Talk:The Big Trail

The Big Trail at the Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) restored the 70mm version and tends to run it at least once a year. If given the opportunity, please do not miss this breath-taking masterpiece. The Big Trail is still recovering from a lifetime of disparagement by John Ford since Ford always wanted to take credit for John Wayne's career. You can find clips on youtube of Ford claiming that he discovered Wayne working as a prop boy in 1939 and cast him in Stagecoach when actually Walsh had done so a decade earlier wirh The Big Trail, arguably a much better movie in every way, as you'll realize as you behold it. Oddly enough, an actor's first major film surprisingly often can feature his or her best performance, probably having much to do with the excitement and electricity generated by doing it for the first time, and a strong case could be made that this is precisely what happens with John Wayne in this film. Under the great Walsh's deft direction while shooting in North America's most beautiful locations, Wayne is as charismatic as any actor ever recorded on film. The ensemble supporting characters always ballyhooed when regarding Stagecoach is largely already present and accounted for a decade earlier, and exceeded by a wide margin, in The Big Trail. The gambler portrayed by John Carradine in Stagecoach is more fully realized in The Big Trail in the person of a vicious gambler blithely competing with Wayne for the extremely beauteous Marguerite Churchill. Tyrone Power Sr., the great actor who fathered our Tyrone "The Mark of Zorro" Power, gives us one of the cinema's most amazing villains, the bearded "bull-whacker" Red Flack, whose look and voice were so strikingly intense that his whole persona was quickly co-opted and converted into Bluto, Popeye's pugnacious enemy in the Fleischer cartoons. Tyrone Power Sr. was anything but a cartoon, however; the uniquely realistic ground-in filth of his garb and nuanced performance as a creature from hell adds up to a believability that startles, grabbing the modern viewer by the throat. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 13:51, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

John Ford did discover Wayne
... and he has him play a part in one of his first talkies: SALUTE, as early as 1929. One glance at Wikipedia would have told you that. Not that Ford wasn't a liar of the first rate, but he really did discover John Wayne. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.181.81.208 (talk) 20:08, 5 May 2021 (UTC)