The Plainsman
by Cecil B. DeMille
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Bickford, Gary Cooper, Helen Burgess, James Ellison, Jean ArthurDirector: Cecil B. DeMille
Brand: Universal Studios
Writer: Courtney Ryley Cooper
Writer: Frank J. Wilstach
Writer: Grover Jones
Writer: Harold Lamb
Writer: Jeanie Macpherson
Writer: Lynn Riggs
Writer: Waldemar Young
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 113 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Universal Studios
Movie Reviews of The Plainsman
Movie Review: A Dime Novel History
Summary: 3 Stars
The film begins by showing horse-drawn wagons (they generally used oxen). This story "compresses many years, many lives, and widely separated events into one narrative". This is Hollywood History, drama not education. Lincoln talks of disbanded soldiers who are without work. [A reference to the 1930s.] The solution is to colonize the grasslands of the West using soldiers and rifles. "We can sell rifles to the Indians and they can pay in fur." [Is there a flaw in this plan?] There is shocking news! There is a comic scene in St. Louis. The speeches tell about the customer's expectations. A gift of a big knife to a small boy. Bill Hickok plays cards, and loses until he wins. Mr. Lattimer collects his shipment from the steamboat.
A stagecoach takes Bill Cody and wife from Leavenworth to Hays City. [Are two horses enough for that coach?] A lone rider warns of danger. Hickok offers help to General Custer in the Indian Wars. Bill Cody will guide the relief troop to Fort Piney. Duty calls. "Don't cry, honey." The dreaded redskins arrive for more drama. Bill Hickok deals for Calamity Jane. "Don't give up your guns!" Hickok has a plan. Yellowhand appreciates the latest technology. He has a complaint against broken promises. [So do the paleface voters.] What about bullets? Can they make Hickok squeal? Extreme interrogation techniques are to try to get information on the relief troops. The troops are then caught in the open! Calamity Jane will ride for help.
Hickok rides to the trapped troop. Days pass. Massed fire halts an attack. A trumpet sounds, the reinforcement arrive. Who will rescue Calamity Jane? Who sold rifles to the Indians? Will Hickok get revenge? There is a shoot-out with some soldiers. Calamity Jane brings a warning. Custer wants Bill Cody. Hickok and Cody meet for lunch. A stray Indian brings news of Custer's Last Stand. Hickok leaves for Deadwood, Cody will warn Generals Merritt and Crook. Is Hickok feeling alright? [Maybe he had the blues?] Hickok meets Lattimer. "Can't you see?" Shots are fired. They have a card game to pass the time until the Fifth Cavalry arrives. Hickok sits for his last hand. "We won't forget what Bill Hickok has done."
Those who read history books will laugh at this drama because of its distorted history. Wild Bill Hickok was a Pony Express rider, Jayhawker, Civil War scout and soldier, then a lawman on the Frontier. He once shot some rowdy soldiers but faced no charges. A "calamity" was the term for a personal illness. Bill Cody also has a real history; the most important was his show business "Wild West". Many Americans gained their knowledge from dime novels that used imagination instead of facts. The importance of this film is the propaganda history of that short era from the Civil War to the late 1870s. Easterners wrote about the "Wild West" as if it was propaganda to keep people from migrating to lands where they would have more liberty and less crime than in the settled cities of the East. The important history of the late 19th century was the rise of big corporations that attacked small businesses and farmers who settled and tamed the West.
Summary of The Plainsman
Wild bill hickok calamity jane and buffalo bill go up againt indians and a gunrunner. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 06/01/2004 Starring: Gary Cooper James Ellison Run time: 113 minutes Rating: Nr Director: Cecil B. DemilleJust maybe the most shamelessly enjoyable of Cecil B. DeMille's pseudo-historical epics, this rumbustious frontier saga offers a three-for-one Western legends combo--Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane, all cutting up in the 1870s, with George Armstrong Custer and Abraham Lincoln thrown in for good measure. (Wait a minute, Lincoln was assassinated in 1865--oh, never mind.) Truth to tell, Buffalo Bill doesn't really pull his weight, since (1) he is hopelessly distracted by virtue of having recently married and (2) he's played by James Ellison, an eternal juvenile normally relegated to second-banana duty in Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy series. However, Gary Cooper's Wild Bill and Jean Arthur's Calamity supply enough star power to light up the Dakotas and parts of Missouri.
Every once in a while, DeMille and his small army of writers stumble upon an actual historical fact. Bill Cody did fight to the death with an Indian chief named Yellow Hand. George Custer and James Butler Hickok did both buy the farm in the summer of 1876. (Custer's Last Stand is handled imaginatively, if cheaply, as a vision narrated by a wandering Cheyenne warrior--none other than C.B.'s son-in-law Anthony Quinn in one of his earliest screen appearances.) Jack McCall (veteran weasel Porter Hall) did find himself in Deadwood, South Dakota, at the same time Wild Bill was drawing aces and eights in a poker game ... though McCall was not necessarily affiliated with DeMille's favorite villain, Charles Bickford, in the business of running guns to the Indians. --Richard T. Jameson
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