All a bit perfunctory
Some would say The Far Horizons is more of a historical drama than a Western and
they’d probably be right but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt today and
review it on this Western blog. After all, it is set in the nineteenth-century far
West and does have attacks by Indians.
Paramount splurged a bit on this picture with big
stars, VistaVision and Technicolor (though it was later re-released in
black-and-white) and handsome Wyoming locations. That’s about where the
spending stopped. Still, the movie did create a stir as a ‘big’ picture.
It is, as you are doubtless aware, the Lewis
and Clark story – surprisingly perhaps the only big Lewis & Clark feature film
to date. But it’s 1950s Hollywood, so don’t expect historical accuracy. Not at
all. In fact it’s a lot of hooey, though factually an improvement on Charlton Heston’s
take on the Pony Express of two years
before, one of the most egregious travesties of historical truth ever committed
to celluloid.
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark Hollywood style
Heston, sour as ever, is William Clark. For
such a macho gun-loving type I wonder that Heston didn’t do more Westerns,
really. He appeared in ten, which was not a great number for the 50s and 60s he
worked in. Many of them were poor or very poor (The Savage, Arrowhead, Pony Express). Major Dundee and The Big Country were potentially good but flawed films, and not helped by his performance in them. Far and away Heston’s best, in
fact for me the only Western I think he was really good in, was Will Penny in 1967. He always came
across as a bitter or downright unpleasant character, except for his Will Penny.
Anyway, in The Far Horizons he is
portrayed as the friend of Lewis who unwittingly steals away Lewis’s girl
(Barbara Hale) and then falls out with Lewis, partly because of this, on the
expedition.
Not the most cheerful or charming chap on screen. I am sure he was very nice really.
Fred MacMurray is the more optimistic and
commanding Meriwether Lewis (it is said that he was third choice for the role
after Gary Cooper and John Wayne, who both turned it down). Unlike Heston, Fred has a fan in me. I
always thought he was good – I’d even say surprisingly good – in Westerns. He
made, depending on your definition of a Western, about fourteen, from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (more of
an adventure/romance really) in 1936 to The Oregon Trail (his worst Western) in 1959. Fred was often excellent in the
genre, though.
Fred being frightfully fair
Despite Fred's getting top billing and being in
command of the Corps
of Discovery Expedition, it’s really Heston who gets most screen time.

Rudolph Maté (left) directed. A cinematographer, he had
been an uncredited cameraman on The Westerner in 1940, presumably learning from William Wyler, and had started
directing Westerns in 1950 with Branded,
an Alan Ladd picture for Paramount, following that with The Mississippi Gambler with Tyrone Power in 1953 and probably his
best Western (though it’s only relative), The Violent Men with Glenn Ford, Edward G Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck the
year after. The year before Far Horizons
he had done the stodgy Siege at Red River
with a miscast Van Johnson. It was not a very distinguished Western record. The
following year Maté would work with Heston again on Three Violent People, also not very good. He only does a fair job
on Far Horizons, trying to keep the pace
going (not always succeeding) and endeavoring to make the hokum romance vaguely interesting (an effort destined to fail).
At least the Hans Salter score is occasionally
vigorous and stirring. You sometimes think it’s only the music that is.
Maté used Daniel L Fapp (right) as cinematographer.
Fapp spent most of his career at Paramount though would win an Oscar for best
cinematography on United Artists’ West
Side Story in 1961. He also did the visually superb stark black & white
noir The Big Clock in 1948. He didn’t
do many Westerns (though he was apparently one of the cameramen on the lost
1930 version of The Spoilers, the
Gary Cooper one). He made the most of the Jackson Hole and Grand Teton
locations on The Far Horizons, though
of course a fair bit of the movie was shot on studio sound stages too.
The farrago (for it is a farrago, e-pards) was written by Winston Miller with Edmund
North from the 1943 novel Sacajawea of
the Shoshones by Della Gould. North
is most famous for The Day the Earth
Stood Still but did contribute to Westerns, some goodish ones: Destry, Cowboy, Only the Valiant and Colorado Territory for example. Miller,
however, was a bigger figure in our noble genre: he had been a child actor in The Iron Horse, had penned B-oaters for
the likes of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, had written and/or produced some
excellent little Westerns such as Station West and Fury at Furnace Creek
but earned undying Western fame for his screenplay for John Ford’s My Darling Clementine in 1946. It was a
great Western career.
North
Miller
Fred has to appear in his first scene in very
silly silk britches, like grandma’s bloomers, but he soon gets over that. He is
the secretary of President Jefferson (Herbert Heyes) at a posh party at the
Hancocks and he wants to propose to Julia Hancock (Hale) but Lt. Bill Clark
(Heston) arrives and beats him to it. Still, Fred is frightfully decent about
it, the best man won and all that. Commissioned by the president to explore the
new Louisiana Purchase (it’s 1803), Lewis asks for Clark to accompany him and
requests equal rank and joint command of the expedition, I’m not quite sure
why. A recipe for disaster, I’d say. But the prez agrees.
