Volume 9 , Issue 45

Across the Wide Missouri

"This movie was released in 1951. Clark Gable is the largely nonheroic hero of the sprawling western Across the Wide Missouri. A cunning trapper who lives purely by his wits, Gable avoids being scalped by the Blackfoot Indians by marrying Maria Elena Marques, the chief's daughter. This marriage of convenience also allows Gable to trap to his heart's content in Blackfoot territory. After bearing a child, Marques is killed by a warring tribe; the opportunistic Gable at first considers abandoning the child, but at long last does right by the boy. Adolphe Menjou steals the show as an eternally inebriated French trapper, while Ricardo Montalban and J. Carroll Naish are convincing (and noncondescending) in their Native American characterizations.

In the 1830's beaver trapper Flint Mitchell and other white men hunt and trap in the then unnamed territories of Montana and Idaho. Flint marries a Blackfoot woman as a way to gain entrance into her people's rich lands, but finds she means more to him than a ticket to good beaver habitat.

During the filming, Ricardo Montalban received a spinal injury which required a 9-1/2 hour operation and which has left him in constant pain ever since. Most of the "Native Americans" in this movie are all portrayed by Hispanic or Caucasian actors, because there was a noticeable lack of Native American actors at MGM at the time this movie was made." -- Across the Wide Missouri
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