‘How The West Was Won’: the only western featuring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart
These days, it’s not uncommon for a high-profile movie to sell itself on the sheer volume of star power gathered together in the same ensemble, but it was certainly something of a novelty when How the West Was Won galloped into cinemas in 1962.
An ambitious undertaking, the epic western was split into five chapters helmed by three directors, telling a fictionalised account of the pivotal period in American history between 1839 and 1889, with three generations of the Prescott family serving as audience surrogates through the great westward migration and into the dawn of what became known as the Wild West.
As if regular Gary Cooper collaborator and western veteran Henry Hathaway, George Marshall – who’d worked with the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis – and all-round cinema icon John Ford as the trio of directors wasn’t an indication of How the West Was Won‘s prestige, the cast was a who’s who of the industry’s best and brightest names.
Even though they don’t appear in the same scenes together – being separated by their respective restrictions to segments ‘The Rivers’, ‘The Civil War’, and ‘The Railroad’ – the film marks the first and only time that James Stewart, John Wayne, and Henry Fonda appeared together in the same production.
Stewart plays Linus Rawlings, a fur trapper and trader who befriends and ultimately defends the Prescotts from attackers. His final scene comes right before Wayne’s first, when ‘The Duke’ shows up as General William Sherman, where he oversees a key victory for his military forces at the Battle of Shiloh. Given their long association over the years, it’s no surprise that Ford ended up directing his Stagecoach and The Searchers star in ‘The Civil War’. Fonda is the last to make their presence felt, as Jethro Stuart serves as an ambassador between the railroad company and the indigenous population.
Those three titans of cinema aside, How the West Was Won was loaded with star power from the very beginning, with Bing Crosby initially pitching studio MGM with the idea. He recorded an album of the same name inspired by a photographic essay in LIFE magazine before selling off the film rights.
In addition to having Spencer Tracy as the narrator, the roster also numbered Debbie Reynolds, Karl Malden, Lee Van Cleef, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Harry Morgan, and Eli Wallach to name but a smattering of the household names to pop up at various points, which proved so irresistible to audiences that How the West Was Won was the second highest-grossing film to release in the United States in 1963, behind only the inordinately expensive historical epic Cleopatra.
It would also win Academy Awards for ‘Best Writing’, ‘Best Film Editing’, and ‘Best Sound’, as well as scoring a nomination for ‘Best Picture’, living up to its epic billing in every sense of the word.
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