In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, director Andrew V. McLaglen had a consistently good eye for locations and a fine knack for attracting powerhouse casts. More often than not, these were the best things about his otherwise banal movies, and The Way West (1967) is no exception. Expertly photographed by William Clothier, who worked with McLaglen eleven times, the locations are indeed magnificent - Oregon has probably never looked better. And topping the cast are Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark. Yet these factors cannot overcome a weak script that tries to tell too many stories or direction which is at best uninspired.

McLaglen learned from such icons as John Ford and John Wayne when he served as assistant director on movies like The Quiet Man (1952) and The High and the Mighty (1954). In his own movies, which include Shenandoah (1965), The Rare Breed (1966) and The Undefeated (1969), McLaglen seemed to be trying hard for a Fordian effect, but he came close only in his landscape compositions (and his frequent use of Wayne). There's a lot more to Ford, of course, such as a complexity and depth of feeling to the characters, and a unique mixing of the personal and the mythic.

In The Way West, Kirk Douglas plays a widowed senator and Robert Mitchum a trail scout with failing eyesight who lead a wagon train of pioneers from Missouri to Oregon. The property certainly had a good pedigree - it was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., who had written the screenplays for Shane (1953) and The Kentuckian (1955) as well as the novel of The Big Sky (1952).

Excerpt from TCM located HERE