The Plainsman
Tags: flashback, romantic, murder, historical fiction

Plot synopsis:
With the end of the American Civil War, military industrialists are left with an oversupply of weapons. Some of the more unscrupulous ones view the Indians as possible new customers.
Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper) has just been discharged from the Union Army and is making his way back west. On a paddle steamer, he bumps into his old army scout colleague, Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison) and his new bride. Later, Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) is the driver of their stagecoach to Hays City, Kansas.
John Lattimer (Charles Bickford), an agent for the gun makers, has supplied the Cheyenne Indians with repeating rifles, which enable them to kill half of the troopers at a United States Cavalry outpost. Hickok discovers the rifles and reports it to General George Armstrong Custer (John Miljan). Custer sends out an ammunition train to the fort with Cody as guide. Hickok tries to locate Yellow Hand (Paul Harvey), the Cheyenne chieftain, to find out why the Indians have gone to war.
When Calamity is captured by the Indians, Hickok tries to bargain for her release, but instead gets captured himself. Yellow Hand states that the Indians are fighting because the white man has starting settling land promised to the Indian and is killing off the buffalo. Yellow Hand promises to release his captives if they tell him the location of the ammunition train. After much prodding from Calamity, Hickok professes his love for her just before he is about to be tortured. Calamity then discloses the route of the ammunition train in order to save Hickok from being burned alive. Yellow Hand holds true to his word by releasing his two prisoners.
The Indians ambush the ammunition train. Hickok sends Jane to get reinforcements while he fights alongside the besieged soldiers. After a desperate six-day siege on a river bank, the survivors are saved when Custer arrives with the cavalry.
Back in town, Hickok catches up with Lattimer and tells him to get ready for a gun duel. Instead of going himself, Lattimer sends three cavalry deserters in his place. Hickok kills all three deserters in the gunfight, but this makes him a fugitive from the law. Hickok flees to the Dakota Territory. Calamity leaves for Deadwood separately when the townspeople find out that she was partly responsible for the attack on the ammunition train.
Custer sends Cody after Hickok. After meeting in the woods, the two friends capture an Indian and learn that Custer has been killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and that the Cheyenne are moving to join the Sioux Indians in the Black Hills. They also learn that Lattimer is sending more rifles to the Indians, to be picked up in Deadwood. Instead of arresting his friend, Cody rides off to warn the cavalry, while Hickok goes to Deadwood to deal with Lattimer. Hickok kills Lattimer and detains Lattimer's henchmen for arrest by the cavalry. Hickok is shot in the back by Lattimer's informant Jack McCall (Porter Hall) while he is playing cards with the henchmen. The film ends with a heart-broken Calamity Jane cradling Hickok's body.

Review: After the failure of his few dramas in the early talkie period, he vowed to make only "big" pictures, and the Old West was simply another historical arena for grand heroic exploits, just like the crusades or the high seas.This being DeMille, the idea seems to have been to do a kind of definitive take on the setting.
So we get Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and General Custer all cheerfully rubbing shoulders like an Old West version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and banding together against the common enemy (the injuns, of course).
DeMille's penchant for historical accuracy may give the sets and costumes a look of authenticity, but does not extend as far as actually portraying Calamity as a drunken prostitute, and Hickok as a kind of 19th-century Lemmy from Motorhead.The two leads may not look like their historical counterparts, but at least Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur have the rugged demeanour of frontierspeople.
And finally a young Anthony Quinn makes a short but impressive appearance as a Cheyenne warrior, lending a degree of dignity to the natives that is woefully absent in the rest of the picture.DeMille himself though does not appear to have "got" the genre.
And DeMille's images are often beautiful in a painterly way, but still the lack of "west" on display stops this from feeling like a Western.Think of this then more as an adventure yarn than a horse opera.
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.
I'm wondering if Paramount decided to save money on the research for this one.The action of this film takes place from the end of the Civil War until Wild Bill Hickok is shot dead in Deadwood which was 1876.
I'm suspecting a lot is lost by only seeing it on television.Gary Cooper is at his laconic yup and nope best, Jean Arthur is a fine Calamity Jane.
Gary Cooper is Wild Bill Hickok, ideal for the role, together with John Wayne and James Stewart, they were the best actors that played western heroes in their generation.
Jean Arthur is great as Calamity Jane, nobody that I know played it better than her.
