| For spectacle in cinema, director Cecil B. DeMille still holds a powerful reputation. His 1936 western, The Plainsman, combines cowboys, Indians, scoundrels and heroes with all of the scenery and action one expects from a Spielberg movie today. Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper) is the Plainsman himself, joined by the doting Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur), his closest friend Buffalo Bill (James Ellison), and supported by such American heroes as General George Custer and President Lincoln. After Lincoln's assassination, the villian John Latimer (Charles Bickford) is sent out west to peddle rifles to the Indians, enabling them to terrorize settlers and slaughter American armies. When Hickok uncovers the scheme, he makes it his personal mission to stop the gun-runners and the Indians' uprising by hook or crook, by poker game or shootout. | CREDITS:
Director--Cecil B. DeMille Writing--Courtney Riley Cooper (story), Harold Lamb |
| CLIP: Hickok faces Yellow Hand | CAST:
Gary Cooper--Wild Bill Hickok, Jean Arthur--Calamity Jane, James Ellison--Buffalo Bill Cody, Charles Bickford--John Lattimer, Paul Harvey--Chief Yellow Hand |
| Indeed, the story essentially belongs to Hickok-it is the story of one man who lives the hard life of the West, a true Plainsman, who comes in conflict with a new world order and succumbs not from lack of will, but in the manner of a tragic hero. His run-in with an "old friend"-Chief Yellow Hand-speaks volumes about the conflicts of Hickock's time. Hickock predicts that the white man's westward domination will not be stopped, regardless of the weapons the Indians may use. Wild Bill's death cannot be stopped either-he is a relic of an older, simpler, rougher West where each man is his own boss, and he is hopelessly out of place in a world where former scoundrel Buffalo Bill becomes an innkeeper, where men like Lattimer are traitors to their own race, where a man is no longer beholden to only nature and his own soul. | NOTES: Full Credits and more information availible at imdb.com |