Actually, Fred MacMurray, as Meriwether Lewis, gets top billing, but after the first act, when President Thomas Jefferson (Herbert Hayes) orders him to check out the 500,000 square miles of newly-purchased Lousiana Territory, and Lewis loses sweetheart Julia (Barbara Hale) to Heston's William Clark, The Far Horizons is much more Heston's show.

Particularly, that is, after Lewis, Clark, and their little band of soldiers (whose numbers include a strangely-accented Sgt. Cass, eccentrically played by William Demarest) encounter Sacajawea (Donna Reed), a Shoshone Indian who quickly begins a love affair with Clark. Lewis, who has already lost Julia to Clark's charms, is none-too-happy with the arrangement, and keeps pressing Clark to get rid of her, though he won't budge. Further complicating matters is a French trapper, Charboneau (Alan Reed - imagine Fred Flintstone in buckskin and talking wis zee French akscent), claiming the Hidatsas, the tribe that held Sacajawea in bondage, had promised her to him; and Wild Eagle (Larry Pennell), a scarred brave from Sacajawea's own tribe betrothed to her as well.

You're probably asking yourself by now, what does any of this have to do with the Lewis & Clark Expedition? The answer is almost nothing at all. Though most of the film's characters did actually exist, Sacajawea was already "married" to Charboneau (he bought her) and with child when the expedition started, and remained with him until her death in 1812. The movie romance between Clark and Sacajawea was pure fiction.

Nonetheless, it comes to dominate a story already short on action and eats up the entire last reel of the picture. Though Charlton Heston and Donna Reed give the love scenes a certain earnestness, she is totally miscast and the Hollywood restrictions on interracial romances doom the affair before it can even begin. Reed, her anachronistically blue eyes generally half-closed in a kind of resigned state of exhaustion, spends most of the film resembling an overworked cleaning lady. The picture's overloaded romantic entanglements (it's not so much a romantic triangle as a cube) lead nowhere. Lewis's anger with Clark over Julia, Clark's guilt over Julia while romancing Sacajawea, Charboneau's interests in Sacajawea, etc.

You'd think the expedition itself or the real-life backgrounds of the two explorers (especially the tragic Meriwether Lewis) would by themselves offer reams of fascinating material. Instead, there's just one scene where the filmmakers try to give the explorers a sense of wonder, and it's badly botched. Looking at the scenery, members of the Permanent Party shout out awesomely banal dialogue: "Look at all the elk!" "Plenty of 'em, too!" "Sure are a lot of 'em!" "Never seen so many!" This accompanies a shot of about 20 elk.

The movie might have offered, for instance, narration from the pages of the actual journals, or maybe Lewis & Clark's surprise at animals and Native Americans and natural wonders never seen by white men before, but there's almost none of this.

Instead, the film drips with Manifest Destiny in embarrassing sequences like the one where the party wanders into a Hidatsa Indian camp and Lewis casually announces, "This is a picture of our chief. He is your chief now, as well as ours." He then tells them, like he's doing them a favor, that the new chief'll be offering his protection. None of this is treated with any irony or consideration, even though by the early-1950s many Hollywood films were reexamining the genocide of the American Indian in Westerns like Broken Arrow (1950).

Video & Audio

Filmed by Daniel L. Fapp in VistaVision, The Far Horizons has been given a fairly good transfer in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen format. It does not appear that the transfer went back to the original horizontal negative; at least the lack of a pristine sharpness suggests this. The image is generally fine with good color, but the image is a bit wobbly at times, like an old three-color Technicolor movie where the matrixes don't fully match. The mono sound is acceptable. There are optional English subtitles but that's it: there are no other subtitle or audio options, and no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

As a historical Western romance, The Far Horizons is blandly passable, but those interested in anything more than that are encouraged to watch Ken Burns' much more historically accurate, and ultimately far more dramatic, documentary on Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997) instead. You can read more about the expedition here.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.