The Plainsman (1936)

During one of the free preivew weekends of the Starz/Encore package some months back, I was able to DVR The Plainsman. Over this past weekend I finally, got around to watching it.

The movie starts of in 1865, just after Lee surrendered to end the Civil War. President Lincoln states the need to develop the west and secure the frontier, just before he gets shot. (Seriously: Mrs. Lincoln interrupts a Cabinet meeting to remind Abe they're going to Ford's theater that night.) Among those going west is Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper), along with Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) and Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison). They first set out for Hays City (which I assume is supposed to be Hays, KS in the northwest part of the state; Wikipedia says all three of our main characters were in Hays in the early days of the town along with Gen. George Custer), although their paths are going to cross up in Montana and again in South Dakota.

Also continually popping up is John Lattimer (Charles Bickford). He's the representative of the gun manufacturers, who made a killing during the Civil War supplying arms to the government. With the end of the war, business is going to dry up, so Lattimer has gotten the brilliant idea of running guns to the Indians, which results in a whole bunch of solders getting killed.

Hickok and Calamity Jane investigate, and get captured and tortured by the Indians, while Cody is serving with Custer (John Miljan). Cody has the great good luck of leaving Custer to search for Hickok just before Little Big Horn, saving him from the massacre, but also causing difficulty for Cody in that he left in order to bring Hickok to justice. Hickok ends up in Deadwood, SD, in time for that fateful card game with Lattimer's gun runners.

The Plainsman is a pastiche of history at best, with famous names set against the backdrop of it. Cecil B. Demille directed, and it seems he was always more concerned with spectacle than complete accuracy, or even partial accuracy. Strangely enough, however, The Plainsman is one of DeMille's more muted movies, with little of the bigness and over-the-top scenes of most of his other movies.

Cooper does as well as can be expected; he was good in a lot of genres and well-suited to the western. Jean Arthur, on the other hand, is horrendously miscast as Calamity Jane and it's interesting to watch her flounder. Ellison is a relative non-entity, and Bickford isn't bad as the bad guy.

There are a lot of other Cecil B. DeMille movies I'd recommend before The Plainsman, although I'm certainly glad I saw it.