Plenty of journalists rolled through, especially since two major locations
could be visited on one trip to Wyoming that summer—George Stevens was filming
Shane
just forty miles away on the other side of the mountains. For his part, Kirk Douglas was soon shacked up with his costar Betty Threatt, and they carried on a hot affair that continued on past the shoot. Before long, Douglas was encouraging her to behave like a star and demand to be treated as one (although she
was getting all of $5,000 for her work). As Lasker recalled, “In one scene she had to dive into the water, and, with Douglas’s backing, she told Howard that she wanted the set clear. Howard said, ‘We’ll clear the set when you’re a star.’” It never happened. After testing for but losing the role of the prostitute in
From Here to Eternity
to Donna Reed, Threatt disappeared from the film scene.
Although no open animosity developed, Hawks and Douglas never hit it off in a big way, and the director realized early on that while Douglas was in his element playing heels and heavies, he wasn’t terribly convincing portraying friendship or warmth. Hawks’s films depended greatly on casting, and he quickly knew that this time he had gotten it wrong and should have held off making
The Big Sky
until
he could get the proper actors. At the same time, the strong-willed Douglas, who would shortly start producing his own pictures, didn’t particularly cotton to Hawks’s leisurely working habits. “Nowadays, with the tremendous emphasis on costs, you couldn’t do that,” Douglas observed, “nor is it my concept of how a movie should be made.”
Still, Hawks got Douglas to perform a scene that John Wayne
had refused to do in
Red River
. It was one of Hawks’s favorite stories, about how he tried to convince Wayne that his character should mangle his finger between a rope and saddle horn and need to have it amputated by Walter Brennan. “Wayne said, ‘You think that’s
funny
?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you’re not good enough then we won’t do it. I’ll do it sometime with somebody who’s a better actor.’ So I
did it with Kirk Douglas, who is not as good an actor, but Kirk did it, and it was very funny. Duke saw it, and he told me, ‘If you tell me a funeral is funny, I’ll do a funeral.’”
What Hawks’s method sacrificed was money and hard-driving narrative momentum. What it generated was a tremendous feeling for territory being penetrated by white men for the first time, for the humor and tragedy emanating
from the diverse cultures present in the West in 1832, a sense of life being lived in a curious and adventurous way. The one actor in the cast who hit exactly what Hawks was looking for was Arthur Hunnicutt, who was only forty but, like his counterpart in old-coot roles, Walter Brennan, looked much older. The Arkansas native was seasoned and seemed part of the landscape in a way that the
other actors did not.
As shooting pushed on through the second half of August, the company was plagued by intermittent rain and, more frequently, bad light, which kept the average number of pages shot down to under one per day. When a surprise early storm of rain, sleet, and snow hit on September 11, Hawks decided to pack it in and return to Hollywood the next day. At that point, the production
was fourteen days behind schedule. Anyone else would have been exasperated by the problems, but Hawks was still thrilled with the landscapes they were able to capture and particularly by Russ Harlan’s beautiful black-and-white photography. Shooting the St. Louis street scenes on the Fox backlot but the remainder of interiors at RKO Pathé, Hawks continued at his sluggish pace while two second units
continued on location. Art Rosson shot a great deal of needed river footage, while Chris Nyby had his usual bad luck attempting to shoot in Montana. He was supposed to film a buffalo hunt on the Crow Reservation, but the animals were spooked and run ragged due to the annual thinning of the herds that had just taken place. It then snowed heavily, forcing him to give up.
The scene Kirk Douglas
had to perform on his last day required him to swim in water on a soundstage. As he was coming down with a bad cold, he told Hawks he didn’t want to do it that day, especially with all the wind machines blowing. According to Ed Lasker, “Howard said, ‘You can stay in bed all day tomorrow once the picture’s finished.’ So Kirk did it, and ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. He was sore that neither
Howard nor I ever came to see him in the hospital.” What Lasker didn’t add was that Douglas was staying in a room that Lasker had donated to the hospital. Douglas recalled, “I heard Eddie was telling people: ‘Isn’t it funny that Kirk’s in the room I donated?’” The actor was sick for weeks and weak for months thereafter.
