GManfred
Clark Gable's career was not the same after WWII, and he was not really "The King" any longer. But in "Across The Wide Missouri", Gable still shows some of the old magic. Although approaching 50, he still appears trim and athletic and flashes the toothy grin which was so appealing to his female fans. Here he is a fur trapper in a glossy Technicolor MGM western directed by Veteran William Wellman, who here seemed to copy John Ford's style of adding a third dimension by adding depth to the characters. Several reviewers have noted that the film was hacked up by studio heads and several action scenes were cut, to the detriment of the final product.I guess nowadays a western has to have a gritty, realistic look but this one is old-fashioned in that respect and has a clean and fresh aspect in the appearance of the characters and sets. I also thought the film was unevenly paced and with protracted stretches of inaction (perhaps due to the aforementioned editing). I'm not a film critic of a historian, just a moviegoer, but I can rate the overall entertainment value. I would recommend it on that basis, but I can't help thinking it could have been so much better.
tcwlsn
"Across the Wide Missouri":1951: The setting for 'Across the Wide Missouri' is the state of Montana, however the majority of the film was shot in the San Juan Mountains, and north of Durango, Colorado. The movie included Clark Gable in it's cast of characters, as well as Ricardo Montalban and Maria Elena Marques. In the movie, stunt man Fred Kennedy suffered a broken neck when his intentional fall from a horse did not go as smoothly as he had intended. The whole incident was caught on film and used in the movie. Thanks to http://www.communigate.co.uk/ne/filmguyernie/page8.phtml
bkoganbing
When one watches western films of the latter half of the 19th century, the settlement of the west was on a course that was nothing but bad for the American Indian. As good as some westerns are, always lingering in the back of any viewer's mind is the thought that no matter what the predicament of a given hero/heroine in any film is the fact that the might and power of the United States Cavalry will ultimately tip the balance towards the white man.But the fur trappers of the early half of that century faced a far different situation. They were few and the Indians at that point outnumbered them. These people as typified by Clark Gable and the rest of the cast in Across the Wide Missouri were the really brave ones in our history. They wanted to trap their beaver and sell their pelts and the last thing they wanted was wholesale immigration of settlers. It took a lot of nerve to live in that lonely existence, days and weeks at a time where you couldn't count on a troop of soldiers to bail you out of trouble.I'm a big old sucker for films about the earlier west and two good ones came out at this time, this one and the following year from RKO, The Big Sky. I give the nod to this one thought because it was done in color and on location.Gable gets one of his best post World War II parts as the sturdy Flint Mitchell, mountain man who falls big time for Indian princess Maris Elena Marques. While grandfather Jack Holt approves of a white husband for his granddaughter, the match don't sit well at all with Ricardo Montalban his successor. The climatic duel between Gable and Montalban is staged very well indeed and quite thrilling.Playing various fur trapper roles are Alan Napier, James Whitmore, John Hodiak and most of all Adolphe Menjou. Though one normally expects the debonair Mr. Menjou in tuxedo, he's really quite good as the French Canadian trapper and sidekick to Gable.Maria Elena Marquess got her first of two chances in Hollywood and did well as the Indian princess. She was already a name in Mexican cinema and became an even bigger star down there due to this film with Clark Gable.This film marked the farewell performance of Jack Holt who died soon after it was completed. His career spanned all the way back to the earliest years of Hollywood. He makes a very impressive chief of the Blackfeet.Gable was a rugged outdoors-man in real life, he liked to fish and hunt and brought his fourth wife, Lady Sylvia Ashley on location. Unfortunately Lady Sylvia was not a big fan of the great outdoors and her experiences roughing it contributed to the Gables getting unhitched.Director William Wellman kept things going at a good clip and though Across the Wide Missouri is slightly over 75 minutes for an A film, it's still a great item and rates being an A film for its cast and its production values.
Alice Liddel
One of the first 'liberal' Westerns that emerged tentatively in the 1950s, films showing that Indians weren't just bloodthirsty savages but peoples with their own culture and humanity. In making this ethical breakthrough, Wellmann doesn't reject the traditional, Fordian Western that had relegated the Native American to a whooping menace; instead, he embraces it. Like Ford's films, 'Missouri' is a history lesson, a tribute to the pioneers who 'tamed' America, 'giants' as the narrator calls them, the camera duly recording the suitably vast sky as a Wagnerian backdrop for these men.
'Missouri' records the development of a UNITED States, and not only does the film bring together a melting pot of different nationalties - Americans, Indians, Scots, French (who provide the kind of knockabout, Fordian 'humour' usually reserved for the Irish) etc., with their own tongues, stories, music etc. - but also a series of structural opposites (man/woman; nature/civilisation, capitalism, language) to create a national allegory of cohesion. Even the past and the future are brought together - the narrator tells of great doings in the past, stretching back at least as far as Waterloo, the Old World; but it is also his story, the tale of his birth, itself the literal and allegorical fruit of racial togetherness, the white man and red woman, even if the cheerful narration does sound conventionally WASPish.Of course, you can't create without destroying, and, as in all those folk tales and myths that express the primal hopes and fears of a people, the evil spirits have to be exorcised, in this case the renegade Indian Iron Shirt, who has the nerve to equate the white man's convenient desire for peace and mutual help with the loss of his own land. We shouldn't expect miracles in 1951; 'Missouri' is only as liberal as its times will allow it - only those Others that accept the White way of life are welcome. Although Mitchell and Kamiah seem to engage in a reciprocating process of teaching and initiation, it is Kamiah who is infantilised, who is brought back to her grandfather, who is put across her husband's lap and smacked for disobedience, i.e. for following her own instincts and customs.
Iron Shirt, rightly hostile to a people who only see the awesome beauty of the Missouri landscape for the money it can make them, is demonised. The birth of the child is linked to the natural surroundings he is heir to; when Iron Shirt tries to kill him, his transgression is clearly unnatural, just as his unwillingness to see the white point of view and give in. In a world where translators (hence communication, conciliation) are the true currency of progress, Iron Shirt is a man of action and physical signs, not to be trusted.The film feels like a civic lecture, made to be shown to schoolchildren to teach them tolerance and the great American way. But Wellman has directed some of the most sombre Westerns ever made ('The Ox-Bow Incident', 'Yellow Sky'), where American progress has fatally turned in on itself, and the bright colours and cheerful tone here are deceptive. As if to warn us, he uses his characteristic montage zoom, whereby his camera pulls back from a composition, not by a zoom, but by cutting backwards at different angles from it, creating an eerie, distancing effect. The climax in the woods, as Mitchell fights Ironside, has a clear symbolic purpose, but it is the most chilling in the film, with no music. To root out the savage, Mitchell himself must become savage, using the Indian's tools to destroy him. He has become destructive and can no longer take part in the forging of a community, from which he voluntarily expels himself. In this story of nation, community and unity, this breach of withdrawal is troubling, and marks the film as a first step in the direction of the traditional Western's apotheosis, 'The Searchers'.
