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There were not a lot of Westerns in the 1930s, at least not in the A-budget bracket. So why would that canny marketeer and bandwagon-hopper Cecil B. DeMille decide to make one in 1936? The answer is simple. 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. Waldemar Young and Harold Lamb, DeMille's current hacks-du-jour, along with "Oklahoma" playwright Lynn Riggs have created a screenplay that is not so much a cliché-fest as a cosy, sanitised and highly anachronistic snapshot of Western mythology. 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. They are also good enough performers to do a decent job despite a lack of coaching from DeMille. But as is often the case, the most interesting players are the villains. Charles Bickford looks as if he was chiselled from the buttes of the plains themselves, and gives a performance comparable to Walter Huston's Trampas in the 1929 version of The Virginian. Victor Varconi, once a handsome lead man in the silents, now thanks to his accent and looks reduced to playing all manner of swarthy baddies, is compellingly menacing as Painted Horse. 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. Despite the title, we don't really get to see those plains, and there is none of the romance of the outdoor lifestyle that makes classic Westerns what they are. But looking at DeMille's style you can see he is not a fan of empty spaces. Bigness for him means fullness. He really goes to town on the steamboat boarding scene, conjuring up an image of lively bustle with people moving across the frame in layers receding in depth. This is a very effective way of making a place look crowded without having to place the camera too far back or hire out every extra on the books. In other scenes, such as the one where the townspeople threaten to tar and feather Jean Arthur he uses extras to build walls around the action, filling every spare space with people. Even in simpler scenes there tends to be a degree of complexity to the shot, like a classical painting that tries to cram every aspect of an idea onto the canvas. 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. It may be silly as silly can be (my favourite daft moment is in the opening scene, when Abe Lincoln's wife bursts into a meeting to remind him he's going to be late for the theatre, followed by a doom-laden chord in the background score), but it is not bad as far as no-brainer entertainment goes. The action scenes are exciting and punchy, largely thanks to the dynamic editing of Anne Bauchens. This is by no means essential DeMille, and certainly not essential Cooper, but is good fun if you happen to catch it.

This Cecil B. 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. She really pulled it off! Gary Cooper is at his most taciturn, but manages some occasional pithy sayings: 'The plains are big, but trails cross ... sometimes.' The story is a pastiche to end all pastiches. All the cowboy heroes of Western lore seem to be in there somehow except for Jesse James. Even Abraham Lincoln opens the story in person (or at least, DeMille would have us believe so). There is no room for anything so evanescent as subtlety, this is a 'stomp 'em in the face' tale for the masses. A remarkable thing about this film however is that it is a very early full frontal attack on what Eisenhower was eventually to name 'the military industrial complex'. It isn't just a story about gun-runners, but about arming anyone for money, and doing so from the heart of Washington. But let's not get into politics, let's leave that to DeMille, who can be guaranteed to be superficial. The chief interest of this film all these years later is that it uses the first film score composed by George Antheil, who has a lot to say about the job in his autobiography, 'Bad Boy of Music'. Antheil seems to have originated 'the big sound' adopted by all subsequent Westerns, whereby the plains sing out with the voices and sounds of countless cowboys in the sky, celebrating the open spaces and interweaving common melodies. That is why it does not sound at all unusual, because we have heard it a thousand times. But he seems to have been the first to summon up the combined rustlings of all the sage brush into this symphony of the open skies which has entered into American mythic lore, and given it a soundtrack which has never varied since then, corny as it may be, but doubtless appropriate. It is amusing to see Anthony Quinn in an early appearance as a Cheyenne Indian. Gabby Hayes is in there somewhere, but you miss him in the crowd. Gary Cooper overtops them all, looming large, - but when did he ever loom small?

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.

Surely the only Western featuring Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Custer, and Abraham Lincoln! After a slow start, it hits its stride for a while but eventually runs out of ideas and seems to go on forever. 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. DeMille's direction is uninspired; it seems he was more interested in creating an epic than telling a good story. There is enough decent material here that a good director and editor could have turned it into an exciting movie of about 90 minutes. Sadly, Burgess, who plays Mrs. Cody in her film debut, died a year later at age 20.

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. This was the first time Cecil B. DeMille and Gary Cooper worked together and the next movie the made was basically the same but set in a different time. This movie starts out with Lincoln's assassination and it also deals with an Indian war. Calamity Jane is in love with Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill has gotten married and now wants to stay home. This movie also deals with Custer's last stand and is far from accurate. Gary Cooper is good as usual and i usually don't like Jean Arthur but i liked her here.

