THE BIG SKY: Go North, Young Man

There’s something larger than life about the concept of the “American frontier” to me, from its towering mountain ranges to tranquil streams zigzagging through dense forests. There’s a romanticism to it all, the kind of inherent beauty that’s ripe for cinematic exploration. It’s a large reason for my fondness for westerns, as I love seeing human morality struggle against lawless wilderness in a push and pull relationship to craft order where there is none. While my taste in the genre heavily skews toward tales of gunslingers and lawmen, I do have a fondness for Howard Hawk’s 1952 overlooked entry in the genre, The Big Sky.

Set in 1832, the film stars Kirk Douglas as a fur trader seeking to make his fortune in the burgeoning fur trade, shacking up with the trigger-happy Boone (Dewey Martin). With Boone’s uncle’s posse of trappers, they travel up the Mississippi to strike it rich. Along for the ride is a Native American woman (Elizabeth Threatt) who may put a divide between these two new friends as they vie for her affection.

Howard Hawks is no small fish in the western genre, having directed stone cold classics like Rio Bravo and Red River, the latter of which was released a few years before The Big Sky. However, this film often gets short shrift when discussing his western work, which is disheartening as it’s certainly better than Rio Lobo. 

I think a big reason for that lack of critical fondness has to do with the film’s seemingly unfocused narrative. While Hawks was never one for slavish devotion to narrative, there’s a certain free flowing pacing to the film. The traders encounter one obstacle after another, get through it, and then reflect on what has happened, usually through some great Hawksian banter or the even more Hawksian expression of self-destructive masculinity: a good ole fashioned brawl. However, it’s this same scattershot approach that gives the film an interesting parallel to the expansion of America across the frontier. What was western expansion but a group of intrepid pioneers throwing caution to the wind and then getting knocked down time and time again, but still forging on despite it all? It’s a quintessentially American belief in human endurance overcoming all odds in the name of securing one’s own personal dream.

It’s a common (and more than justified) critique that we tend to gloss over America’s foundation of colonialism and destruction of native cultures. However, Hawks here seems to repurpose those very same attributes, twisting them into something strangely wholesome. It’s a story about a motley crew of Native Americans, American drifters, and French working-class men banding together to fight against the Missouri Fur Company. It’s small scale entrepreneurship against bloated monopoly, the little guys working together against unchecked greed. Despite its dubious historical accuracy in terms of ethnic group relations (let’s pretend the French and Indian War didn’t happen in this universe), there’s a kind of genuine belief in the human capacity for cooperation and camaraderie here that feels like a warm blanket in an era where division feels like the norm. After all, if we can fawn over Tarantino for historical revisionism in his movies, why can’t we extend the same courtesy to Hawks?

The iconic Hawksian woman here is found in an (albeit unfortunately redfaced) great performance by Elizabeth Threatt, who both exemplifies but also subverts the tropes associated with the archetype. Whereas Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep are verbose and quick to retort when their competence is challenged, Threatt’s Teal Eye doesn’t speak English at all. Most of the male characters spend their time trying to figure out what she’s saying, which feeds back into the idea of the Hawksian woman as a mysterious figure to be understood by a community of men who are thrown into flux by her presence. She instead speaks through her actions, proving to be a foil to the boisterous Boone who says a lot, but does very little right. Like the typical Hawksian hero, he talks too much, but thinks too little. Even by the end of the film, the characters (and the audience by extension) don’t fully understand her. In one of my fave shots in the Hawks oeuvre, our last image of her is as she stands alone on the bank of the village as the men sail away, still just as alien as before. 

If there was ever a Hawks movie in desperate need of restoration, it’s this one (Criterion wya?!). Having viewed this on Prime Video via a beat up VHS print that was probably colorized under media grand poobah Ted Turner, a lot of the cinematography feels “off”. The shades of green of forestry seem sapped of saturation and instead have a yellowish-brown tint to them, which is just ugly. For a movie that goes out of its way to thank the National Park Service its in opening, the gorgeous landscape shots are criminally underserved by the current lackluster print available.

The Big Sky is Hawks’ philosophy of honest work and self-ownership presented as the same thinking that allowed us to stretch from shore to shore. Manifest Destiny is revealed to be the product of rugged individuals seeking to carve out their own personal fortune and somehow managing to string together bonds along the way, the seeds of community in wilderness beginning to sprout. Reductive and saccharine? Possibly, but it’s the kind of vision of America I’d like to believe in, even if it’s through a fantasy only the movies can provide.