Widescreen experiments from several Hollywood studios in 1930 were greeted with derision by theater owners still paying for the previous year's conversion to sound. Only a few big-city audiences saw the large-screen version of The Big Trail, a spectacle we can savor again-thanks to The Museum of Modern Art-in a CinemaScope print (converted from the original 70mm nitrate) restoring the full size and length. 22-year-old John Wayne had his first lead role as scout for a pioneering Missouri-to-Oregon wagon train, which faces every obstacle that nature and human villainry can throw at it. Variety, spotting a possible star, noted with unintentional understatement that "the entirely unknown young Wayne...can be built up." A year in production at spectacular locations, the film proved a box-office disaster, especially in the standard release version-a Little Big Trail-shorn of an hour's running time and the sides of its widescreen image. Not only Wayne but the Western genre itself was relegated to the 'B' feature treadmill for a decade (until both were rescued by John Ford in 1939's Stagecoach). Today, the very qualities that doomed The Big Trail at first release-its un-modern, crowded, rough, documentary textures-are the qualities that save it from its lumpy dialogue ("Oh! You've made me the joke of the plains!" shouts our heroine at Wayne, stamping her dainty feet). In a holdover from the silent Western-and from Fenimore Cooper-The Big Trail maintains an ambiguous attitude toward the Indians, with whom Wayne's character was raised. Otherwise, it's a bald defense of the genre's traditional fusion of Social Darwinism with Anglo-Saxon Manifest Destiny: "We're blazing a trail that started in England," Wayne reminds the discouraged pioneers. "You fight, that's life; you stop fighting, that's death." What remains entirely unconventional is the breathtaking spectacle: the battles with mud and blizzards, the river crossing, and particularly the lowering of cattle and wagons down Grand Teton cliffs. Scott Simmon