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Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, the 1930 Louis R. Loeffler & Raoul Walsh adventure epic winning-of-the-West cowboy western ("Greatest Fox Movietone"; "The Most Important Picture Ever Produced"; "Raoul Walsh's all talking Fox Movietone production"; "Story by Hal G. Evarts") starring John Wayne (very young in this role!), Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall, Tyrone Power Sr., David Rollins, and "a cast including 93 principals and 20,000 extras". John Wayne was given a chance to have a leading role in this movie at a very young age. After this movie did poorly at the box office (which was not John Wayne's fault, but he was unfairly hurt by this experience), he was only given mostly lesser roles (including starring roles in a large number of B-westerns) until 1939 when he finally became a superstar in "Stagecoach" (and only because Gary Cooper turned down the role!). Note that for U.S. audiences, this movie was filmed in both the 1.37:1 format (known as the Academy ratio) and a widescreen format, which means they had to film the same scenes twice with different cameras! But that's not all. This movie was also made in FIVE languages simultaneously, which were English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German! The Italian version starred Franco Corsaro and Luisa Caselotti and was called "Il Grande Sentiero". The French version starred Gaston Glass and Jeanne Helbling and was called "La Piste des Geants". The Spanish version starred George J. Lewis and Carmen Guerrero and was called "La Gran Jornada". The German version starred Theo Shall and Marion Lessing and was called "Die Grosse Fahrt". They are exactly the same movies, except for the language difference and the different cast (this is very similar to the 1931 U.S. and Mexican versions of "Dracula"). Imagine the difficulty of shooting all of these versions at one time, likely using the same sets! We wager that few film buffs know that William Fox wanted to recoup the huge cost of this movie by making five simultaneous language versions, as noted above!
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that in recent auctions we have auctioned small photos of theater fronts from the 1930s and 1940s. Now we have been consigned a really cool collection of mostly 1930s 8x10 stills that show theater fronts and lobby displays (many of them have a stamp from a Boston company on the back, so it seems likely that most or all of them are from theaters in the Boston area)! All of those stills are in this set of auctions (in separate auctions). So this is a rare opportunity to purchase vintage 8x10 stills showing theater fronts from the 1930s (and since we have only auctioned a tiny number of these over all our years of auctioning, there is a good chance that it will be a long time before we have more of them). Also note that this still measures 7 3/4" x 9 3/4" [20 x 25 cm], but it has not been trimmed.

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