Customer Reviews

Big Sky [VHS]

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The "Big Sky" is probably one of the best frontier movies ever made. Howard Hawks did a fantastic job of directing this one of a kind movie for it's time. The screenplay is brilliant and the folksy dialogue is pure "Hawks". You can see his brilliance in developing the relationship between characters. The casting is great, with Kirk Douglas and a great supporting cast. Arthur Hunnicutt is outstanding as the old frontiersman and received an Oscar nomination for his performance. This movie was also filmed on location on the Snake River, which was very rare in those days in Hollywood. The sets and scenery in this movie are real and authentic because they were filmed on location. This movie has been given high reviews by almost everyone and is considered to be a classic of it's time. I highly recommend it to everyone. It is one of those rare jewels that few people know about. This is a great film for those who love classic movie making from a great director. Curl up with a good blanket and some popcorn and gather the whole family around.

Kirk Douglas is Jim Deakins, a Kentucky backwoods type who is looking for something new to challenge him. Dewey Martin is Boone Cardell, a similar soul who is initially hostile to Deakins but they soon become inseparable friends. Their search for excitement inevitably leads them westward, where they find far more than they had bargained for. It's a great story, loaded with authentic touches that show how such men coped with the difficulties of this kind of life. Terrific movie, one of the NY Times' "1000 Best Films Ever Made."

Occasionally time forgets some movies. I don't fully understand why this is, but "The Big Sky" is a land that time forgot. Perhaps soon it will be newly remastered in a DVD version of the first quality; until then, this precious VHS copy will have to do. Finally restored to its full 140-minute length, the sound and picture quality change noticeably when the restoration of edited-for-TV footage is reinserted (the film was released for TV use in a 122-minute version). This is jarring but let us be thankful the footage has been recovered. This is usually not the case for films this old.

I have been reading from Lewis and Clark's journal and I have been trying to stay with them day by day 200 years later. It has been an interesting experience and helps bring history to life. I reflected on the Corps of Discovery last night as I watched, for the first time, the movie "The Big Sky". I found myself seeing scenes that took me back to passages from the journals. An on-screen depiction, if you will, of what I had been visualizing in my mind. Now, for the record, I had been visualizing this in color and watched it in black and white but I came away from "The Big Sky" impressed that the writer and director had done more than the normal amount of homework in putting this story on film. The scenes of the men pulling the boat along more difficult channels, the hunters traveling on foot to find meat for the explorers, etc. were well done, I felt. I'm not going to praise "The Big Sky" as an incredible documentary because there is plenty of Hollywood in it. However, within the plot is a reasonably good look at early European-American explorers of the West.

The plot is simple enough, two backwoods Kentuckians set out to find the uncle of one of them. This leads them to St. Louis and then on to an independent fur trading company. There are rivalries and an Indian maiden romance to keep things on edge. However, even in Black and White, the scenery, at times, is the main star of the show. Much of the film was shot around the Grand Tetons back when tourism in that part of the country wasn't the overwhelming thing it is today. It's as good as an excuse as any to watch this movie. The acting is good with Kirk Douglas giving his usual solid preformance. The second and third bills were new to me but I was glad to see Arthur Hunnicut came away with an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The movie is a bit long although, in all honesty, if they were to cut the movie back to two hours, they'd probably slice out my favorite parts.

Thanks to the vast amount of old movies available on Turner Classic Movies, I have been able to see a number of movies from the distant and not-so-distant past. Many of them I never heard of and am seeing for the first time. I noticed the other day that my 13 year old son was trying to find a DVD to buy. His problem, as he looked over the latest selections, was that he'd already seen them all at least 2-3 times. I told him that, if he'd just lose his prejudice against anything from an earlier generation, he'd discover an endless treasure chest of great movies to pick from. That's the way it's been for me since we got TCM on cable two years ago. "The Big Sky" is another good (not great but good) example of that.

"The Big Sky is a 1952 black and white western/adventure tale about 3 men making their way on a 2,000 mile voyage up the Missouri River in 1830 to trade furs with the Blackfoot Indians. Along the way they meet a Blackfoot princess and face opposition from Crow Indians and the powerful Fur Trade Organization. The film is based on the A. B. Guthrie novel of the same name.

