Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

robertguttman Howard Hawks directed successful movies in just about every genre; including screwball comedy, film noir and even science fiction. However, he seems to have had a particular affinity for westerns, and "The Big Sky" was one of his best. "The Big Sky", which Hawks made made in 1952, was a western produced on a scale every bit as grand as his earlier effort, "Red River". However, despite the fact that "The Big Sky" is also a western, it is a very different movie. "The Big Sky" is set in a much earlier era, 1831. One result of that is that the usual lever-action Winchester rifles and "six-shooters" found in most westerns are absent, the characters being armed with the muzzle-loading rifles of that earlier era. In addition surprisingly few horses and no cattle, are in evidence for a western, since the story deals with an earlier era, when fur-trading was the important business and cattle-raising hadn't even begun yet. There is also a great deal of water in evidence for a western, since most of the action takes place on board a boat making it's way up the Missouri River. Another unusual feature is that, for a western, the story features an unusually large proportion of French-speaking characters. It is often forgotten today that the city of St. Louis, Missouri was actually founded by the French, and only became part of the United States in 1803. Consequently, there were undoubtedly many French-speaking people to be found still living around there three decades later, just as there were farther south in New Orleans."The Big Sky" is, of course, the nickname for the present-day State of Montana, and the story revolves around a voyage up the Missouri River to trade with the Indians living as far up river as that region, if not beyond. Interestingly, the Indians are depicted as being not necessarily averse to such contact. In fact, the biggest conflict is with the large "Trading Company", with which the protagonists are in commercial competition.Filmed in black-and-white amid some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, "The Big Sky" is a spectacular and somewhat unusual western that is well worth a look.

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.

henrylbs This is a movie that I try to watch whenever it is on but I am sad because there is so much that I don't like about it. First the positives... I love the haunting theme music that just seems so appropriate for this movie. I also like the story about a largely unknown time in western America and and I like the way it is presented as a story being told by the Arthur Hunnicutt character, the old mountain man Zeb Calloway. The narration is just perfect with Hunnicutt's folksy voice and because it mostly fills in the holes and keeps it all moving. And then there are the interesting characters of which I especially like the seemingly hapless Indian Poordevel played by Hank Worden. And now the things that bother me about the movie... I hate the fact that it is in black and white and moreover it seems dark and lifeless to me. All the wonder that could have been made of the magnificent scenery is lost. What a waste. Second, I generally dislike Kirk Douglas who always seems so over the top, so overbearing and obnoxious and unlikeable that I have difficulty watching any movie that he is in. (I've read that he was rather unlikeable and this aspect of his personality seems to show through in his roles.) In this one he is a frontiersman, Jim Deakins,who mainly plays against another frontiersman, Boone Caudill, played by the unknown actor Dewey Martin. Martin's personality is nonexistent with the result that the overpowering Douglas dominates every scene so the movie is mostly about the Douglas character and a lot of the other character development is not done sufficiently. For example we wonder why Poordevil is the way he is, a drunken Indian caricature yet reliable when he is needed. We also miss the fact until the very end that something is going on between the Indian woman Teal Eye whose character is totally undeveloped and the Martin character Boone Caudill. We really never get to know either of them so for me at least the ending came as a surprise. In fact, I'm not sure Teal Eye, who is played by Elizabeth Threatt, has a single line in this movie and Boone has little to say except in the scenes dominated by Douglas. Arthur Hunnicutt shines through all this but except as the story teller, his is a minor role. The clash with the trading company is predictable and the story ends well as we suspect it will since the narrator lived to tell about it. All and all, a very watchable movie that makes me crazy when I think about how good it could have been .

bkoganbing One of my favorite Kirk Douglas films is The Big Sky where he plays mountain man/trapper Jim Deakins. It's a great part for Douglas with his incredible charm and quick burn when someone does him wrong.The Big Sky was RKO Pictures big production for 1952. I'd like to say that Howard Hughes spared no expense in making this film, shooting a good deal of it in the Grand Tetons, the actual location for the adventures of many fur trappers. But for the life of me I don't understand why Hughes and RKO after doing that, didn't spring for color.Possibly because director Howard Hawks wanted black and white. His last epic film Red River had done well in black and white. Still I really think something was missed. RKO did use color on films with a lot less budget.There's a lot of similarity between The Big Sky and Red River. Both films involve a group of men on an epic journey into the unknown for business reasons. In Red River, John Wayne has to get that huge herd to market and has to use a trail few have used. In The Big Sky a group of independent trappers basically want to land a nice fur contract with the Blackfeet Indians where few whites have gone up the Missouri River. Going against them is a fur trading consortium kind of like the one John Jacob Astor put together.The trappers are mostly French Canadian Metis headed by Steven Geray, but also along is Arthur Hunnicutt who speaks the Indian language. Their ace in the hole is Elizabeth Threatt, a Blackfoot princess the trappers have rescued and are bringing back to her people in the hopes that her old man will be grateful. Hunnicutt is also the narrator of the film.Douglas and Dewey Martin join up with the group in St. Louis and the trappers have the usual adventures as they take the flatboat up into the Missouri River country. The scenes showing journey upriver are nicely photographed.Two others in the cast merit attention. Hank Worden does a nice job as a lost Blackfoot Indian who the trappers pick up. He may not be playing with a full deck, but he does come in handy. Jim Davis is one lean and mean villain as the company troubleshooter who wants to keep the independents out.Arthur Hunnicutt got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role, The Big Sky proved to be his career film. Unfortunately he lost to Anthony Quinn for Viva Zapata. Still Hunnicutt's folksy charm was always something to look forward to in any film he was ever in.The Big Sky is one of the best films ever done about the mountain man era of the American frontier. If they'd only spent for color.