Distinctly Montana Magazine

54 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 - 2 5 T HE DIRECTOR RAOUL WALSH, best known today for the 1949 Jimmy Cagney-starring gangster flick White Heat, was something of a cowboy himself. At fifteen, after his mother died, he set off across Texas, eventually made it to Mon- tana, and later became a working cowboy in Mexico. He made his film debut (as an actor rather than a director) in 1915's The Birth of a Nation, in which he embodied the role of John Wilkes Booth. He starred opposite the actual Pancho Villa in The Life of General Villa. Later, while filming an adaptation of an O. Henry Western, he lost his eye after a jackrabbit went through the window of his car. His 1930 film, The Big Trail, called for a good-looking, clean- cut young cowboy for the role of Breck Coleman, a trapper and guide guiding a large caravan of settlers along the Oregon Trail while also searching for the villains who killed his friend. Above all, the role called for the mix of bravado, virtue, and vulnerabil- ity that would, and still does, define the Western hero in film. Gary Cooper was the first choice, but as Walsh wrote in Each Man In His Time, his autobiography, "there were not many Coo- pers and Gables around, it seemed." The Helena-born movie star, known for a leading-man vis- age that seemed carved from granite, was too busy. So too were Clark Gable, and Tom Mix. In the 27 years after The Great Train Robbery, which wasn't even the first Western, there had been nearly 1,000 Western films made. Most of those were silents, but in 1928, sound had been in- troduced to the movies. Cooper himself had starred in two West- ern "talkies" already, the partly sound, partly silent Wolf Song, and the classic Owen Wister adaptation The Virginian. With all due respect to those films, The Big Trail was going to be something else entirely: an American spectacle to rival and surpass anything that Buffalo Bill had ever staged, and wired for sound. The film crew, along with the hundreds of extras, would for all intents and purposes have to travel the actual Oregon Trail, enduring real dangers and inconveniences, inconstant weather, and the human irritations that come with traveling in a group. In short, they'd have to become real pioneers, at least for a time. And, for the stars of the picture at least, they'd have to look earnest and determined—and don't forget, sexy, too. But what magic produces a leading man out of thin air? Walsh's problem was serendipitously solved when he hap- pened to see a lanky youth hauling furniture in and out of the prop department on the Fox lot. Walsh adjusted his eye patch and watched the man, whose name, he would learn later, was Marion Robert Morrison. Walsh would remember the moment he saw the "tall young fellow" with "wide shoulders to go with his height." He was good-look- ing enough, certainly. "He was unloading a truck and did not see me," he wrote. "I watched him juggle a solid Louis Quinze sofa as though it was made of feathers and pick up another chair with his free hand." Walsh got his attention and waved him over. He asked the prop department man his name, and what he wanted to do. Morrison said he'd like to star in movies but hadn't had much success yet. by SHERMAN CAHILL • illustrated by ROBERT RATH

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