Landlocked Ship of Fools

The Way West is a standard horse epic in which the Oregon trail is a metaphor for life and the people in the wagon train are symbolic of mankind. Adapted from a novel by A. B. Guthrie Jr., the film has somehow lost the earthy realism of the book, and has become merely a landlocked ship of fools. Among the passengers are a flint-eyed scout (Robert Mitchum), a pioneering couple (Richard Widmark and Lola Albright), a frightened newlywed who alternately freezes and teases her husband, a Negro slave--not to mention a crowd of teenagers, old folks and other essentials of the wayward western.

Along the way, lives conveniently intertwine like braids. The frustrated newlywed groom sleeps with a nubile teenager, and gets her pregnant. A wild shot in the dark kills a prowling Indian boy. His father, a Sioux chieftain, demands a life for a life, and the leader of the pioneers (Kirk Douglas) hangs the offender--who happens to be the adulterer--with his own hands. Widmark's son nobly proposes marriage to the teenager.

Like Moses, Douglas leads the way but never settles in the promised land. Thirty miles from it, as he descends by rope from a cliff, the widowed bride coldly cuts the cord and he plummets to the rocks below. A wooden slab marks his resting place, and the troupe troops on to Oregon.

From the beginning, The Way West is off on the wrong trek. As was common in the taming of the frontier, there is a great waste of natural resources--in this case, Mitchum, Douglas, Widmark and Albright. All are solid professional performers who deserve to travel first-class next time they journey West.

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