Across the Wide Missouri (1951)

Clark Gable is trapper Flint Mitchell in this tribute to the mountain man that helped open the West to the whites who followed.

He has his eyes on the plentiful beaver in Blackfoot territory, and marries pretty Indian maiden Kamiah (Maria Elena Marques) because she’s the daughter of a Blackfoot chief.

But there’s a young Blackfoot brave named Ironshirt (a very buff-looking Ricardo Montalban) who sees the white man’s arrival as a call to war.

Kamiah’s father keeps the Blackfoot tribe peaceful, until he’s killed by a vengeance-seeking trapper whose partner was previously killed by Ironshirt’s men.

That leaves Ironshirt as chief, and that spells trouble, Mitchell knows. Sure enough, as the trappers are headed for a rendezvous, their packs fat with furs, Ironshirt and his men attack.

By that point, Mitchell has more than a fortune in furs to protect. He’s fallen in love with the woman he married out of convenience, and she’s borne him a son.

Review:

Pretty darn awful, given the expectations for a film directed by William Wellman and one starring Gable. The plot is flimsy. We never see the mountain men trap a single beaver. And the action sequences are few and far between.

Marques makes for an attractive Indian maiden, but she was a Mexican actress who reportedly appeared in just one other American-made film, 1953’s “Ambush at Tomahawk Gap.”

And the fact that the narrator is Flint Mitchell’s son, explains that he’s telling the story his father told him. Since he was no more than an infant when the trip out of the mountains begins … well, it sort of ends any suspense about who’s going to survive the final Indian attack.

As for Wellman, he disowned the film because of cuts made to his finished print. The narration, provided by Howard Keel, was added later to stitch the story line back together after those cuts.

Directed by:
William Wellman

Cast:
Clark Gable … Flint Mitchell
Maria Elena Marques … Kamiah
Ricardo Montalban … Ironshirt
John Hodiak … Brecan
Adolphe Menjou … Pierre
J. Carrol Naish … Looking Glass
Jack Holt … Bear Ghost
Alan Napier … Capt. Lyon
Narrator … Howard Keel

Runtime: 78 min.

Memorable lines:

Mountain man to Flint Mitchell: “You can’t just go over there and buy the girl.”
Mitchell: “Why can’t I?”
Mountain man: “Well, it’s one thing for Brecan to take her back to her own people. But old Looking Glass won’t trade her to you. Oh, no. He’ll expect you to marry her.”
Mitchell: “I’d expect to myself. She can’t do me any harm, and she might do me a lot of good.”

Pierre to Flint Mitchell: “Mr. Flint, you know all about the mountains, but you know nothing about the woman… not yet… but you will learn.”

Narrator: “My father told me that for the first time, he saw these Indians as he had never seen them before – as people with homes and traditions and ways of their own. Suddenly they were no longer savages. They were people who laughed and loved and dreamed.”

Alan Napier as Capt. Lyon with Adolphe Menjou as Pierre in Across the Wide Missouri (1951)

Jack Holt as Bear Ghost, Blackfoot grandfather of Kamiah in Across the Wide Missouri (1951)

Maria Elena Marques as Kamiah, mad at Flint Mitchell for returning to their teepee drunk on their wedding night in Across the Wide Missouri (1951)

Clark Gable as Flint Mitchell, his focus set on trapping in the beaver-rich area controlled by the Blackfoot tribe in Across the Wide Missouri (1951)