Year:  1962
Rating: 5.0

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This was a reasonably popular film when it was released in Cinerama in 1962, but due to a lack of quality digital distribution it has sort of slipped through the cracks. Cinerama was a new form of making films using three cameras simultaneously shooting the film and then displaying it with three projectors. How the West was Won was the first feature film to use this technology (there had been a few travelogues shot previously that are worth seeing) and this film was the second. These other Cinerama films were restored and released on digital by Smilebox that look great - but not for this film. So there was only a laser disc back in the 1990's, an Italian DVD that is supposed to be very bad and a version that TCM showed that seems to be the best. That is the version I saw but it too has issues as you can easily see the three panels, it gets smudgy at times and the colors are a bit faded, but as a person who used to watch copies of copies of copies of Hong Kong vhs tapes this was good enough for me.


It is a fanciful look at the lives of the Grimm Brothers that is reasonably close to the truth unlike The Brothers Grimm released in 2006 that is utter nonsense. The brothers were serious scholars in the early 1800's who were dirt poor and who as part of their research began collecting German folk tales. These were eventually collected and published in two books consisting of over 200 stories. Many of these folk or fairy tales have become very famous - Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Snow White among them.


The film is produced by special effects master George Pal who was famous for his many science fiction films and the directing is split between Pal directing the enactment of three fairy tales while Henry Levin directed the narrative. It's target audience seems to be for children and in general it is fairly dull going that probably hasn't aged all that well and today I would guess it would not even appeal all that much to children. One brother (Karl Bohm) is devoted to his academic work while his brother (Laurence Harvey) is fascinated hearing folk tales from the common folk. There are attempts at some drama in there but most of it falls rather flat.



There are three of the Brothers Grimm tales told here and they add a little flash to the film as Pal uses some interesting camera work and stop motion special effects that feel charming if not cutting edge even at that time. Pal was another European émigré driven out of Europe by the rise of Nazism - but he had been using stop motion since the 1930s in what he called his Puppetoons - Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin being two of these. In Hollywood he continued making shorts until he began producing feature films in the 1950s - When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, Destination Moon and Atlantis: The Lost Continent. He had been wanting to make this film for years before he finally did.


The three tales are lesser known ones - The Dancing Princess (reduced from the Grimm's tale from twelve to one) - and starring Yvette Mimieux, Jim Backus and Russ Tamblyn; the Cobbler's Tale with elves making shoes and The Singing Bone starring Terry Thomas and Buddy Hackett fighting a dragon (in the Grimm's telling it was a wild boar). The first two have musical scenes. Also in the film is Claire Bloom as the wife of one brother and Barbara Eden as the girlfriend of the other - and interestingly they don't get married which in fact is true - one brother never married. Throw in character actors Walter Slezak and Oskar Homolka.