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?

DKosty123 There are elements to this movie which are classic. The obvious location shooting shows up in a lot of scenes which enhances the experience even though the film is black and white. The actors carry the film as it tells several stories in the characters and has a lot of social interaction. This is one of the very few Western films made where fighting Indians is not the central theme.What tends to make it lack classic status is the fact the film really has not been preserved very well judging from the TCM showing I have been watching. There are some scenes and dialogs which are much rougher than the original film was. What really shows up in this film is the lack of money RKO had for pictures at this point.This top notch cast and great director do a great job putting something very watchable on film but the budget for the film is obviously very thin as you can tell watching the film. Kirk Douglas account addresses this as he mentions loving doing this movie in spite of spending more than 2 weeks tent camping.The lack of money for a long feature contributes to the fact this one was shot in black and white in an era where color had taken over for films like this. RKO cut an extra 20 minutes off the film, because they were out of money and afraid that the longer movie would be so long it would not sell tickets.Still, because of the locations and acting, this movie commands attention from viewers. It is a shame it was made on a shoe string which shows very obviously in the finished product.

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.

aberlour36 This western features lovely scenery (alas, in black and white), a fairly good chase story, impressive music, and some excellent props and sets. On the other hand, some of the dialog is ludicrous, the ending is predictable, and at times the acting is ridiculously bad. Smirking Kirk Douglas and ever smooth-shaved Dewey Martin, with his impeccable conk and very tight leather pants, are not at all convincing as rough and tough frontiersmen. The female parts, like the Indian and black roles, are stereotypical and far from politically correct. The movie is very long (141 minutes), but the action and suspense generally hold one's interest.