ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

chaswe-28402 This story compresses many years, many lives and widely separated events into one narrative. It is mainly, if vaguely, based on the life and death of Wild Bill Hickok, 1837-1876, known in Harper's New Monthly Magazine as Hitchcock, and as having killed "hundreds of men". No relation. Hickok is portrayed by Gary Cooper. He checks in to a barbershop, where the barber tries to get him to cut his hair. He says he doesn't believe in getting his hair cut. Oddly, it's already quite short, in a style suitable for 1936. There are nevertheless many photographs of the real Wild Bill, in all of which he is shown with hair tumbling well below his shoulders. Not Cooper's favoured style.Is there any message in this mash-up of a movie ? Could it be that while he inspires calamitous fandom from the fair sex, the true gunman, and noble he-man, is essentially misogynistic ? This doesn't save him, though. He's fated for aces and eights, the dead man's hand, and gets shot in the back. The reason Buffalo Bill survives is because he weds a little woman, and intends, improbably, to run a civilised hotel, and do the washing up. Actually, I thought he ran a Wild West Show. No matter.This film is designed to entertain, and it does. It features an interesting antique mechanical cocktail shaker. Those were the days when America was great, but tragically undermined by internal political corruption and proliferating guns. Seems familiar. All the prominent Indians, except Mexican Anthony Quinn, were white men in war paint, and spoke with forked tongues, especially when setting out to trap the cavalry.

James Hitchcock "Cecil B. DeMille Much against his will Was persuaded to leave Moses Out of the Wars of the Roses". Unlike some clerihews, that one encapsulates an essential truth about its subject. Most of DeMille's films were set in some period of history, but he was not a stickler for historical accuracy and never let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story. DeMille is best remembered today for grand epics like "The Ten Commandments", but he also made a number of Westerns, of which "The Plainsman" is one. He saw the Old West as one more canvas on which he could paint an epic tale of heroism and adventure, and felt no more need for accuracy when dealing with American history than when dealing with the ancient world. The film is set between the end of the American Civil War and Custer's Last Stand, in reality a period of eleven years but here seeming like only a few weeks or months. The main characters are Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and General Custer, although the account of their lives is highly fictionalised. I am only surprised that DeMille did not try and introduce Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley into the mix, thereby getting all the main Western heroes into the same film. Knowing him he could probably have got Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger in there as well. The main villain is a gun-runner named Lattimer who is selling rifles to the Cheyenne Indians. He is acting as agent for a group of unscrupulous weapon manufacturers whose business has taken a hit with the end of the Civil War and who view the Indians not as enemies of the United States but as potential new customers. The film tells the story of how our four heroes frustrate this dastardly plot and ensure that the rifles find their way to the Cavalry. There is also a subplot about the romance between Hickok and Calamity. As that synopsis might suggest, this is not one of those revisionist Westerns which try to tell the story of the West from a viewpoint sympathetic to the Indians, or even one which tries to tell it from a viewpoint even-handed between Indians and whites. The concept of the "revisionist Western" did not really exist in 1936. Modern audiences might have a certain sneaking sympathy with Lattimer whose endeavours, however mercenary his motives, do at least have the effect of partially levelling an otherwise very uneven playing-field between Indians and whites. In the thirties, however, it was still "white man good, red man bloodthirsty savage". Only in one scene, when the Cheyenne chieftain Yellow Hand is allowed to state his point of view, is it suggested that the Indian Wars might have had more to do with white greed than with red bloodlust.Despite its dodgy political stance, "The Plainsman" is by no means a bad film. During a decade when many directors turned to intimate, small- scale movies, DeMille remained true to the sort of large-scale action films with which he made his name in the silent era. "The Plainsman" is not quite as spectacular as some Westerns from the fifties and sixties, but it has some good action sequences, especially the Indian attack on the ammunition train and the subsequent siege. Gary Cooper as Hickok makes a charismatic hero- he has a rather larger role than James Ellison as Cody or John Miljan as Custer- and Jean Arthur as Calamity is better than her successors in the same role, Jane Russell in "The Paleface" (too glamorous) and Doris Day in "Calamity Jane" (so obviously unsuitable that I can only assume this was deliberate miscasting for comic effect). Anthony Quinn (DeMille's son-in-law) has small early role as an Indian. Today we lovers of the Western are lucky in that we have available to us so many films by the masters of the genre such as John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Anthony Mann, William Wyler and Clint Eastwood. People in 1936 were not so lucky. Certainly, "poverty row" Westerns were ten-a-penny in the thirties, but few of these were of any quality, even when they featured stars of the future like John Wayne. Even the likes of "Destry Rides Again", "Dodge City" and "Stagecoach" still lay a couple of years in the future. A major-league Western by a major-league director like DeMille was therefore something of a novelty at the time. "The Plainsman" is not in the same league as the greatest works of the directors mentioned above, but it is a very decent Western for the mid- thirties. 7/10 Some goofs. In a scene set in the 1860s there is a reference to tumbleweed. Although these plants have come to be regarded as iconic symbols of the West, they are actually native to Asia and were not introduced to North America until after the events depicted in this film. ("The Plainsman", however, is far from the only film to make this mistake). Calamity Jane pronounces her surname, Canary, as though it were the name of the bird; in reality it was pronounced, and sometimes spelt, "Cannary", with the stress on the first syllable.

