The Plainsman (1936)

Leonard Maltin calls this one "Cecil B. DeMille hokum." It's true! Totally historically inaccurate and implausible, but great fun to watch. I doubt very much if Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Custer and President Lincoln ever met or even had lunch together, but it sure makes for a good yarn! A Saturday-afternoon "Western" in every respect. Lots of Indians and a very contrived battle scene with plenty of action. "Gabby" Hayes is there to complete the all-star cast. Look for a young Anthony Quinn playing an Indian. Garry Cooper and Jean Arthur play Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, the star-crossed lovers. The Indians speak in typical bad English. The plot is totally ridiculous and involves capture by Indians, betrayal, and "The Code of the West." Which, in this case, means it's o.k. to shoot soulless Indians but not horse soldiers; as Wild Bill finds out. Great fun until the sad ending when our hero "bites the dust." But he appears in the very last scene, a-shootin' and a-fightin', his way into the sunset. A great transfer by Deluxe Video (Fox). Sharp and crisp with very few scratches or dust.(Look at how awful the trailer looks by comparison.) A typical early Western. Barely a drop of blood is shown on the screen except for a busted skull! Don't be fooled by the color cover--It's in glorious black and white. Once again, thank you TCM for running black and white movies.

Cecil B. deMille really knew how to create a classic, and after 7 decades his western comes across as the Real McCoy, engrossing, entertaining, spectacular; in no way outdated.As a real fan of TV's DEADWOOD, I'll tell you the performances of Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickock and Jean Arthor as Calamity Jane are far more on-target.We don't have any giants in Hollywood anymore. PLAINSMAN is just one of dozens of classics from the 1936-1945 decade that have seen enduring commercial life decade after decade: released, re-issued, re-issued all over again. Filmmakers like today's Spielberg, Jackson, Bruckheimer are like kids playing in a sandbox. None of today's movies will be sought out in 7 months let alone 70 years.

"The Plainsman" represents the directorial prowess of Cecil B. DeMille at its most inaccurate and un-factual. It sets up parallel plots for no less stellar an entourage than Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper), Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison), Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur), George Armstrong Custer and Abraham Lincoln to interact, even though in reality Lincoln was already dead at the time the story takes place. Every once in a while DeMille floats dangerously close toward the truth, but just as easily veers away from it into unabashed spectacle and showmanship. The film is an attempt to buttress Custer's last stand with a heap of fiction that is only loosely based on the lives of people, who were already the product of manufactured stuffs and legends. Truly, this is the world according to DeMille - a zeitgeist in the annals of entertainment, but a pretty campy relic by today's standards.TRANSFER: Considering the vintage of the film, this is a moderately appealing transfer, with often clean whites and extremely solid blacks. There's a considerable amount of film grain in some scenes and an absence of it at other moments. All in all, the image quality is therefore somewhat inconsistent, but it is never all bad or all good – just a bit better than middle of the road. Age related artifacts are kept to a minimum and digital anomalies do not distract. The audio is mono but nicely balanced.EXTRAS: Forget it. It's Universal! BOTTOM LINE: As pseudo-history painted on celluloid, this western is compelling and fun. Just take its characters and story with a grain of salt – in some cases – a whole box seems more appropriate!

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.