When production closed on November 12, Hawks was thirty-five days behind
schedule, having shot for an incredible ninety-two days. The budget wound up at $2,546,336, including overhead, not quite as much as
Red
River
but very high for a film without a heavyweight cast and far more than RKO was spending on any other picture at the time.
As before, Hawks gave Nyby free rein in the cutting, telling him basically what he wanted but leaving the detail work to his trusted
editor. For one scene that Hawks hadn’t covered properly in which a bulldozer in high gear had pulled a raft downriver too fast, Hawks had said, “Don’t worry about Chris, he’ll figure out a way to cut it together.” With all of Hawks’s and the cast’s additions, the script as shot came to 216 pages, enough for a three-and-a-half-hour feature. With tremendous difficulty, Nyby cut the film down to somewhere
around two and a half hours and, after a series of public previews, pruned it further to 138 minutes. All through the trimming, Hawks kept redoing the voice-over narration, with input from Dudley Nichols, until finally he told RKO production executive Ned Depinet he could remove nothing more. (At one point, Nyby reversed gears to add some footage: For a private screening of one version at
Ed Lasker’s house, Nyby cut some hardcore stag film footage into a wrestling scene between Dewey Martin and Elizabeth Threatt.) Further sneaks were successful, but the widespread view among audiences, studio executives and the trade reviewers was that it was still too long. Hawks told Depinet that “it gets down to a decision either we want a shorter picture that definitely is not as good or let it
stand.” Hughes balked endlessly at approving Hawks’s cut, and no one, including Hawks, could even get him on the phone for his comments. Lasker said that, on their own, he and Nyby managed to take out nearly another twenty minutes, but that Hawks put it all back.
Finally, on August 6, 1951, at a time when
High Noon
was the most popular film in the country, RKO held the world premiere of
The Big
Sky
at the Woods Theater in Chicago, with Douglas, Martin, and Hawks flying in for the hoopla. (Jane Russell was in town at the same time to promote the opening of
Son of Paleface
at the renovated Oriental a half block away.) Hawks later accurately stated that initial business was outstanding (it did $35,000 opening week), but fancifully claimed that RKO immediately shortened the picture in order
to cram in more shows per day, only to see the grosses plummet. In fact, the original long version was used, not only through the quickly tapering four weeks of the Chicago run, but upon the film’s major openings at the end of August in New York and Los Angeles. Benefiting from mostly outstanding reviews, the film performed strongly at the Criterion in Times Square (although not nearly as well
as
The Thing
had at the same theater) but was unaccountably soft on the West Coast, an accurate forecast of the mixed public turnout that followed throughout the country.
For one week in September, it was the number-two film in the nation, and it ranked fifth at the box-office for the entire month. But it generally struggled, and the ultimate domestic take of $1.65 million didn’t come close to
matching the large production nut. It was also the lowest return for any Hawks film in well over a decade, the first one significantly under $2 million since the 1930s. Hawks’s extraordinary winning streak, of eleven hit films (including
The Thing
) in thirteen years, was officially over.
Among the most interesting of the numerous rave reviews
The Big Sky
received was that from Hollis Alpert in
the highbrow
Saturday Review
. He began by complaining that Howard Hawks was nowhere to be found in
Who’s Who
, a shocking omission, and noted, “He is one of the select Hollywood few, a man who may choose, not only his own pictures but his studio connections as well.” It was an astute insight for the time, one that not only foreshadowed by many years the eventual serious attention Hawks received,
but points up how Hawks, despite his incredible track record and the prominence of his name above the titles of all his films since the 1930s, had not managed to make himself a national brand name. His career remained incoherent, his touch invisible, to most critics and viewers.
After years of inaccessibility, the 138-minute version of
The Big Sky
recently resurfaced on cable television, albeit
in a highly variable print in which certain sections, particularly the reinstated scenes, look like bad 16mm dupes. The two versions are not radically different, and in a way, the long-lost material is more of the same—if you like the picture at 122 minutes, then there’s more to like. If you don’t care for the ambling pace and anecdotal structuring, then the picture is apt to seem even more leisurely.
Hawks maintained, “They took out most of the story of the Indian girl and Dewey Martin. The scenes that made the relationships good were gone so all of a sudden you were hit with this strange relationship and you didn’t know where it came from.”
