How the West Was Won was not produced; it was perpetrated. With a. script by Life Magazine out of Frederick Jackson Turner, it purports to tell HTWWW, but ends up as just another Debbie Reynolds picture. There is Debbie as a covered wagon girl, Debbie as a dancing girl in the frontier hell of St. Louis, Debbie as a riverboat singer, Debbie as the wife of a railroad tycoon (an ex-cardsharp by the name of Gregory Peck), and Debbie, with the West finally won, as a grandmaw type. About the only thing she isn’t in is the picture’s Civil War sequence (but I was always of the opinion, anyway, that the Civil War was a North-South affair). The dialogue runs along the lines of “I guess I seed the last uv that varmint” (honest!) and there is one geographical howler that shows Jimmy Stewart, as a fur trapper, canoeing his furs from the Rockies to Pittsburgh, a trip that—even if such a waterway did exist—would take roughly three years and two months.
The picture is also in Cinerama, a process which I recommend wholeheartedly to all the world’s threeeyed people. For us two-eyed folks, the three-paneled screen creates an irritating distortion along the seams where the panels join. Actors in the two end panels, moreover, always look as if they are walking uphill; in one scene, I thought sure that Henry Fonda and Old Paint would slide right off the screen, even though he was riding on what was supposed to be the table-flat Great Plains.
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