Customer Reviews

Across the Wide Missouri [VHS]

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4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
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Clark Gable is excellent as a mountain man who leads a company of mountain men and trappers into the Blackfoot Indian Nation to trap beaver. It has humor, drama, action, and suspense. The "Run For Your Life" scene where Gable is given a choice by the Indians to either run or be killed is classic. Ricardo Montalban is also in fine form as the Blackfoot Indian War Chief who hates the intrusion into his country by Gable and his company. A must see for Clark Gable fans. Also, if you liked the movie, "The Big Sky" with Kirk Douglas, you'll love this one.

My Great Grandfather was in this movie as a French Trapper. It was great to see a man, whom I never met, on the big screen. It would be a great movie for the entire family. It has some excellent scenery shots and a great performance by Clark Gable. It combines history, comedy, and drama all wrapped into one film.

It is impossible to watch this at time breathtakingly beautiful movie without sadness not least because what survives is a mere fraction of the movie made by the great William Wellman -the studio interfered in the picture excising great swathes of the footage Wellman shot and adding a ponderous voice over narration declaimed in sonourous mannner by Howard Keel which adds nothing to the picture whatsoever .
It is a movie about the destruction of a way of life -that of the mountain men .The source material is a novel by Bernard de Soto which is based on the life of one such man , Flint Mitchell ,who controlled the trade with the Blackfoot Indians in the Rockies during the 1820,s .In many ways he was the very incarnation of the pioneer spirit , a trader and adventurer married to a Native American ,and the movie shows how this idyllic lifestyle is blown away by the inexorable rise of white society on the frontier as it gradually "civilises " previously virgin lands .

The society is one where whites and Indians co-exist and intermarry as a matter of course and even this comparative racial harmomy is destroyed by "society"and the violence it brings in its wake

Achingly lovely location photography make the movie a visual poem to the American landscape and it dwarves most of the players but Gable gives one of his strongest performances

This is a fascinating movie but I suspect if Wellman had been alllowed to pursue his original vision we would be talking about an acclaimed masterpiece rather than the rump left by an nervous studio

Excellent copy of a very fine western classic. Color is beautiful and sound excellent. A very interesting story extremly well done.

Across the Wide Missouri
1830s
Montana & Idaho country

This 1951 movie is one of my favorite movies, as I read quite a bit on the mountain man and his era. This film is supposed to majestically show the mountain man circa early 1830s almost midpoint of his era. This movie does not depict the end of his era nor is it meant to. The mountain man era ran from the early 1820s to the late 1840s for prime and abundant fur and in some other areas even continued on as late as the 1860s.

I don't know how this film could be any better. It sums up or is meant to sum up the freedom and adventure of the early mountain man era while there were 'shining times' and as the movie shows the only main tribe meeting their era with terrible resistance was the Blackfoot nation, comprised of 3 tribes (North Piegan, Blood or Kainai-South Piegan, and Blackfoot or Siksikawa). Iron Shirt is only meant to serve as the main symbol for that murderous resistance.

During Lewis and Clark adventure in the west (1804-1806) July, 1806 they were forced to kill 2 members of the Blackfeet Confederacy or First Nation of Canada and that left the tribes not only with an abiding anger toward American fur trappers or travelers. Even Clark Gable's run early in the movie to save his life, is similar to what John Colter (Yellowstone, Grand Teton, & Jackson Hole), ex-member of the Lewis & Clark group, experienced in 1809 at the hands of this same Blackfeet Nation. In what became known as 'Colter's Run' he ran for his life and survived. Across the Wide Missouri was, however, shot in Colorado, not in Missouri or southern Alberta, home to the Blackfoot nation.

For a statement of this early mountain man era I cannot conceive of a better movie. One of equal footing describing later era as the beaver played out, the movie with Charlton Heston and Brian Keith (The Mountain Men, 1980)may be a later movie of some equal footing showing the later years of that era (1938) when fur prices were beginning to decline. While The Mountain Men is one full of sadness, Across the Wide Missouri is not.

Just an excellent movie, full of color and excitement.

If you like a good adventure story that includes the hardship, heart break and humor of the mountain man days, buy this. I first saw this movie when I was very young and recently saw it again, it is still a great movie.

Two Star Man: White Man won, Indian Lost, get over it and enter the 21st Century or move to the reservation, where some may listen to you, when they're not watching this movie, that is.

When amazon has a vendor history you can believe the service matches the quality of the product...I'd buy from him again.

To me it is important that a US DVD is subtitled in english I own an multiregion DVD player so for video there is not problem.In product details the title was signed subtitled in english. But it is not.I keep it all the same but the detail product should be corrected detaild

'Missouri' feels more like a civic lecture than a film; it tries the impossible task of celebrating the American frontier spirit with a newly tolerant approach to Native Americans, who are kindly allowed do more than whoop menacingly. Well some are; this Western is only liberal to those Natives who agree to the white subjugation of their land - those who refuse are murderous, anti-family transgressors.

That's what the script says, and the cheerful narration and dazzlingly bright colours seem to confirm it. Us old Western hands know Wild Bill Wellman, though, director of bleak critiques like 'The Ox-Bow Incident'. The chilling climax, therefore, refuses to simplify the tensions between community, family, and the violence needed to protect them, and can be now seen as foreshadowing the complexities of 'The Searchers'.