The friendship of Hickok with Buffalo Bill, the selling of rifles to the Indians by a great manufacturer to compensate for the losses he would have because of the end of the civil war, Custer and Little Big Horn, the uneasy relationship between Buffalo Bill's wife, a religious woman, with Hickok a man who had killed plenty, also the unusual love affair between Hickok and Calamity all this makes 'The Plainsman' a non conventional and interesting film.
The first in order of production was this film, starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok, with Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane.
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.
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.
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.
Silly Fun. 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..
Pass This One Up. I really wanted to like this western, being a fan of the genre and a fan of "Buffalo Bill," "Wild Bill Hickok," and "Calamity Jane," all of whom are in this story!
Jean Arthur's character was somewhat annoying and James Ellison just did not look like nor act like "Buffalo Bill." Cooper wasn't at his best, either, sounding too wooden.
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.
DeMille and Gary Cooper worked together and the next movie the made was basically the same but set in a different time.
The action takes us from an Indian raid on a cabin; one of the best parts of the movie with Jean Arthur excellent while attempting to appease the war-painted natives.
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.
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.
At the close of the US Civil War, girl-shy Gary Cooper (as "Wild" Bill Hickok), fellow frontiersman James Ellison (as "Buffalo" Bill Cody), and feisty blonde Jean Arthur (as "Calamity" Jane Canary) battle Native American Indians and greedy gunrunner Charles Bickford (as John Lattimer).
The film starts by helpfully disclaiming, "The story that follows compresses many years, many lives, and widely separated events into one narrative - in an attempt to do justice to the courage of The Plainsman of our west." This film is far from historically accurate.
DeMille ~ Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, James Ellison, Charles Bickford.
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.
In other words, while he was clearly able to get great actors and amazing sets and scenes, it was all, to me, fluff due to insipid writing.Here in the case of "The Plainsman", DeMille had Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur at his disposal--two of the biggest stars of the era.
After all, first Wild Bill Hickock just happened to meet his old friends Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane--and then shortly after the two met General Custer!!
Too many times the film played fast and loose with the truth--just like in DeMille's "Cleopatra", "The Ten Commandments", "Sign of the Cross" and many other pictures.
Surely the only Western featuring Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Custer, and Abraham Lincoln!
Cooper tries hard to make Hickok come alive and Arthur brings her usual spunk to Calamity Jane but Ellison is over matched as Buffalo Bill.
Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur were great as a movie duet here.
It has to be clearly stated that this movie is a mix of western - we have cowboys, indians , US Cavalry soldiers , Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody and even Abraham Lincoln!
There is a lot of action in the film, the plot is interesting, but of course it has its naive elements like showing the battle over Little Big Horn soon after the end of American Civil War in order to the story would be connected.
Can be seen on the picture that the director Cecil De Mille put in this work so much amount of money , De Mille who was a specialist in big movie shows.We can see in the screen the great charisma of Gary Cooper outstanding western legend.
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.
Most of DeMille's films were set in some period of history, but he was not a stickler for historical accuracy and never let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story.
DeMille is best remembered today for grand epics like "The Ten Commandments", but he also made a number of Westerns, of which "The Plainsman" is one.
The film is set between the end of the American Civil War and Custer's Last Stand, in reality a period of eleven years but here seeming like only a few weeks or months.
The main characters are Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and General Custer, although the account of their lives is highly fictionalised.
I am only surprised that DeMille did not try and introduce Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley into the mix, thereby getting all the main Western heroes into the same film.
Only in one scene, when the Cheyenne chieftain Yellow Hand is allowed to state his point of view, is it suggested that the Indian Wars might have had more to do with white greed than with red bloodlust.Despite its dodgy political stance, "The Plainsman" is by no means a bad film.
During a decade when many directors turned to intimate, small- scale movies, DeMille remained true to the sort of large-scale action films with which he made his name in the silent era.
Gary Cooper as Hickok makes a charismatic hero- he has a rather larger role than James Ellison as Cody or John Miljan as Custer- and Jean Arthur as Calamity is better than her successors in the same role, Jane Russell in "The Paleface" (too glamorous) and Doris Day in "Calamity Jane" (so obviously unsuitable that I can only assume this was deliberate miscasting for comic effect).
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..
It stars Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, James Ellison, Charles Bickford, Helen Burgess and Paul Harvey.