That's Sgt. Demarest in the middle, trying to keep the peace
They have Sergeant William Demarest for a bit
of color and semi comic-relief. He is a relief too, now and then, for the
principals are a bit on the earnest side. The expedition sets off up the
Missouri on their riverboat and they all change into buckskins. It’s getting a bit more
Western now. They come upon the village of the Minnetaree Indians whose chief
is Ralph Moody.
Lewis gives the chief a medal as compensation for taking over all his lands
The chief is rather ambiguous about these American arrivals, fearing
they are the precursors of many white-eye invaders to come (and he is not
wrong). He listens to the counsel of evil, sweaty and unshaven French-Canadian Charbonneau (Alan
Reed, no relation to Donna, described by one reviewer as “Fred Flintstone in
buckskins”), who also fears Yankee traders and convinces the chief to attack
the expedition. The chief contemptuously throws the medal Lewis had given him
from the president in the dirt. He’d probably seen High Noon.
A splendid picture of the real Charbonneau
It’s at this village that they meet Sacajawea
(as she is called here), blue-eyed Donna Reed in unconvincing heavy make-up,
doing her Debra Paget act. She is a Shoshone, captured and working as a slave.
She offers to guide the expedition as a way to get back to her people. She
falls for Lt. Clark (he’s still a lieutenant, the War Department having lost
his promotion) and Clark, despite the glam Julia back home who has accepted him,
finds himself reciprocating. Such shocking miscegenation! Once he spots this,
Lewis disapproves highly (but then he still holds a candle for the fair Julia).
Of course Hollywood taboos on interracial romances doomed the love affair at
the outset; we know it will not end well. And given that Maté and the producers
(William H Pine and William C Thomas, who together produced 81 pictures for
Paramount) decided to make this romance the very heart of the film, it rather
doomed the movie too.
Reed a token Indian maid
Now all this is baloney. Sacajawea was not a
guide; in reality she was little more than an interpreter and reassuring presence.
And there is no evidence whatsoever that she had an affair with Clark. Later,
the movie Lewis conveniently tears the relevant five pages out of his journal to keep the affair
all decently under wraps, so that’s why there’s no record of it, you see. But
Hollywood had to have a bit of romance, n’est-ce
pas?
It's lerve
Toussaint Charbonneau was in fact a member of the
expedition, not its enemy, and Sacajawea was his woman. Shortly after joining
Lewis and Clark she gave birth to a baby, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. Clark
referred to Charbonneau and Sacajawea in his journal dismissively as “Interpreter & Squar”. In
the movie, after the expedition Sacajawea accompanies Clark to Washington DC (which she did not),
is presented there to President Jefferson in what they call "the White House" (it wasn't known as that then) and it is the president who arranges her
discreet departure back to her people, provoking much boo-hooing from (now) Capt.
Clark. The future of sad Julia, disillusioned by her former beau, is not
mentioned (in fact Clark married her and they had five children).
In 2011, Time Magazine
rated The Far Horizons as one of the top ten most historically
misleading films, and they had a point. Still, we don’t watch such movies for
historical accuracy. You want history? Read a history book.
Believe it if you will
There’s some movie action,
with various Indians attacking, a desperate fight in canoes, natural hazards, fever
and so on. Various expedition members are killed (in fact only one died, and that
from a ruptured appendix three months after the departure). Lewis is especially
brave and resourceful. But there are definitely tedious bits. And some pretty
clunky dialogue:
"Look at all the elk!"
"Sure are a lot of 'em!"
(Shot of about five distant elk).
There’s no sense of wonder or of the new. They just seem to take everything as normal. It
is instead a perfunctory manifest destiny statement, with Lewis blandly
assuming sovereignty for the United States of the whole continent. “This is a
picture of my chief,” he says at one point to an Indian. “He’s your chief too, now.”
In no time they get to the Pacific. Peezy. Right,
back to Washington, they seem to say, as if Maté can’t wait to return to drawing
rooms and tailcoats. Lewis and Clark are back in DC in a trice, looking as if
they have just been out for an afternoon stroll, with no signs of
fatigue at all.
If you’re not too fussy
you might enjoy it.
The New York Times was
uncomplimentary: “A surprisingly dull account of the Lewis and Clark wilderness
trek, Paramount's ‘The Far Horizons’ landed at the Criterion yesterday with a
hollow thud.” French critic Erick Maurel said it was “un
film non seulement paresseux et ennuyeux, platement filmé et mal rythmé, mais
également plutôt réactionnaire” (a film that is not only lazy and
boring, flat in its filming and with bad rhythm, but also rather reactionary.”)
Given the
astonishing achievement of the expedition one feels that a film of it ought to
have been grandly epic. The Far Horizons
is, however, all rather turgid.
All in all you might
prefer Ken Burns's 1997 documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of
the Corps of Discovery. It’s
actually more dramatic. Or, if you want something more Western, The Big Sky,
which was (vaguely) inspired by the expedition, Elizabeth Threatt’s Teal Eye
character being more than a little Sacajawea-ish.