Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Jonathan Roberts '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.

MartinHafer In 2011, "Time" magazine listed this as one of the 10 historically misleading films! As a retired American history teacher, it's pretty obvious what I think about the film!! Some of the ridiculously wrong portions of the film include a romance between Clark and Sacagawea (she was pregnant and married to Charbonneau in real life) as well as having the Donna Reed play this lady!! It's hilarious hearing her, with her perfect diction and Midwestern accent, playing a native. So how do they make her look like an Indian? LOTS of paint and a wig! I think Divine would have been about as convincing (and a lot more entertaining)!! Despite this romance NEVER occurring, it is the main focus of the film! And, despite the nasty natives in the film, for the most part, the tribes the expedition encountered were very peaceful.If you can completely ignore the film's MANY inaccuracies, it is a very nice looking but dull film. The color is amazingly nice--and has that nice 1950s color scheme. It also has many lovely location shots and is HUGE in scope. And, if you ignore most of the details, the film did get the gist of the actual story! There were folks named Lewis and Clark and they did explore the western portion of the United States. As for the acting, it was generally good, but Fred MacMurray didn't seem to have a lot to do but scowl. Poor guy. And William Demarest sounded VERY peculiar--with an accent that came and went and seemed like it was part Irish, part Scottish and part....God knows! Heston and Reed were fine.Note: Although the film is VERY pretty, sometimes the images are blurry. Apparently this is caused by differences in shrinkage rates of the color strips put together to make a full-color film. In other words, the red or blue layer might shrink at differing rates in portions of the film--giving a few scenes an odd look today.Another Note: Films about this expedition neglect to mention that not too long after it was complete that Captain Lewis committed suicide! This dark event was apparently the result of his lifelong struggle with clinical depression. Pretty sad....

kterryl 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.

Alberto Francisco Carmo I think that the best thing this movie did to me was to unveil that wonderful character, namely Sacajawea, the Shoshone squaw who helped and guided the Lewis-Clark Expedition. After seeing it I discovered on a very old Reader's Digest issue something about her, just to realize that Sacajawea didn't have any romance with William Clark, because she was already a married woman, namely a guy named Charbonneau with whom she stayed till his death. The real Sacajawea story (or biography), as well as the real Lewis& Clark expedition, are certainly much more interesting than this Hollywood make believe-"historical" movie. For instance, it was lovely to know how Sacajawea was amazed to see a whale skeleton on a West Coast beach. However when she tried to tell this to her tribe's people, they just laughed at her, convicted that she was a liar, that no "fish" could be so big. So the "romantic" approach used in the screenplay, wasted a good opportunity to show either how fascinating the real expedition history has been or the cultural shock experienced by this simple Indian young woman when her tiny inner word was broadened by the unique opportunity she had to explore the unknown, together with the duo of white explorers and their fellows. Other than this, I remember how curious I was to differentiate the optical process used by Paramount (VistaVision) from the CinemaScope, the latter implemented by 20th Century Fox and other companies. Other than a sharper resolution, quite between us, it has been deceiving. In short, expeditions like the one the film stages, have a certain similarity with many similar expeditions carried out in Brazil, especially in the XVII century.The difference is that Lewis & Clark has been an official enterprise and the ones in Brazil have been a matter of private nature, mostly by adventurers, gold rushers, or cruel people seeking Indians for slavery, a thing that didn't work.Indians were either fragile as to Whites' diseases or too much independent to become slaves. So our Portuguese colonizers turned themselves to Africa.Too bad for it.But very good as to the splendid cultural heritage brought either by Africans or the mix of the three cultures:Indians,African and Portuguese Whites. Other than this I remember Donna Reed's performance, while I hardly remember Charlton Heston in his deep blue uniform. An I had forgotten Fred Mc Murray was on the film. In short, some thrill, some sightings in true Technicolor, but as to History, Hollywood just tried it...