Metacritic reviews

Despite wooden performances, the final feature filmed in true Cinerama is great fun and holds a wiiiiiide spot in cineasts’ hearts.

It's a story [suggested by the series How the West Was Won in Life magazine] which naturally puts the spotlight on action and adventure, and the three directors between them have turned in some memorable sequences.

A grand folly, but lots to love.

The main problem remains the impossibility of subjecting a film that is fundamentally about landscape and history to the demands of such a coarse dramatic form.

With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.