MartinHafer Cecil B. DeMille was an odd director. Although he was quite skilled (especially in making spectacles), it seemed as if he always was filming second-rate scripts. Now I know that this will ruffle a few feathers, as conventional wisdom has it that he was a great director. Well, great director or not (and I say NOT), his films generally have some of the worst dialog and anachronistic plots of any A-list director in Hollywood of his era. In other words, while he was clearly able to get great actors and amazing sets and scenes, it was all, to me, fluff due to insipid writing.Here in the case of "The Plainsman", DeMille had Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur at his disposal--two of the biggest stars of the era. And, 2000 American-Indians were on hand for the fight scene. But, the plot is one cliché after another--with historical figures tossed into the mix right and left--even though many of the events in the film never occurred or occurred very differently. As usual, to DeMille, none of this mattered--what mattered was that his film was exciting and BIG!! Early in the film, I got bored. After all, first Wild Bill Hickock just happened to meet his old friends Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane--and then shortly after the two met General Custer!! It was as if the writers did all their research by glancing, briefly, at a history book and taking all the highlighted names and tossing them together! As a history teacher, I was (as usual) appalled...but not at all surprised.If you take common sense and toss it out the window (along with history), then the film is very watchable and fun...and brainless. Too many times the film played fast and loose with the truth--just like in DeMille's "Cleopatra", "The Ten Commandments", "Sign of the Cross" and many other pictures. But because Cooper and Arthur were such good actors, they at least made watching this mess pleasant.

theowinthrop After the failure of "The Crusades" at the box office, Cecil B. DeMille stopped doing films about non-American history. His films for the next thirteen years were about our history from Jean Lafitte to World War II (Dr. Wassell). The first in order of production was this film, starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok, with Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. James Ellison was Buffalo Bill, John Miljan (not a villain as usual) was General George A. Custer, and Anthony Quinn was one of the Indians who fought at Little Big Horn. The villains were led by Charles Bickford (selling arms to the Indians) and Porter Hall as Jack McCall (who killed Wild Bill Hickok).Basically the film takes up the history of the U.S. after the Civil War. Lincoln is shown at the start talking about what is the next step now that Lee has surrendered. Lincoln talks about the need to secure the west (more about this point later). Then he announces he has to go to the theater. That April 14th must have been very busy for Abe - in "Virginia City" he grants a pardon to Errol Flynn at the request of Miriam Hopkins on the same date.Actually, while Lincoln was concerned about the West, his immediate thoughts on the last day of his Presidency were about reunifying the former Confederate states and it's citizens into the Union as soon as possible. It was Reconstruction that occupied his attention, not the west (except for the problems of Maximillian and his French controlled forces in Mexico against Juarez). But he had been involved in actual problems with the West. In 1862 he sent disgraced General John Pope, the loser at Second Manassas, to Minnesota to put down a serious Indian war by the Sioux (the subject of McKinley Kantor's novel, "Sprit Lake". Pope, incompetent against Lee and Jackson, turned out to be quite effective here, and the revolt was smashed.However, with all Lincoln's actual attention to western problems, it is doubtful that he says (as Cooper repeats at least once), "The frontier should be secure." There is nothing to say he could not have said it, but it is hardly a profound pronouncement by a leading statesman. Like saying, Teddy Roosevelt said, "Eat a good breakfast every morning for your health." It is not a profound statement of policy. It is, at best, a statement of recognizable fact. Cooper turning it into a minor mantra, like Lincoln's version of the Monroe Doctrine, is ridiculous...typical of the way DeMille's scripts have really bad errors of common sense in them.However, this is not a ruinous mistake. "The Plainsman" is an adventure film, and as such it has the full benefit of DeMille the film creator of spectacle. As such it is well worth watching. But not as a textbook on Lincoln's political ideas or his quotable legacy.