fewer close-ups because its cameras couldn't focus well up close.
- The film was a box-office disappointment, partly because, at the start of the Depression, theatres couldn't afford to install widescreen equipment. Wayne spent most of the 1930s in low-budget Westerns before John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made him a star.
- It was the only sound film, and the last completed film, of stage star Tyrone Power Sr., father of the 1940s screen idol Tyrone Power.
- The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2006.
Public-domain status
The Big Trail was published in 1930 and entered the US public domain on January 1, 2026. See "Rights & source" below.