Buffalo Bill
by William A. Wellman
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Actor: Edgar Buchanan, Joel McCrea, Linda Darnell, Maureen O'Hara, Thomas MitchellDirector: William A. Wellman
Brand: Fox
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Producer: Harry Sherman
Writer: Cecile Kramer
Writer: Clements Ripley
Writer: Frank Winch
Writer: John Larkin
Writer: Æneas MacKenzie
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-05-24
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of Buffalo Bill
DVD Review: Legend overawes truth, but entertainingly enough
Summary: 4 Stars
A wagon, heading towards a fort, attacked by Indians. Riding to the rescue, rifle blazing, is Buffalo Bill Cody (Joel McCrea). Among those saved, Senator Frederici (Moroni Olsen) and his daughter Louisa (Maureen O'Hara). Louisa raves on a bit about the "savages", but Bill corrects her, suggesting that they attack the wagons crazed with whiskey - which the white man provided. This nicely sets the stage for the moral attitude of the film - that Buffalo Bill is a man caught between the worlds of civilization and nature, and that he understands and respects the Indian, is saddened by what has been done to him - even while he knows that his duty is to help further the cause of westward expansion.
This is a pretty well done large-scale, expensive Technicolor western - made at a time when only a couple of westerns per year were in color. There's a lot of location shooting (in Montana and Utah), and several of the sequences involve quite large numbers of extras - the large battle between the cavalray and the Cheyenne at the end is pretty spectacular. But ultimately it's the tale of one man who becomes famous but initially rejects it, whose heart is always being torn - between doing his duty for his country in leading the cavalry to head off the Cheyenne at Powder River, for which he received a Medal of Honor, and between fame and fortune in New York after establishing his Wild West show, and a quieter life at home in the west. The cast is pretty solid, and McCrea brings some real poignancy to his portrayal, even if there's probably not a lot of historical truth to it. Thomas Mitchell is along to play the sardonic newspaperman who helps put Bill into the public spotlight, and Edgar Buchanan is old-timer Sgt "Chips" McGraw, a somewhat more serious role than what he often played
What's probably most memorable and interesting about the film today is the relatively complex portrayal of Bill's - and the nation's - relationships with the Indians. It's not surprising that the two principal native roles are played by whites - Anthony Quinn as Bill's childhood friend and eventual enemy Chief Yellowhand, and Linda Darnell as the rather superfluous and underdeveloped schoolteacher Dawn Starlight, whose loyalties are torn between her people and her obvious (if never stated or explored) attraction to Bill. In the end, certainly stereotypes abound (the raised hand and "How" in greeting, the pidgin English, etc) and we get little sense of the Indians as human beings, of their culture; but the fact that Bill is presented as championing their cause at times - and regretting when he has to fight them, always - and that the film makes no bones about the treaties being broken by the white man while the natives have tried to honor them, certainly gives it a more progressive stance than many westerns of the time.
Most of the action of the film takes place in 1872 or thereabouts, though as I said it plays fast and loose with history; if I'm not mistaken, for example, the film conflates the Powder Creek battle for which Cody received is MOH with the Warbonnet Creek incident from four years later, after Custer's last stand. In any case, it's this "western" part of Cody's career, the beginning of his marriage, and the showdown with the Cheyenne that is the concern here; the formation of the Wild West show and Bill's later career is treated as an afterthought, but it is to the film's considerable credit that we can well imagine what went into those shows, and Cody's moral purpose in showing the public the "real" west - certainly whitewashed in this film, which does tread a little too close to hagiography at times - is clearly evident. Whether it really happened like that or not is beside the point; this is the larger-than-life Bill, and as such it's a solid piece of work.
Description of Buffalo Bill
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