The Plainsman

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.

With the end of the North American Civil War, the manufacturers of repeating rifles find a profitable means of making money selling the weapons to the North American Indians, using the front man John Lattimer (Charles Bickford) to sell the rifles to the Cheyenne. While traveling in a stagecoach with Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) and William "Buffalo Bill" Cody (James Ellison) and his young wife Louisa Cody (Helen Burgess) that want to settle down in Hays City managing a hotel, Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper) finds the guide Breezy (George Hayes) wounded by arrows and telling that the Indians are attacking a fort using repeating rifles. Hickok meets Gen. George A. Custer (John Miljan) that assigns Buffalo Bill to guide a troop with ammunition to help the fort. Meanwhile the Cheyenne kidnap Calamity Jane, forcing Hickok to expose himself to rescue her.

The dated "The Plainsman" is a great deception, with a pretentious and shallow story without historical accuracy, "politically incorrect" in the present days and a terrible screenplay that wastes Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. Their performances are below average with awful characters. The best part is the beginning, with the inception of the lobby of the greedy manufacturers of weapons using the repeating rifles to provide Indian (and also "white man") annihilation in the name of the pockets full of money. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Jornadas Heróicas" ("Heroic Journeys")

This Cecil B. DeMille epic of the old West contains what may be Jean Arthur's finest performance, as a hysterical, eccentric, incurably amoral, but devotedly doting Calamity Jane. She really pulled it off! Gary Cooper is at his most taciturn, but manages some occasional pithy sayings: 'The plains are big, but trails cross ... sometimes.' The story is a pastiche to end all pastiches. All the cowboy heroes of Western lore seem to be in there somehow except for Jesse James. Even Abraham Lincoln opens the story in person (or at least, DeMille would have us believe so). There is no room for anything so evanescent as subtlety, this is a 'stomp 'em in the face' tale for the masses. A remarkable thing about this film however is that it is a very early full frontal attack on what Eisenhower was eventually to name 'the military industrial complex'. It isn't just a story about gun-runners, but about arming anyone for money, and doing so from the heart of Washington. But let's not get into politics, let's leave that to DeMille, who can be guaranteed to be superficial. The chief interest of this film all these years later is that it uses the first film score composed by George Antheil, who has a lot to say about the job in his autobiography, 'Bad Boy of Music'. Antheil seems to have originated 'the big sound' adopted by all subsequent Westerns, whereby the plains sing out with the voices and sounds of countless cowboys in the sky, celebrating the open spaces and interweaving common melodies. That is why it does not sound at all unusual, because we have heard it a thousand times. But he seems to have been the first to summon up the combined rustlings of all the sage brush into this symphony of the open skies which has entered into American mythic lore, and given it a soundtrack which has never varied since then, corny as it may be, but doubtless appropriate. It is amusing to see Anthony Quinn in an early appearance as a Cheyenne Indian. Gabby Hayes is in there somewhere, but you miss him in the crowd. Gary Cooper overtops them all, looming large, - but when did he ever loom small?

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.