The White Buffalo [Region 2]
by J. Lee Thompson
![The White Buffalo [Region 2]](/images/The-White-Buffalo-Region-2-B00005QG0R-L.jpg)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Bronson, Clint Walker, Jack Warden, Slim Pickens, Will SampsonDirector: J. Lee Thompson
DVD: Region Code 2
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: PAL
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Movie Reviews of The White Buffalo [Region 2]
Movie Review: File under cult potential
Summary: 3 Stars
Something of a rarity these days, The White Buffalo is the kind of film that almost inevitably disappoints first time round but improves immensely on second viewing with revised expectations. Certainly casting Charles Bronson as Wild Bill Hickok sets up a lot of expectations that the film defies. His regular fans in the 70s probably WEREN'T expecting Bronson to play a haunted man with syphilis and fading eyesight hiding behind dark glasses and a false name from his nightmares of approaching death in the form of a giant white buffalo. While the film does provide a fair bit of action, it's not a typical western adventure, and while it's one of Dino De Laurentiis post-Jaws big beast movies (King Kong, Orca), it's not exactly a western Moby Dick either.
Haunted by dreams of a white buffalo charging at him and hoping to try his luck in the Black Hills gold rush, Hickok and ornery sidekick Jack Warden find themselves hunting the last white `spike' with Will Sampson's Crazy Horse, who's also hiding behind an assumed name until he can reclaim his own by wrapping the body of his dead child in the skin of the white buffalo that killed it so its spirit can rest in peace. It's a curious kind of quest: neither man really hates the beast but need to kill it to find some kind of peace of mind - rather than glory or adventure, it's an attempt to defeat death, though it's only a momentary reprieve. Both men are hunted themselves by foes old and new along the way, but as John Barry's dark and brooding score makes clear, their own legends are probably their biggest enemies as they approach extinction themselves. Unfortunately it never really makes enough of its own potential: it's certainly no The Last Hunt and it's tempting to think what a director like Richard Brooks or a younger Sam Peckinpah could have made of the material.
Technically it has its fair share of problems. It would be kind to describe much of the film's look as `stylised' when in reality large parts of the exterior scenes have very obviously been shot on soundstages and backlots with Paul Lohmann's cinematography making no attempt to give the illusion of shooting on location or even matching shots with the genuine location scenes. The buffalo itself is one of Carlo Rambaldi's better animatronic creations and even has a surprisingly good running motion, but though generally fairly well shot it's one film where some fluid CGi might have genuinely helped give the beast a bit more flexibility. It has a fine cast of familiar faces - Slim Pickens as a stagecoach driver, John Carradine as an undertaker ("You better lay them out in the snow until I get back. That will keep them fresh"), Stuart Whitman as a drunken no-account gambler, Kim Novak as Poker Jenny, Ed Lauter as Tom Custer and Clint Walker as Hickok's latest adversary - but there's often the feeling that they're used to add colour rather than substance to the mix. Yet though the film may never quite work anywhere near as well as it could, it's an interesting ride off the beaten trail that offers the odd striking moment like the heaps of millions of buffalo bones stacked up by the railroad tracks and has some marvellously literate language to savour. It's not the most accomplished of Bronson's collaborations with director J. Lee Thompson, but it is the most interesting. File under cult potential. Shame the fullframe UK DVD's such poor quality, though a French remastered widescreen DVD has recently been released.
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