The Big Sky

“Theirs the great adventure...”

In the 1830s, a keelboat leaves St. Louis and starts up the Missouri River, loaded with whisky to trade for furs with the Blackfoot. Two Kentucky mountaineers, Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas) and Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin), sign on with the crew, and old Zeb Calloway (Arthur Hunnicutt) comes along as their guide. Howard Hawks keeps the camera on the long haul upriver, where Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt) waits among the men on the boat, and the river runs wide and brown.