Old Missoula

The article below, by Jule Banville, appeared at the New West blog on April 4, 2011

During the making of “Red Skies of Montana,” various Hollywood stars were severely injured on a motorcycle, stung on the neck by a hornet, burned badly, missing eyebrows singed off unintentionally and visiting the local dentist to repair two busted front teeth. It was an eventful filming in and around Missoula in the early ’50s. And although, by today’s standards, the acting’s kind-of hokey, “Red Skies” remains an important testimony to the history and bravery of the men (and, now, a few women) who jump out of planes and helicopters to fight the West’s fires. Smokejumping was about nine years old when the filming got under way and, to those involved in that world, it was a huge deal to have 20th Century Fox buy the rights to the story –- and bring in big-name actors Victor Mature (the original lead) and Richard Widmark (the man who replaced him after Mature’s motorcycle accident just outside of Missoula). When it premiered in 1952, “people from New Hampshire probably didn’t know a smokejumper from a Martian alien,” said Stan Cohen, who authored a pictorial history of smokejumping and has recently added to what’s likely the world’s largest collection of “Red Skies” memorabilia.

Rare Screening of ‘Red Skies of Montana’ Offers Classic Glimpse of Both Smokejumping and Missoula

During the making of “Red Skies of Montana,” various Hollywood stars were severely injured on a motorcycle, stung on the neck by a hornet, burned badly, missing eyebrows singed off unintentionally and visiting the local dentist to repair two busted front teeth.

It was an eventful filming in and around Missoula in the early ’50s. And although, by today’s standards, the acting’s kind of hokey, “Red Skies” remains an important testimony to the history and bravery of the men (and, now, a few women) who jump out of planes and helicopters to fight the West’s fires.

Smokejumping was about nine years old when the filming got under way and, to those involved in that world, it was a huge deal to have 20th Century Fox buy the rights to the story –- and bring in big-name actors Victor Mature (the original lead) and Richard Widmark (the man who replaced him after Mature’s motorcycle accident just outside of Missoula).

When it premiered in 1952, “people from New Hampshire probably didn’t know a smokejumper from a Martian alien,” said Stan Cohen, who authored a pictorial history of smokejumping and has recently added to what’s likely the world’s largest collection of “Red Skies” memorabilia.

Cohen, a founder of the Museum of Mountain Flying that houses numerous “Red Skies” posters, as well as an original screenplay, lobby cards, signed photographs and the like, will introduce the latest screening of this classic Tuesday night at the historic Wilma Theatre in downtown Missoula. The rare chance to see the movie on the big screen coincides with the 11th Annual Wildland Fire Safety Summit, also in Missoula.

If You Go

When: Tuesday, April 4, 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30.
Where: Wilma Theatre, 131 S. Higgins Ave., Missoula, MT
Tickets: $5 at the door. Proceeds benefit the Museum of Mountain Flying and the International Fire Relief Mission.

The movie’s rightly credited with exposing to the rest of the world the dangers faced fighting forest fires. It’s loosely based on the tragedy at Mann Gulch, north of Helena, where 13 members of a 16-man crew died in a fire in August 1949. As was the case at Mann Gulch, the crew chief of a deadly fire in “Red Skies” survives, although, in the movie, he’s the only one who does. At Mann Gulch, foreman Wagner Dodge was one of three and faced an intense inquiry that resulted in an overhaul of the smokejumping program.

The film follows the fictional chief, Cliff Mason (Richard Widmark), as he battles his own memory and insecurities surrounding the deadly fire. The tension’s not just internal, as the son of one of the men who died there (Ed Miller, played by Jeffrey Hunter), accuses Mason of cowardice and sets out to prove it.

The dramatic arc peaks at a fire, of course, where Miller’s in danger and Mason’s tough choice to save him unties the conflict between them.

And, as far as special effects at the time go, that fire was truly something else.

According to the director of publicity for 20th Century Fox Studios, 450 giant pine and cedar trees were trucked to Missoula from California, along with another 2,500 shrubs, bushes and flowers. Huge rocks made on location (some still in Lolo National Forest if you know where to look) completed the scene. The “raging scorch-job” that followed, wrote the publicist, “was bigger than the burning of Atlanta for ‘Gone With the Wind.’”

The movie was two years in the making. Most of what was done during the fire season of 1950 was scrapped after Mature injured himself on a motorcycle at the Nine Mile camp, one of the filming locations. In an autographed photo, donated to Stan Cohen’s collection, Mature writes to a nurse at St. Patrick’s Hospital a promise to get together the following summer when he comes back to finish the movie. It never happened and Widmark signed on to play Cliff Mason, filming in the summer of ’51.

Widmark suffered during the shoot, as well, requiring treatment for burns to his legs and hip when his pants caught fire. In the movie, his eyebrows burned off. That happened in real-life as well, as did a fall out of a helicopter that chipped his front teeth, according to Cohen’s book, “A Pictorial History of Smokejumping.”

Many of the scenes in the movie will still be familiar to those who know Missoula, said Cohen, including those at the courthouse and the dance hall at Lolo Hot springs, as well as shots of the old Higgins Avenue Bridge and Hale Field, the region’s first airport.

Those who don’t know Missoula might be more familiar with an actor who got his start in the picture, Charles Buchinski, later known as Charles Bronson.

Almost six decades after it premiered, “Red Skies” still holds a special place in both the annals of smokejumping and in the history of Missoula, where it’s one of only two major movies ever made (the other was 1955’s “Timberjack,” a romance revolving around the lumber industry). And it’s also important as a fictionalized account of the real event at Mann Gulch, which was still pretty fresh at the time and remains one of the greatest tragedies of smokejumping.

“A River Runs Through It” author Norman Maclean, in “Young Men of Fire,” his account of what happened and when on that ridge, gives an engrossing play-by-play: “It roared from behind, below, and across, and the crew, inside it, was shut out from all but a small piece of the outside world.”

“Red Skies’” storytelling came before Maclean’s, however, recreating that sort of horror with a big-budget burning of a fake forest and a cast of chiseled heartthrobs.

This week in Missoula, it offers what a literary study, however beautifully written, can never be: a classic big-screen adventure enjoyed with the modern price of popcorn.