Wild Bill

In Wild Bill we get to see one of the best characterizations of the legendary western character. Jeff Bridges joins a pantheon of great players who've essayed the part of the marshal of Abilene, Kansas. Folks like William S. Hart, Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Guy Madison, Bill Elliott, Forrest Tucker, and Charles Bronson have all played Hickok with varying degrees of success.

Some of these people have played Hickok more or less nobly as the script and their screen persona permitted. Someone like Roy Rogers you know without seeing the film had Hickok be a straight arrow. The real Wild Bill was someone who was as tough as he had to be to enforce law and order in a wild and woolly town like Abilene, Kansas circa 1870-1871 when Hickok kept the peace there.

Among those other actors who played Hickok also includes Jeff's father Lloyd Bridges who did it in an hour television drama on the Great Adventure series. I saw that years ago and I wish I could remember more of it so I could compare father and son. The part I best recall is the famous story of Hickok accidentally shooting his own deputy who made the fatal mistake of coming up behind him too quietly and after he'd just shot one of Texas's rowdier cowboys. It's part of the Hickok legend and shown here as well.

Of course the manner of Hickok's death has also entered into folklore with wide and varying accounts of the kind of man Hickok's killer Jack McCall was. He was probably closer to the sneaky rat that Cecil B. DeMille had Porter Hall play him as in The Plainsman. Here he's shown as a drunk and scared kid played by David Arquette much in the same manner as Bob Ford was played by Casey Affleck last year. Arquette does well in the role.

Ellen Barkin is cast as Calamity Jane and while she's as tough as the famous frontierswoman, she's way too good looking. Too bad Louis B. Mayer never thought of using Marie Dressler for the part back in the day. Even she was a little too femme for the part.

The film is done in Citizen Kane style, narrated by John Hurt who is a close friend of Hickok in the story. It's a pretty good western, coming out when those are few and far between.

Wild Bill (1995)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Bridges) comes into Deadwood where he meets up with his old flame Calamity Jane (Ellen Barkin) and has a pesky young kid (David Arquette) threatening to kill him. While staying at Deadwood, Hickok begins to feel that his questionable past is starting to haunt him.

Walter Hill's WILD BILL pretty much took a beating when it was originally released. The critics ripped it apart and movie goers pretty much stayed away turning it into one of the year's biggest bombs. I avoided watching the film due to its reputation but I finally got around to the movie and I must admit that I found it to be incredibly entertaining on a number of levels.

I think what I enjoyed most was the style of the storytelling. The film starts off like a greatest hits package as we get several small scenes showing some of the more notorious moments from Hickok's life. I really loved how Hill made this work as we basically get to see what made the man a legend and then we get to the current story of him struggling with his past while at the same time having to deal with this young man who wants to kill him.

Not only does the story work extremely well but we're also given a terrific cast. Bridges is downright terrific in the lead role and I must say that he's a lot better here than he was in TRUE GRIT. In fact, you could make the argument that this contains some of the actor's greatest moments on the screen, which is saying a lot. Barkin is also extremely good in her role of the love interest and Arquette is also good in his part. We've also got a great supporting cast including Bruce Dern, Keith Carradine, Diane Lane, Christina Applegate, James Gammon and John Hurt.

As you'd expect from a Hill movie, WILD BILL is well-made and contains some great style and especially when it comes to the violence. The shoot outs are handled extremely well and they are so well-filmed that you can't help but get caught up with them. The personal story of Bill and his demons also work extremely well. I'm really not sure why WILD BILL was such a disaster at the box office and with critics but the film is certainly worth watching.

Most reviews seem to look at this through the prism of "Deadwood," which seems unfair as the elongated TV format allows for far more character development. So to point out that the characters in "Wild Bill" aren't as-- well, you get the picture. Viewed alone, the movie deserves praise for performance, set design, a sense of period dialogue and historical accuracy in visual recreations. Yes, WB really did wear Navy Colts backwards, cavalry-style, in a red sash; yes, he did have greasy lanks of hair and wear a big floppy hat, a thick tie and a vest that didn't match his jacket which didn't match his pants. And for about an hour, I think the movie is pretty amusing. But when it sinks into Deadwood over its last hour, it appears to use too much of the stagey dialogue of one of its sources, a play by someone named Thomas Babe. At this point, it pretty much abandons history which is bad enough, but also cinematic fluency, of which Hill is a master: it becomes static, talky, dreary, and completely loses its momentum. And someone--Babe?--made the decision to give the McCall-Hickcock dynamic an Oedipal overtone--he's the "son" of a woman once loved , then abandoned, by Hickcock. This is an attempt at coherency, to bring the murder into some sort of classic framework. Yeah, swell, however: McCall was much older, a buffalo hunter who'd lost dough to Wild Bill the night before. He didn't stand for the abused son, he stood for the randomness of frontier violence, where booze, pride, stupidity and a culture of pointless aggression could easily spell an ambush murder like McCall's. THAT, to me, would not only have been more accurate, but more fluent and a better movie.

I've been checking out the comments on this film and they seem to be in line with most of the other reactions I've heard. It's important to say up front that this is not a film for Western fans. It's not a film for action fans. It's not for history buffs who care only about the facts. It's not a film for people who want to see a good story told simply.

Wild Bill is one of the richest and most disturbing films ever made about the American West. It shows us a complicated man without trying to explain or rationalize the contradictions in his character. He's capable of love, but he also commits acts of brutal violence. He cares for his friends but he holds them all at arm's length. And he feels compelled to play the part of the living legend to the end, come what may.

I suspect that Walter Hill chose this subject because he identified strongly with Wild Bill himself. But whether or not this is true, the contradictions in Hickok's character are a part of this country's character. Hill was lucky to have Jeff Bridges in the lead. It's one of his finest performances. Though Wild Bill doesn't voice doubts about his life out loud, Bridges' face shows us that he doesn't understand himself the reasons for many of his actions.

The story is not told in chronological order, but the organization of the sequences is not haphazard. In fact it's beautifully thought out. This is not a film for everybody, but I think it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten so far. I feel like fans of Walter Hill's work will see the same thing I do: a beautiful and haunting meditation on why this country is the way it is.

Walter Hill has based his screenplay on two literary works by two individuals: Paul Dexter's book and Thomas Babe's play. Hill is a good screenplay-writer himself. I recommend viewers to view the film as an example of a good screenplay and not be unduly worried about facts.

The structure of the narrative is simplified by the sepia and black-and-white flashbacks by the director. Unlike other directors, Hill chooses to uses tilted shots for most of these flashbacks, suggesting a "colored" viewpoint of what is shown.

The film can be dismissed easily as a crass action western--but this film looks at bravura narcissism (opening shots of shooting a glass on top of a dog's head), a man who refuses to be tied down to relationships with women but is friendly with men, stupid reactions to knocking his hat, etc. The heroics may belong to the mustachioed men rather than the clean-shaven but the film has more to offer than hairy faces.

The casting of John Hurt, Bruce Dern and Ellen Barkin is commendable--they provide fascinating screen time that adds to the credibility. Hurt and Barkin who open the film carries the film even though Jeff Bridges proves to be a credible lead player but he is no great thespian.

The film ultimately belongs to Hill and art director Dan Olexiewicz, with the atmosphere changes from bright sun to slushy streets--that strangely keeps pace with the characters. Hill develops the characters slowly through filmed flashback and dream sequences (visit of Wild Bill to the insane asylum, the conversations with Red Indians, are examples) rather than the spoken word of the main character and that contributes to the feeling that most characters are not fleshed out. They are well developed, in an unusual way. This is not great cinema but above average stuff--a good way to describe Hill's body of work.