After the failure of "The Crusades" at the box office, Cecil B. DeMille stopped doing films about non-American history. His films for the next thirteen years were about our history from Jean Lafitte to World War II (Dr. Wassell). The first in order of production was this film, starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok, with Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. James Ellison was Buffalo Bill, John Miljan (not a villain as usual) was General George A. Custer, and Anthony Quinn was one of the Indians who fought at Little Big Horn. 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. Lincoln talks about the need to secure the west (more about this point later). Then he announces he has to go to the theater. That April 14th must have been very busy for Abe - in "Virginia City" he grants a pardon to Errol Flynn at the request of Miriam Hopkins on the same date.

Actually, while Lincoln was concerned about the West, his immediate thoughts on the last day of his Presidency were about reunifying the former Confederate states and it's citizens into the Union as soon as possible. It was Reconstruction that occupied his attention, not the west (except for the problems of Maximillian and his French controlled forces in Mexico against Juarez). But he had been involved in actual problems with the West. In 1862 he sent disgraced General John Pope, the loser at Second Manassas, to Minnesota to put down a serious Indian war by the Sioux (the subject of McKinley Kantor's novel, "Sprit Lake". 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. Like saying, Teddy Roosevelt said, "Eat a good breakfast every morning for your health." It is not a profound statement of policy. It is, at best, a statement of recognizable fact. 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. "The Plainsman" is an adventure film, and as such it has the full benefit of DeMille the film creator of spectacle. As such it is well worth watching. But not as a textbook on Lincoln's political ideas or his quotable legacy.

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. Hickok meets Gen. George A. Custer (John Miljan) that assigns Buffalo Bill to guide a troop with ammunition to help the fort. 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. Their performances are below average with awful characters. The best part is the beginning, with the inception of the lobby of the greedy manufacturers of weapons using the repeating rifles to provide Indian (and also "white man") annihilation in the name of the pockets full of money. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Jornadas Heróicas" ("Heroic Journeys")

The master of movie spectacle Cecil B. De Mille goes West. 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.

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. Bickford is the smooth gun running villain. De Mille's well-practised abilities in handling big budgets, big casts and big stories overcame the doggedly domestic drama of Cooper and Arthur's relationship. Slow moving and overly romantic by modern standards in its depiction of Westward expansion, 'The Plainsman' remains an entertaining spectacle.

In 1966, Universal remade the movie as a vastly inferior telefilm.

Phil Hardy

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). Mr. Ellison handles himself exceptionally well alongside Mr. Cooper, already a huge box office star, and young Helen Burgess (as Louisa) does well in the debut of her unfortunately brief film career. Speaking with forked-tongues, young Anthony Quinn and George "Gabby" Hayes have small but notable roles as an Injun and victim.

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. While mannered and obvious, the handsome production benefits from beautiful visual framing by director Cecil B. DeMille and the Paramount studios crew.

****** The Plainsman (11/16/36) Cecil B. DeMille ~ Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, James Ellison, Charles Bickford

Cecil B. DeMille was an odd director. Although he was quite skilled (especially in making spectacles), it seemed as if he always was filming second-rate scripts. Now I know that this will ruffle a few feathers, as conventional wisdom has it that he was a great director. Well, great director or not (and I say NOT), his films generally have some of the worst dialog and anachronistic plots of any A-list director in Hollywood of his era. 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. And, 2000 American-Indians were on hand for the fight scene. But, the plot is one cliché after another--with historical figures tossed into the mix right and left--even though many of the events in the film never occurred or occurred very differently. As usual, to DeMille, none of this mattered--what mattered was that his film was exciting and BIG!! Early in the film, I got bored. 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!! It was as if the writers did all their research by glancing, briefly, at a history book and taking all the highlighted names and tossing them together! As a history teacher, I was (as usual) appalled...but not at all surprised.

If you take common sense and toss it out the window (along with history), then the film is very watchable and fun...and brainless. 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. But because Cooper and Arthur were such good actors, they at least made watching this mess pleasant.

Sure this movie is not historically accurate but it is great entertainment. Most DeMille pictures especially the later epics are slow and plodding but the action here moves at a clip. The story is basically a series of peaks with very little quiet moments. 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. This is followed by her and Cooper being taken to the war camp and being tortured. Later comes a protracted battle with the Cheyenne. The whole thing is ridiculous but great fun and entertaining from start to finish. Jean Arthur is one of the best actresses of this era and she shines here.