Film is a fictionalised account of the relationships involving Wild Bill Hickok (Cooper), Calamity Jane (Arthur), Buffalo Bill (Ellison) and George Custer (John Miljan).Master of the epic DeMille crafts a big and bold Western that's finely acted, interesting in its telling and big on idealism.
Gun running and politico musings drift in and out of the narrative but leave a mark, while DeMille proves classy in action construction as a number of warfare sequences raise the pulse considerably.The flip-side...There are no bad apples in the cast (Cooper wonderfully macho, Arthur whip-crackingly gorgeous and Bickford suitably weasel like), though Burgess doesn't quite grasp the dramatic thrust of being Buffalo Bill's good woman.
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.
They seemed to have missed the point, The Plainsman was never made with the intention of being historically accurate, it was made as a piece of wild western fantasy as Cecil B.
So the spectator watching The Plainsman should know it is not be a realistic portrayal of the individuals involved, just a grand spectacle of Western adventure which is one of enjoyment.At the core of the narrative is Wild Bill Hickok, played with rugged masculinity by Gary Cooper, who when thrown into a war against hostile Indians comes up against John Lattimer, the antagonist who has been selling unused rifles to Indians on behalf of military industrialist.
The subject of masculinity is a recurring motif in many Westerns and The Plainsman is no exception.The masculinity element comes into play in the subplot of Hickok's friend Buffalo Bill attempting to settle down with his new wife, who is unfamiliar to the ways of the Wild West.
He, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane, are the central characters.As the Civil War closes, Lincoln mentions his concern that the country's dynamism would be enhanced if people would follow the advice, "Go West, young man," which, mercifully, the film didn't erroneously attribute to Horace Greeley, as a number of others did.
Wild Bill uses a Bowie knife, which he eventually gives to the boy, calling it an "Arkansas Toothpick," which in reality was a different type of knife, though both were used throughout the frontier.Hickock eventually meets Buffalo Bill Cody, who looks close to the photographs and paintings of the actual man.
This a rip roaring western and i have watched it many times and it entertains on every level.However if your after the true facts about such legends as Hickcock,Cody and Calamity Jane then look elsewhere, as John Ford suggested this is the west when the truth becomes legend print the legend.The story moves with a cracking pace, and there is some great dialogue between Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur two very watchable stars who help to make this movie.The sharp eyed amongst you might just spot Gabby Hayes as an Indian scout, also there is a very young Anthony Quinn making his debut as Cayenne warrior, he actually married one of Demilles daughters in real life.Indeed its Quinns character who informs Cooper of the massacre of Custer told in flash back, the finale is well done and when the credits roll it fuses the American west with American history.So please take time out to watch this classic western..
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!
Garry Cooper and Jean Arthur play Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, the star-crossed lovers.
DeMille (director).Gary Cooper (as Wild Bill Hickok) is an off-and-on romantic interest to Jean Arthur (as Calamity Jane).
Charles Bickford is the bad guy here (as usual in this type of film he is selling guns to the Indians).
But, despite its historical inaccuracies (a major character dies in a way that was totally inaccurate to the facts), it's fun, and well worth watching.Cooper and Arthur are excellent here, although this isn't the kind of role we usually think of for Jean Arthur.
There were more colorful quotes in the picture than the one in my summary line above, like Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) calling Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper) a 'slab sided, bird totin' rat', or Hickok's own statement to villain John Lattimer in Hays City - "You're not leaving town unless dead men can walk".
So it's not like he was trying to pawn this off as a definitive history.While I was watching though, it was hard not to draw a comparison to the way movies are filmed today.
Gary Cooper was generally effective here in his role as Wild Bill Hickok given the era in which it was made.
That's probably no one's fault, as movie making was still a long way off from projecting the kind of realism that makes for adventure stories today.Interestingly, the picture opens and closes with an assassination, and I was wondering if DeMille designed it that way on purpose or if he came upon the idea after filming already started.
Fuzzy Knight makes an appearance as soldier Dave, and I had to do a double take when Anthony Quinn showed up as the wandering Cheyenne who describes Custer's fall at the Little Big Horn to both Bill's.So what you have here for 1936, is a competently made film given it's limitations, rising above the level of a B Western, but ultimately not achieving the level of story telling that would come for another couple decades or so.