Kirk Douglas (1916) plays one of the traders. He was a rising star at the time, Oscar nominated for "Champion" (1949) and memorable roles in "Out of the Past" (1947) and "Young Man with a Horn" (1950). Following this film he would be Oscar nominated for "The Bad and the Beautiful" in 1952, and "Lust for Life" in 1957, and win the Golden Glove for "Lust for Life". He appears as #17 on the AFI list of Top 50 Screen Legends.

Boyish Dewey Martin (1923) is Douglas' sidekick. Martin had a small part in "The Thing" (1951) and director Howard Hawks gave him a bigger part in this film. He played Bogart's brother in "The Desperate Hours" (1955) and then transitioned to TV.

Arthur Hunnicutt (1910-79) made a good living playing a cantankerous old man in westerns like "Broken Arrow" (1950), "Cat Ballou" (1956), and "El Dorado" (1966). I liked him best as Davy Crockett in "The Last Command" (1955). He was nominated for an Oscar for this film.

Hank Worden (1901-92) plays a loony Indian. Worden is best known for the 8 films he made with John Ford and 17 with John Wayne. He was a cowboy turned actor. He's best remembered for his role as `ol Mose in "The Searchers" (1956).

Jim Davis (1909-1981) plays a murderous villain for the Fur Traders. Davis had a distinctive deep and throaty voice. He's probably best known for his years on the TV series "Dallas" although he appeared on dozens of other TV shows and more than 50 films, most of them westerns.

Look for Iron Eyes Cody (1907-99) as a Blackfoot Indian. He appears dancing around a fire.

We think of Howard Hawks (1896-1977) as a Western director, but in truth, Hawks made all kinds of films, including comedies, gangster and war films. He was nominated 3 times for a DGA award for "Red River" (1948), "The Big Sky" (1952) and "Rio Bravo" (1959) and he was Oscar nominated for "Sergeant York" (1941). Among his other notable films were "Scarface" (1932), "The Big Sleep" (1946), and "Gentlemen Prefer Blonds" (1953).

Hawks was a master with this type of film - a few determined men face formidable obstacles in their quest. "Red River" and "El Dorado" are essentially the same film. Hawks also liked to juxtapose the younger more adventurous boy with the mature male and Martin here plays the role that Monty Clift, James Caan, and Ricky Nelson played in other Hawks film. Hawks was also smitten with the role of alcohol, which is as apparent here as it is in films like "El Dorado". This picture of the "old west" as it should have been is popular in Hawks' films, just as it was in Ford's films, and is probably one of the reasons that revisionist westerns appeared in the late 50s and 60s.

Russel Harlan (1903-74) provides beautiful film of the Snake River and Grand Tetons. This was his first of 6 Oscar nominations which included films like "Hawaii" (1966) and "Hatari" (1962). He worked with Hawks on "Red River" (1948) and "Rio Bravo" (1959). One has to wonder why this film was shot in black and white.

Oscar winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979) did the musical score. Tiomkin won 3 Oscars ("The High and the Mighty", "High Noon", "The Old Man and the Sea") (1954), and was nominated for 14 more.

The top grossing films in 1952 were "The Greatest Show on Earth", "The Bad and the Beautiful", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", "Ivanhoe", and "Singing in the Rain". "The Greatest Show on Earth" won for Best Picture and other Oscar winners were "High Noon" (Actor), "The Quiet Man" (Director), "Come Back Little Sheeba" (Actress), and "Viva Zapata" (Supporting Actor). Other memorable films that year were "Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd", Tracy and Hepburn as "Pet and Mike", Fritz Lang's "Rancho Nororious", "The Red Planet Mars", "Scaramouche", and Marion Cooper's "This is Cinerama".

The NY Times called the film "a saga as long as the day and as big as all outdoors" and said "The majestic sweep of rivers, mountains, passes and woods of Grand Teton National Park is a sight to behold and a tribute to photography."

