The Big Trail

A wagon-train epic shot on location across seven states, The Big Trail follows a party of settlers from the Mississippi to the Pacific Northwest, led by the young scout Breck Coleman. Raoul Walsh shot the film in Fox's experimental 70mm Grandeur process, and the wide frame gives the landscapes and the wagon-train set pieces a scale the standard 35mm version could not match. The film is John Wayne's first leading role, at 23; he plays the kind of plainspoken, decent hero he would spend the rest of his career refining. Tyrone Power Sr., in his final film, plays the villain. The film's widescreen version was little-seen at the time and the picture flopped, but it survives as a landmark of early sound spectacle. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.