Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Ric-7 I love this film--it makes me feel good every time I watch it. I'd seen it when I was a child, and loved it then. However, for decades later, I confused it with The Far Horizons which was released a few years later. Could there be two upriver boat adventures involving a pair of heroes and one Indian princess? Sure enough.The film may not be faithful to Guthrie's novel, but there were too many unmarketable items, such as having heroes with dark sides, and a generally "down" ending. Rape, murder, and racial hatred are not usually found light-hearted adventures. A film with serious characters who experience adult problems is not something that could be sold to kids, such as myself when I first saw the film. For example, I saw The Searchers when I was a kid, and was clueless. I vastly preferred The Big Sky. More fun.So if you take the book and subtract the adult themes and plot elements, you are left with a film that was hugely entertaining to kids, as well as to any adult looking for pure escapism.

Sillyhuron The Big Sky is one of my favourite western novels - because it goes against all the "Western" rules. It's main character is vicious, angry and dangerous. In the first chapter, he tries to kill his own father (a fate the old creep richly deserves). If he's insulted,he pulls out a knife. When someone whips him, he comes back later planning a killing. People die throughout the book,they get scalped and VD and smallpox - kind of the way people did in the frontier.So what does Hollywood do? Make the lead the supporting character, the sidekick the lead (& make him Kirk Douglas - nice & non-threatening). Start the movie several chapters in, so you don't see Dada cop it. Oh, and the boatload of characters waving at the Indians at the end? Halfway through the book, those same Indians wiped them out. 'Nuff said. If you decide to make a movie of a book, why change it?

Robert J. Maxwell This is Howard Hawks' version of a boat trip to trade with Blackfeet Indians in 1840. It's a dangerous trip. Among the plentiful comic interludes there are scenes of action and sometimes death, though the deaths are never sentimentalized. It's the only movie I can think of in which the amputation of a man's finger is treated for laughs.A. B. Guthrie wrote the novel but it's a tragedy of sorts and Hawks doesn't stick to it closely. For good reason. Hawks liked to make movies with some commercial value and saw no reason to kill off characters the audience had grown to like. In the novel, young Boone Caudill (Martin) leaves the Midwest for Montana and winds up a savage, killing his friend Jim Deakins (Douglas), raping a woman on a visit back home, and trapping off most of the beaver. The last scene in the novel has Boone finding only one animal, an old female beaver with one leg in the line of steel traps, the flesh mostly gnawed off the bone, and he bashes her head in. Guthrie, a Pulitzer Prize winner, didn't pull any punches. The film's message is entirely different. It's business friendly. Free commerce is good for the Europeans and for the Blackfeet too. The movie, on the other hand, although long, is a rollicking adventure and the story of a friendship between two men, Martin and Douglas. It's probably Hawks' most homoerotic film. Martin in particular is extremely butch, with carefully coiffed hair and tight leather pants, with a couple of scenes in which he is shirtless and his robust pecs are on display. Of course, Hawks needn't have intended this subtext -- though it shows up in several of his flicks. Interviewed about recurring themes in his movies, he once told a reporter, "They attribute these things to me. It's all unconscious." However, the two friends are rivals for the affection of Teal Eye (Threatt), a former model who conformed to the type Hawks preferred, tall and outdoorsy. He seduced many of them. Easily. There would usually be an intimate dinner, and Hawks would ask something like, "Would you like to come up and spend a weekend at the ranch?" Threatt must have been quite a package. A major-league masochist, she once asked Douglas to whip her with his belt. Ever the gentleman, Douglas complied. According to his autobiography, Threatt said, "That wasn't hard enough. Really do it." "Are you sure?", asked Gentleman Kirk.The movie is full of Hawks' boyish ideas of honor and humor. There are several fist fights. In one, Douglas is beaned with a frying pan and sinks to the floor with his eyes askew. In another, a man cheats by holding a bullet pouch in his fist. They build a giant sling shot out of a tree to hurl a deer carcass downhill. Martin carries a trick rifle with two barrels. When they hold their enemies at gunpoint, Martin and Douglas taunt their captives. Not that the movie is sloppily constructed, though it has its gaps in believability. It's just that it's infused with Hawks. He copies liberally from his own previous works. (There's a word to describe that in music, quoting from your earlier tunes, but I forget what it is. Very annoying.) He even copies from "The Last of the Mohicans." The Indians aren't generic and they're treated relatively fairly, in the context of the period. The Crow really didn't cause any major problems for the Eastern settlers, and neither did the Blackfeet, who were almost wiped out by smallpox. The tribe after which the boat is named, the Mandan, were thoroughly extinguished by disease. They were all dead before the anthropologists or missionaries could reach them.At 140 minutes, it's pretty long but there's hardly ever a dull moment. The rousing and bombastic music is by Dmitri Tiompkin, moi drug. Arthur Hunnicut is the archetypal "wise old man." Hank Worden is Poordevil, the crazy Indian. Aside from the actual Indians involved, he's the only actor who really speaks the language with its torturous phonemes, but all his utterances are dubbed by a native speaker. When Poordevil talk, he's often filmed from behind so the dubbing isn't so obvious.A. B. Guthrie died at the age of 90 in Choteau, Montana, a quiet pleasant town, notable mainly for a spectacular view of the nearby Rocky Mountains and an on-going dinosaur dig a few miles out of town. A tranquil place.

garyzaboly Although it only covers the first half of A. B. Guthrie's masterpiece novel of the same title---leaving out the very dark events of the second half---Howard Hawks' 1952 film version of THE BIG SKY is unique unto itself: it need not be compared with the novel, nor history itself. What it is, is an atmospheric impression of a keelboat voyage up the Missouri River of the 1830s into dangerous Blackfoot country. It is simply a beautifully lensed film: you can almost feel the river breezes on your face, the warm sun poking through the clouds, and the "skeeters" that pester Caudill, Calloway, Deakins and Poordevil as they scout the Jackson Hole wilderness. Don't look for probing examinations into human behavior here: most of the characters are surface-deep, and the story is really not all that remarkable. The costumes are little better than "ok" in terms of providing a credible idea of what was worn in those days, but of course the scholarship into this area is much more advanced now than it was in 1952, so the makers of the film can be forgiven. It's HOW Hawks tells and shows that story and its characters that makes this an unforgettable film. And the rivers, plains, forests and peaks of the American West have rarely been so lovingly "understood" on film as they are here. Other movies about trappers and mountain men, especially ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI and JEREMIAH JOHNSON, have moments that are wonderfully evocative of that era, but for me THE BIG SKY possesses the one scene that has never been bettered in terms of capturing the spirit of these men and their times. This occurs near the end, when Boone, Deakins, and Poordevil ride the crest of the bluff as they wave to the keelboat "Mandan" below. With the Grand Tetons looming magnificently behind them, and Dimitri Tiomkin's score lushly but understatedly highlighting the moment, the pure essence of those long-gone days is artfully, and beautifully conveyed. I first saw this film 45 years ago on television, and I never get tired of watching, and hearing, it. It has a certain magic that either touches you, or it doesn't. Fault-free it is not, but by the end of the voyage its virtues overwhelm those faults.