Cinerama Takes The Road West FROM OUR FILM CRITIC When special glasses were put on in an experimental type of stereoscopic film that is no more. the lion leaped into the lap; with Cinerama. that huge s^reen designed in the form of a triptych, the audience found itself packed into a bob-sleigh and careering down the mountains or seated in an aeroplane flying low over tropical sands and seas. Up to the present, in fact, Cinerama has been content to turn itself into a series of huge, mobile travel posters; now, as the title How the West Was Won indicates, it is prepared to tell a story, a story in which landscape figures pro- minently. It tells it on the largest possible scale-the film runs for 155 min=utes, not counting an interval-and the programme contains less a list of thc cast than a catalogue of famous names. Miss Carroll Baker, Mr. Henry Fonda, Mr. Gregory Peck. Mr. James Stewart, Mr. John Wayne, Mr. Richard Widmark, Miss Debbie Reynolds, and many more, are among those present. to say nothing of Mr. Spencer Tracy as narrator. All, then, or nearly all, the old familiar faces (and very nice too) are present, and, what-is more, there are three directors, Mr. Henry Hathaway, Mr. John Ford and Mr. George Marshall, to direct the three episodes which com-prise the sum of the narrative. The link between the three, to say nothing of the narrative line itself, is tenuous to a degree, but to put it roughly, three generations are involved and the action takes in the rivers, the prairies, fights with Indians and the battles of the Civil War. If all is predictable-it takes no great intelligence, for example, to prophesy the precise moment when the redskins will charge down on the wagon train- it has a kind of surge and splendour and extravagance not to be despised. If it does not add up to the best type of realism, here at least is the semblance of realism at its loudest and most emphatic. The noise is, indeed, at times so overpowering that its stereophonic effects get the better of the efforts of the screen to fill and startle the wondering eye. Cinerama, however, still remains something to wonder at; the film, in itself, presented in a less ambitious form, would hardly be that. Cinerama Takes The Road West London Casino (Friday): How the West Was Won