Hard-driving Kirk Douglas organizes a wagon train to Oregon, hiring mountain man Robert Mitchum to lead the way and squaring off with Indians, the elements, and hostility among the settlers, particularly hard-headed farmer Richard Widmark.Almost universally panned and patronized as director Andrew V. McLaglen's attempt to ape the style of his mentor John Ford, it's actually an innocuous, inoffensive adventure saga in the mold of How The West Was Won or Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, though not as good as those films. It's still fairly watchable, except for the endless, obnoxious subplots featuring teenage Sally Field and her deflowering by a married, frustrated loser!Douglas and especially Mitchum are excellent, as usual. However, Widmark falls a little short, thanks to a less than interesting character, though he's always a welcome presence in anything he's involved in.

In 1843 Missouri, hot-headed senator Kirk Douglas leads a large group of chosen people across rugged terrain to start "a new Jerusalem" in Oregon; he picks a half-blind pioneer scout (mourning the death of his Indian wife!) to help lead them, but immediately clashes with a family man over incidental matters; meanwhile, a sex-starved teenage girl has a fling with a married man, resulting in personal tragedy and an Indian attack (don't ask). A small pox outbreak is falsely reported, there's a wedding, a frigid woman goes insane, and the trail comes to an end at the Grand Canyon. A.B. Guthrie, Jr.'s book becomes somewhat besotted western epic with star-names, mixing vulgar jokes and inanities with ripe old clichés. A voice-over narration and a patriotic song come clean out of nowhere, while snarling Douglas blames himself for a death and asks a servant to whip him. It's cheap and low-brow all the way, but most viewers in the mood for a picture such as this probably won't be disappointed. There are some solid elements worth mentioning: William H. Clothier's outdoor cinematography is fine in the old-fashioned sense; and, although Bronislau Kaper whips up a dusty frenzy with his ridiculous score, the pacing is jaunty throughout and the wagons roll along at a fast clip. Douglas and Richard Widmark manage to retain their movie star allure, though Robert Mitchum was looking haggard by this time (and his performance is intentionally forgettable--he cancels out all his interest in the proceedings with one heavy sigh). Sally Field makes an inauspicious movie debut which I'm fairly certain she'd rather forget, but Lola Albright has a pleasing smile and Michael Witney does well as the handsome married man who can't get his wife to submit...but why does he shoot blindly into a rustling bush at night when it could have been his wife spying on him? Perhaps he was hoping it was! **1/2 from ****

The Way West is an epic western, but unlike another epic western How the West Was Won, it isn't a very good film. The main problem here is that the script writers and the director have got carried away, and have tried to cram far too many events and subplots into the two hour running time.The main plot thread follows an ambitious and cruel visionary named William Tadlock (Kirk Douglas), who dreams of taking hundreds of people into the vast, unexplored wilderness of the Wild West and starting up a new town. His ambition is an obsession. It drives him and dictates his every move. Even his own family come second in his list of priorities. During the journey, his behaviour towards the other pioneers becomes increasingly irrational and unsympathetic, and in the end he loses the respect of his fellow travellers.There are some good moments in the film. The climax is really surprising, with a twist that few viewers will predict. Sally Field has some interesting scenes as a young girl who undergoes a sexual awakening during the trip. There's also a well done scene in which a man who has killed an Indian child by accident is hanged. However, the abundance of plot threads, characters and subplots is a big drawback. The makers should have concentrated on a few elements and done them really thoroughly, instead of cramming in so much and only dealing with the themes in a shallow and all-too-brief fashion. This is not bad, I suppose, but it could have been oh so much better.

The sixties were the last decade when western was a genre in its own right.It was dying all along the seventies and began to disappear afterwards,only revived now and then by people like Eastwood or Costner. Everybody knows that the western heyday was before:the forties and the fifties produced the definitive classics:Ford,Daves,Mann,Walsh were here."The Way West" is a fairly entertaining if conventional movie.In 1960 ,Anthony Mann did a better job -about the same subject-with "Cimarron".LITTLE SPOILER HERE Of the three leads ,only Douglas is given a relative interesting part:the actor has enough talent to overcome the weaknesses of the plot and he sometimes look like an old patriarch,some kind of Moses leading his people to the promise land.He can be particularly cruel and brutal and like Moses,he won't see the new world it's never too late to build. END OF SPOILERAs for Widmark ,he's cast against type as a nice man with wife and son,and he cannot make anything with it,and Robert Mitchum is cast as Robert Mitchum,period.A strong scene:an Indian boy has been killed by the Whites and his father demands justice.Douglas's character takes here harshness to new limits and during this long sequence,the audience is really panting for breath.MCLaglen ,probably influenced by Delmer Daves's lyricism,superbly uses the Indians here.An offbeat touch comes from the doomed Mack couple:the bride does not want to consummate the wedding and the husband consoles himself with a young Sally Field (her cinema debut)who was already hamming it up.