Henry Hathaway · 1962 · overland

The 1962 Cinerama epic by Hathaway, Ford and Marshall. Across fifty years, four generations of the Prescott family push west with the American frontier - by flatboat down the Erie Canal and the Ohio, by wagon train out of St. Louis to the California gold fields, through the Civil War and the building of the transcontinental railroad, to a last reckoning with outlaws in the Arizona desert.

1. 1
   The Erie Canal

   In 1839 the Prescotts, a farming family from upstate New York, set off west along the new canal to claim land in the Illinois country, falling in with a wandering mountain man on the way.

2. 2
   The Ohio River

   They build flatboats and run the Ohio downstream, surviving river pirates but not the rapids, which drown the parents - and the eldest daughter stays to settle the ground where they died.

3. 3
   St. Louis

   Her sister Lilith, singing in a St. Louis dance hall, inherits a California gold claim and joins a wagon train rolling west out of the gateway city across the open plains.

4. 4
   The Great Plains

   The prairie crossing brings buffalo, Cheyenne and the long labour of the transcontinental railroad, hammered west across the grasslands a generation later by the family's descendants.

5. 5
   California

   The gold fields of the Sierra draw the family to the coast - the shining western end of the migration, where fortunes are dug, gambled and lost in the mud of the boom camps.

6. 6
   Arizona

   A last generation settles the Southwest, where Zeb Rawlings, now a marshal, faces down a band of outlaws in the desert - the frontier finally, uneasily, won.