There are not many films about the trapper days in the American West. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and the TV mini-series "Centennial" (1978) are the best of breed here. "The Mountain Men" (1980) with Charlton Heston and Brian Keith is also worth a look. Lesser films include William Wellman's "Across the Wide Missouri" (1951) with Clark Gable and Anthony Mann's "The Last Frontier" (1955) with Victor Mature

Bottom line - pretty much a B western that is far too long and the beauty of the scenery is lost in the black and white print.

This Howard Hawks' movie was supposed to be the film version of one of the truly great novels about the American west, A.B. Guthrie's "The Big Sky." However, as an adaption of the novel, this movie cannot be described as anything but as a miserable failure- a convoluted mish-mash of the three of novel's four parts with a completely contrived happy ending. (In the novel- the fate of the "Mandan" is not pleasant and the friendship triangle between Boone, Jim, and Teal Eye ends in tragedy.) If you love the novel then you're bound to be sorely disappointed by this film.

However, taken on its own merits without reference to its source material the movie is fairly entertaining. With Howard Hawks behind the camera and Kirk Douglas and Arthur Hunnicutt in front of it, the movie cannot help but be anything else!

The movie starts in 1830 Kentucky with boisterous Jim Deakins (Douglas) befriending taciturn Boone Cardell (a wooden Dewey Martin). The two young men go to St. Louis where they meet with Cardell's Uncle Zeb Calloway, an experienced mountain man played by Hunnicutt. Uncle Zeb takes the two young men under his wing as hunters for a trading expedition heading up the Missouri River in order to open trade relations with the hostile Blackfeet. It's a dangerous gamble, but the expeditionary leader, a Frenchman, has an ace of up his sleeve- Teal Eye, the daughter of a Blackfoot chief, who could be the key to establishing friendly relations with the tribe. The movie details the ardous journey up the Missouri and all the adventure and danger that entails.

It's time to get this,along with Man Without a Star,transfered to a Region 1 DVD.
A combined package would be very attractive

That's what they might have called this film, directed by the great Howard Hawks, but a poor job nonetheless. There is scarcely a single believable scene, just contrived rivalries between trading scows and upset Injuns during a Missouri River run in the early 19th century. More than half the action takes place at night but apparently Hawks had a phobia about night-shooting outdoors, and the sets are lousy. If he had tried day-for-night it would have added to the realism and made a little better film.

To each his own. I like movies about early American life which makes an attempt to show life as it was then. The story is interesting but not overly believable concerning the Indian girl being the daughter of an Indian chief ... but you get the feel of life as it was then. We must remember, without some story of interest, who would buy the video. I had seen this on TCM and wanted my own copy to give to my grandchildren.

In Howard Hawks's THE BIG SKY, Kirk Douglas is a frontiersman who accompanies a group of fur traders up the Missouri River. At the end of their journey lies a large haul of valuable pelts. Along the way however the men encounter many hazards, not the least of which is a band of river pirates led by the ruthless Louis MacMasters (Frees) and his cohort, 'Streak' (Baer).

In 1832, Jim Deakins (Douglas) meets and becomes friends with Boone Claudel (Martin), who's on the run after being falsely accused of a crime. The two get into a bit of trouble and once they're released from jail Deakins and Claudel decide to go on the fur trading mission. The company sets out for Blackfoot territory along with tribal princess Teal Eyes (Threatt)-- her presence is supposed to assure everyone's safety according to the expedition's leader, riverboat captain 'Frenchy' Jourdonnais (Geray).

After surviving river rapids and Indian raids, the encamped traders are attacked by confederates of MacMasters and Teal Eyes is abducted. Next, their boat is set on fire; two of its saboteurs are captured and confess to the girl's whereabouts. Now that he knows who is holding the princess, Deakins has to find a way to free her.


As of 2/09, "The Big Sky" was not available on a Region 1 DVD.

Also recommended:
The next western Kirk Douglas headlined was King Vidor's MAN WITHOUT A STAR (1955) (VHS) (DVD--Chinese import)


Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 viewer poll rating found at a film resource website.

(7.1) The Big Sky (1952) - Kirk Douglas/Dewey Martin/Elizabeth Threatt/Arthur Hunnicutt/Buddy Baer/Steven Geray/Hank Worden/Jim Davis (uncredited: Paul Frees/Frank DeKova/Iron Eyes Cody/Jay Novello)