Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Please don't spend money on this.

i must have seen a different film!!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I thought it was appropriate to reflect on the following issue, "Is historical accuracy relevant to the quality of a film?" If it is manufactured to provide a true representation of history, maybe so. But if it as manufactured as an entertainment vehicle, maybe not.As a piece of fiction, I believe this film to be one of the finest works of western lore ever recorded. It appeals to both men and women. It promotes ethical values. And it fills the viewer with the full range of emotions that it is expected to.I won't waste your time with the details of the plot, you can find that by the ton here. All I can tell you is that I believe that anyone who is willing to invest the time will absolutely love this.

'The Far Horizons' is a film in which an expeditionary force, commanded by Captain Meriwether Lewis (Fred MacMurray) and Lt William Clark (Charlton Heston), sets out to explore newly acquired US territory. The film begins with an atmospheric party at which the news of the American expansion is broken, and arrangements are made to investigate. Subsequent scenes are ominous and foretelling, and handle this effect quite well. Sadly, it tends to go downhill from there. Although MacMurray, Heston and Donna Reed (who plays a helpful young Native woman and romantic interest of Lt Clark) play their parts well, the uncertainty of the surveyors' mission renders the film's direction ambiguous at times. The cinematography is in parts very good, and the tedious, repetitive shots that I usually associate with maritime films are satisfyingly rare in 'The Far Horizons'. However, some of the choreography isn't very good, and one or two fight scenes appear pretty poorly designed. Also, many of the Natives are depicted as being quite flat in character and lacking in opinion, and so not many of the supporting cast and extras perform dynamically. The final scenes of the film attempt to be reflective, with a letter being read in a narrative form, but the mediocre and vague drama in the prior scenes lead to this delivery feeling unsubstantiated.

In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were ordered by President Thomas Jefferson to lead an expedition surveying the territory that the United States had recently acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. Their expedition, which lasted several years, played an important role in increasing Americans' knowledge of the continent on which they lived and in opening it up to white settlement, but "The Far Horizons" is to date the only film on the subject.Although it is based upon a real-life event, many of the details are heavily fictionalised. A fictional love-triangle is introduced with Lewis and Clark in love with the same woman, Julia Hancock. (Julia was a real person who became Clark's first wife). The triangle becomes a quadrangle when Clark falls in love with an Indian maiden named Sacagawea, even though he is engaged to Julia. Sacagawea was also a real person, who acted as a guide to the expedition, although the love between her and Clark was an invention of the scriptwriters for which there is no historical evidence, just as there is no evidence for Lewis's love for Julia. Their relationship becomes the main focus of the film, which means that the first part of the journey, across the Great Plains, is ignored in favour of the later part through the Pacific Northwest. (Sacagawea was from the Shoshone tribe, who lived in what is today Idaho).I felt that the film would have been better, in a dramatic sense, if it had followed its own dramatic logic and ended with the marriage of Clark and Sacagawea, leaving Julia free to marry Lewis who has always loved her faithfully. (I know that would have made it even more historically inaccurate than it already is, but historical accuracy was clearly not the film-makers' priority). Instead, it ends with Sacagawea leaving Clark to return to her own people, even though she is in love with him, and him marrying Julia. It has been suggested that this ending was dictated by a Production Code which tolerated interracial love but not interracial marriages, but this cannot be correct as in "Broken Arrow", made five years earlier, the white Tom Jeffords and the Apache maiden Sonseeahray become husband and wife.Of the male leads Charlton Heston as Clark is the better, although this is far from his best performance. Fred MacMurray, who impressed me in some of his other films such as "Double Indemnity" and "The Caine Mutiny", seems particularly stiff and wooden as Lewis, so much so that I wondered whether the director had deliberately instructed him to play the role in that manner, perhaps to explain why Julia was so uninterested in him despite his devotion to her.Sacagawea is played by the white actress Donna Reed, something which has given rise to adverse comment in recent years, even though in the fifties it was certainly common for white actors to play characters of different ethnicities, generally with the help of appropriate make-up. The reason in this case was probably financial- the producers needed a well-known leading lady to act as a box-office draw, and in 1955 nearly all famous Hollywood actresses were Caucasian- but it is also possible that this particular piece of casting might have helped overcome any prejudices the audience might have felt about a mixed-race love affair. (Sonseeahray was played by another white actress, Debra Paget). Today, however, the casting of Reed seems unfortunate. Leaving questions of political correctness aside, she looks about as convincing as a Native American as the Black and White Minstrels did as black people, even with the assistance of what looks like dark brown boot-polish smeared all over her face.Sacagawea may be depicted as a sympathetic character, but the film's depiction of the Indians, portrayed as violent and treacherous, is a generally negative one. This was by no means unusual in the fifties, but even then some films such as "Broken Arrow" took a more liberal view of racial issues. The film certainly does nothing to challenge the nineteenth-century concept of America's "manifest destiny" - the idea that the West was virgin territory inhabited only by "savages" and therefore ripe for colonisation by white Americans- and this view of history can make for uneasy viewing today. The film has its virtues; it can be a rousing adventure with some decent action sequences set against the magnificent scenery of the Northwest. Its attitudes, however, mark it out as very much a product of its time. 6/10A goof. We are informed that in 1803 all the land lying west of the Rocky Mountains was "unknown territory", and it is even marked as such on a map. In fact, the Spaniards had been colonising California since the 1770s and New Mexico since the 1590s, so this land was hardly "unknown" even to Europeans. I will, however, let the film-makers off as regards the White House. Admittedly, the first written reference to the Presidential Mansion as the "White House" dates from 1811, a few years after the years during which the action takes place, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the term could have been used colloquially prior to this date.

Many reviewers on this site, and the daytime host of Turner Classic Movies have said, this is the only Hollywood movie that has been made about the Lewis and Clark expedition. They have all been misinformed. This film is so lacking in historical accuracy that I am surprised the heirs of Lewis and Clark (perhaps there aren't any) have not sued the producers for slander. Nothing except the heroism of Sacajawea and the general route of the expedition are portrayed even remotely realistically. Many reviewers have pointed out errors; I will just add a few more: No one in Washington knew there were mountains between the source of the Missouri River and rivers flowing to the Pacific (Jefferson thought an all water route could be developed), the only serious Indian difficulties were met with the Blackfeet, Birchbark canoes were strictly a Chippewa product and western tribes mostly used the much more rugged dugout canoes as they had a ready supply of very large tree trunks for raw material (Idaho, between the Missouri and Columbia Rivers is still a lumber supplying country today), very few Americans knew what a buffalo was in 1806, Judith, not Julia, had her name immortalized in Montana natural features, the explorers were sending back to Jefferson reports and specimens along the way as they proceeded west but it took some time to get a finished narrative to him and some of the crewmen got their reports published before Clark's (Lewis never did finish his). And of course, most notably, Sacajawea was firmly in the familial arms of her French fur trader husband (who was a skunk) for all or most of the trip, even having a son by him on the trail; and it was very unlikely that William Clark had any romantic interest in her. She was a teen ager at the time, and I thought the 34 year old Donna Reed did a good job of playing a teen aged Indian girl, even if no one else did. Also, there actually was an incident when a boat (actually 2 boats) was pulled up around a portage on rollers on track. So we are still waiting for the movie, but there has been some non-fiction work done that is pretty good, entertaining and worth watching.