June 20 at 6: "The Big Trail" (1930, Raoul Walsh).
"The ice had broken off so there was a big trail of growlers.
In his grand-scale 1930 Western "The Big Trail," he gave another big fellow his first leading role: John Wayne.
The first epic western to use talking in its sound track was Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930).
Said the barber, "This year's is not going to be any big trailing, snooping affair, but the little, short, stubby kind".
One of 1930's biggest hits, The Big Trail was a western epic with young John Wayne in his first starring role as the head of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail and was filmed in an early widescreen process.
A strikingly handsome tabula rasa in his first leading role, in Raoul Walsh's "Big Trail" (1930), Wayne steadily added elements to his screen persona through his 1930s apprenticeship in Poverty Row westerns.
Although Baxter has been edited into the rustling sequence, the actor on horseback in the long shots (in the background, we can see the amazing bluffs that Walsh would return to for "The Big Trail" two years later) is almost certainly Walsh, with his long Irish pan faintly visible beneath his broad hat.
Published in 1977, but set in 50s Hollywood – O'Brien was the son of George O'Brien, star of the 1927 silent movie Sunrise, and Marguerite Churchill, who appeared with John Wayne in The Big Trail – its narrator is a kid called Salty whose movie star parents are flamboyantly unhappy.
'THE BIG TRAIL' -- (Fox, $19.98, May 20) Raoul Walsh's 1930 epic western is best remembered as John Wayne's debut as a leading man (though the film was such a flop that he was immediately relegated to B westerns and serials, until "Stagecoach" rescued him in 1939).