Hawks was only partially right. The sixteen minutes of cuts came from four significant scenes, or portions of scenes, having been chopped wholesale from
the picture. The first major elision was of a scene between Jim and Boone; after they meet, fight, and agree to travel together, the two young men bed down together by a campfire and have a long talk during which Jim makes a major breakthrough by getting the dead-serious Boone to laugh. The scene has an important function in cementing their friendship, but most interesting is that it is written
virtually like a romantic seduction, with one man trying to break down the resistance of the other and achieve an intimacy. The longest deleted sequence was a skirmish with Indians, which
ends when the not-all-there Indian, Poordevil, kills another Indian with a bow and arrow and then scalps him. The entire sequence is very gracefully filmed, although it is arguably of minimal importance from
a dramatic point-of-view. The third excision, much later on, was of a bullet being removed from Jim’s leg; in the short version, there is an awkward cut from the preparation for the procedure to Boone handing his friend the bullet; the actual extraction was deleted. The final cut took out the second half of a key scene, in which Boone, having now unwittingly “married” Teal Eye, gives his rifle to
her father, the Blackfoot chief; missing is a chat between Jim and Zeb in which the latter talks about a man he knew who married an Indian squaw then left her, only to come back to find that she had killed herself. This speech obviously lends more weight to what Teal Eye has done and raises the stakes over Boone’s eventual decision whether or not to stay with his bride.
Hawks was too hard on
himself when he judged
The Big Sky
a failure. Accepting all the blame, he said, “It should have been a really good picture. It’s my fault.” The film has a great deal to recommend it if one gets in sync with the pace, which corresponds to the slow mode of transportation depicted and the far-from-straightforward progress of wilderness exploration; this is a journey marked by bends in the river rather
than the flat plains of
Red River
. It is true that the drama is seldom urgently compelling, that it lacks the stark conflict and magnetic characters of
Red River
. It is also the case that Hawks, despite his best attempt to present not only an Indian character but the colorfully assorted French-speaking pioneers of the period, didn’t find a way to bring Teal Eye to meaningful life. Granted that
Hawks was never adept at portraying cultures other than those with which he felt a personal affinity, he still managed a reasonably evenhanded portrait of the Indians here, showing some to be good and some bad, but respecting them on their own terms. All the same, the film is genial in the manner of several of the more relaxed Hawks films to come, deeply appealing for the innumerable times the characters
help and support one another in unspoken ways, and quite successful in giving the viewer a feeling for the discovery of the land, of pushing known boundaries, physical and emotional. The film also rewards multiple viewings, offering up further riches upon deeper investigation. Truly, the problem lay in the casting; if Hawks had made the same film with, say, Brando and Mitchum in the leads,
it could have made all the difference.
By the early 1950s, the real world began to encroach upon Howard Hawks’s paradise at Hog Canyon. An immaculately manicured preserve throughout the previous decade, the 105-acre estate was surrounded by hills in a way that seemed to ensure against the city crowding in on its owner. However, the Los Angeles postwar boom knew few limits,
and the property on the hills above Hawks’s home to the north and west was bought in April 1950, by one Elwain Steinkamp, who planned to divide it up into thirty-six lots for houses. In due course, excavation, clearing, and grading were done. Hawks foresaw, to his annoyance, that he would soon have dozens of neighbors looking down on his private domain.
But annoyance became fury during the first
three months of 1952. A phenomenal deluge pounded Los Angeles, playing the usual havoc on the streets and mountain passes of a city seriously unprepared for anything more than light rainfall. Down and down it came, until one day Hawks found—literally—tons of mud, rock, and debris covering his property. Steinkamp, his associates, and his contractors had stripped the land of vegetation and moved
the earth above around with no regard to the consequences of a rainstorm. The result was a lavalike flow that rolled over the lawn, trees, shrubbery, and fences and despoiled, to varying degrees, Hawks’s house, stables, barns, and horse paddocks. In some spots, the mess was several feet deep. Rivulets formed in the surrounding hills, channeling even more water straight into Hog Canyon; erosion was
severe on Hawks’s property immediately beneath the development, and a great deal of topsoil was washed away. One of the unfortunate consequences was the ruination of much of Hawks’s career memorabilia, including the scripts from all of his films, which he had carelessly left out in the barn.