HOW THE WEST WAS WON

Cinerama was a neck-craning exercise that began in the mid-fifties and lasted for a decade or so until the fad ran out of steam. Of all the films made in the process, which involved projecting images from three 35mm projectors on to a huge, curved screen "How the West Was Won" was probably the most famous and the most successful. With three directors, including John Ford, and four Directors of Photography this was the most epic of epic westerns though I think its real appeal lay in watching its all-star cast, including a host of Oscar winners, go through the motions as much as in its vistas which seemed to stretch from here to eternity and were very pretty indeed.

Covering a period of about sixty years it traced, somewhat sketchily, the whole history of the American West while Debbie Reynolds provided some sort of link between the various stories ageing, not very convincingly, from young girl settler to old lady pioneer. It was written by James R Webb who rather surprisingly won an Oscar for his endeavours.