Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Buffalo Bill and the Indians is a pre-cert UK VHS release by Thorn EMI Video on April 1982.
==Description==
Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival of 1976, Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians is not a movie which gives up all its secrets at a first viewing. Although the subtitle "Sitting Bull's history lesson" hints that there's more to the film than meets the eye. The opening scene bears this out. In the glowing but unreal colours of the front covers of the Wild West paperbacks of almost a century ago, a marauding band of savage Indians is massacring a family of settlers. Then as the camera pulls back, the prairie and distant mountains prove to be just a painted backcloth; the dead pick themselves up; property men wheel away he log cabin. For the Indian wars are now over, and William F. Cody (Paul Newman) is re-staging history as mass entertainment in his Wild West Show and adding lustre to his own heroic image as the legendary Buffalo Bill. He shuts his ears to the sardonic comments of story writer Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), who knows that Cody is really a hero of fiction based on a smattering of fact . A tinsel star who has come to believe in his own publicity. A showman giving the public what it wants - like the sharp shooting of Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and exciting re-enactments of battles on horseback in which the "treacherous" Indians invariably end up biting the dust. The whites are all goodies, the redskins all baddies. Surrounded by sycophants, Cody sees himself as a giant among pygmies until he meets his match in his old adversary Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts). Released from prison to appear as himself in Cody's latest audience puller, Custer's Last Stand, the Sioux chief refuses to play the white man's game. He remains aloof and inscrutable, speaking only through his wily interpreter (Will Sampson). The scene is now set for a battle of wits and wills in a slyly satirical comedy with a relevance to all history as it has been simplified and distorted to fit the needs of popular entertainment.
==Cast==
*Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill
*Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley
*Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline
*Kevin McCarthy as Major Burke
*Joel Grey as Nate Salisbury
*Harvey Keitel as Ed Goodman
*John Considine as Frank E. Butler
*Frank Kaquitts as Sitting Bull
*Will Sampson as Halsey
*Pat McCormick as President Grover Cleveland
*Shelley Duvall as Mrs. Grover Cleveland
*Allan F. Nicholls as Prentiss Ingraham
*Robert DoQui as Oswald Dart
*Evelyn Lear as Nina Cavallini
*Mike Kaplan as Jules Keen
*Bert Remsen as Crutch
*Bonnie Leaders as The Mezzo-Contralto
*Noelle Rogers as Lucille DuCharme
*Denver Pyle as McLaughlin
*Ken Krossa as Johnny Baker
*Fred N. Larsen as Buck Taylor
*Jerri Duce as The Cowboy Trick Rider
*Joy Duce as The Cowboy Trick Rider
*Alex Green as The Mexican Whip and Fast Draw Act
*Gary MacKenzie as The Mexican Whip and Fast Draw Act
*Humphrey Gratz as The Old Soldier
*Dennis Corrie as Rancher
*Patrick Reynolds as President Cleveland's Aide
Category:VHS
Category:UK VHS Releases
Category:1982 VHS Releases