The Plainsman

The master of movie spectacle Cecil B. De Mille goes West. Using three legends of the old west as its protagonists (they probably never met),Gary Cooper is portraying Wild Bill Hickock,James Ellison as Buffalo Bill and Jean Arthur does make a nice Calamity Jane. The story serves only for De Mille to hang some marvelous action sequences on, like the big Indian attack.Scenes like that are extremely well done.If you don't mind the somewhat over-the-top performances of the cast this is an very entertaining western.Look out for a very young Anthony Quinn essaying the role of an Indian brave who participated at the battle of Little Big Horn.This part got him at least noticed in Hollywood.

Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane fight alongside General Custer and expose a scheme by greedy arms manufacturers to sell repeating rifles to renegade Indians.

This somewhat gratuitous exercise in wild west name-dropping is pretty silly but also fairly entertaining as well, though it's a bit too long and runs out of steam near the end.

Also, it might be off-putting to many modern viewers due to it's politically incorrect, stereotyped treatment of Indians.

The feisty Jean Arthur is extremely cute as Calamity Jane and easily runs away with the picture.

Recognizable cameos include iconic western sidekick George "Gabby" Hayes as a wounded scout and director Cecile B. DeMille's future son-in-law Anthony Quinn as the Cheyenne brave who relates the news of Custer's last stand to Cody and Hickock.

Conceived and executed with all the brio typical of a De Mille epic - all the 64 pistols used in the film came from his personal collection - 'The Plainsman', for all its attention to petty historical detail (De Mille was insistent that the Phrase 'Go West, Young man' be correctly attributed to John B. Searle, the Editor of The Terra Haute Express) plays fast and loose with history.

Cooper is the austere Hickok, Ellison (a regular in the Hopalong Cassidy series, loaned to De Mille by 'Pops' Sherman)a boyish Buffalo Bill, Arthur a breezy Calamity Jane and Miljan a heroic Custer to whose defence all three come. Bickford is the smooth gun running villain. De Mille's well-practised abilities in handling big budgets, big casts and big stories overcame the doggedly domestic drama of Cooper and Arthur's relationship. Slow moving and overly romantic by modern standards in its depiction of Westward expansion, 'The Plainsman' remains an entertaining spectacle.

In 1966, Universal remade the movie as a vastly inferior telefilm.

Phil Hardy

This movie has Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and General Custer all together. Gary Cooper plays Wild Bill and Jean Arthur plays Calamity Jane and Charles Bickford plays the bad guy who sells weapons to the Indians and you can hardly recognize him. This was the first time Cecil B. DeMille and Gary Cooper worked together and the next movie the made was basically the same but set in a different time. This movie starts out with Lincoln's assassination and it also deals with an Indian war. Calamity Jane is in love with Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill has gotten married and now wants to stay home. This movie also deals with Custer's last stand and is far from accurate. Gary Cooper is good as usual and i usually don't like Jean Arthur but i liked her here.

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.