| The Far Horizons (1955) is a disappointing historical Western, so conservative that its ’50s sensibilities and Production Code-imposed mores have come full circle and seem quite at home 50 years later. Subtitled The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the film offers a U.S. President anxious to develop mineral rights in territories long ago claimed by non-white, non-Christian Native Americans whose interests are totally ignored (…). Though Charlton Heston and Donna Reed give the love scenes a certain earnestness, she is totally miscast and the Hollywood restrictions on interracial romances doom the affair before it can even begin. Reed, her anachronistically blue eyes generally half-closed in a kind of resigned state of exhaustion, spends most of the film resembling an overworked cleaning lady. The picture’s overloaded romantic entanglements (it’s not so much a romantic triangle as a cube) lead nowhere (…). The movie might have offered, for instance, narration from the pages of the actual journals, or maybe Lewis & Clark’s surprise at animals and Native Americans and natural wonders never seen by white men before, but there’s almost none of this. — Stuart Galbraith IV |
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