The Plainsman is directed by Cecil B. DeMille and written by Courtney Ryler Cooper & Frank J. Wilstach. It stars Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, James Ellison, Charles Bickford, Helen Burgess and Paul Harvey. Music is by George Antheil and cinematography by Victor Milner. 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. You obviously have to forget real time lines, this is a splicer as DeMille and Co take some of the Wild West's most famous characters and stir them into one Oater stew! Friendships and affairs of the heart form the basis of thematics, with the war against the redskin giving the characters reason for being. 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. The running time is a touch too long, with several passages of dialogue serving only as time filling exercises, while the back screen projection work is irritable if a little understandable given the time of production. Ultimately there are flaws that make this only a comfortable recommendation to classic era Western fans who can accept it as a 1930s dressed up bit of frontier malarkey. Casual observers, mind, are unlikely to get past the historical hodge-podge and hooray idealism. 7/10

Cecil B. 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. PLAINSMAN is just one of dozens of classics from the 1936-1945 decade that have seen enduring commercial life decade after decade: released, re-issued, re-issued all over again. Filmmakers like today's Spielberg, Jackson, Bruckheimer are like kids playing in a sandbox. None of today's movies will be sought out in 7 months let alone 70 years.

"Cecil B. DeMille Much against his will Was persuaded to leave Moses Out of the Wars of the Roses".

Unlike some clerihews, that one encapsulates an essential truth about its subject. 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. He saw the Old West as one more canvas on which he could paint an epic tale of heroism and adventure, and felt no more need for accuracy when dealing with American history than when dealing with the ancient world. 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. Knowing him he could probably have got Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger in there as well.

The main villain is a gun-runner named Lattimer who is selling rifles to the Cheyenne Indians. He is acting as agent for a group of unscrupulous weapon manufacturers whose business has taken a hit with the end of the Civil War and who view the Indians not as enemies of the United States but as potential new customers. The film tells the story of how our four heroes frustrate this dastardly plot and ensure that the rifles find their way to the Cavalry. There is also a subplot about the romance between Hickok and Calamity.

As that synopsis might suggest, this is not one of those revisionist Westerns which try to tell the story of the West from a viewpoint sympathetic to the Indians, or even one which tries to tell it from a viewpoint even-handed between Indians and whites. The concept of the "revisionist Western" did not really exist in 1936. Modern audiences might have a certain sneaking sympathy with Lattimer whose endeavours, however mercenary his motives, do at least have the effect of partially levelling an otherwise very uneven playing-field between Indians and whites. In the thirties, however, it was still "white man good, red man bloodthirsty savage". 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. "The Plainsman" is not quite as spectacular as some Westerns from the fifties and sixties, but it has some good action sequences, especially the Indian attack on the ammunition train and the subsequent siege. 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). Anthony Quinn (DeMille's son-in-law) has small early role as an Indian.

Today we lovers of the Western are lucky in that we have available to us so many films by the masters of the genre such as John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Anthony Mann, William Wyler and Clint Eastwood. People in 1936 were not so lucky. Certainly, "poverty row" Westerns were ten-a-penny in the thirties, but few of these were of any quality, even when they featured stars of the future like John Wayne. Even the likes of "Destry Rides Again", "Dodge City" and "Stagecoach" still lay a couple of years in the future. A major-league Western by a major-league director like DeMille was therefore something of a novelty at the time. "The Plainsman" is not in the same league as the greatest works of the directors mentioned above, but it is a very decent Western for the mid- thirties. 7/10

Some goofs. In a scene set in the 1860s there is a reference to tumbleweed. Although these plants have come to be regarded as iconic symbols of the West, they are actually native to Asia and were not introduced to North America until after the events depicted in this film. ("The Plainsman", however, is far from the only film to make this mistake). Calamity Jane pronounces her surname, Canary, as though it were the name of the bird; in reality it was pronounced, and sometimes spelt, "Cannary", with the stress on the first syllable.

In his long career veteran Hollywood showman Cecil B. DeMille had been making westerns since his directorial debut during the silent era with 'The Squaw Man', and in one of his later films in the genre reunited the stars of 'Mr Deeds Goes to Town' in a very different setting with Gary Cooper as an upright and clean-cut Wild Bill Hickok and with Jean Arthur creating one of the western's most sleek and glamorous heroines as Calamity Jane with swept back hair and in leather britches; while in a supporting role Anthony Quinn started true to form in the first a wide variety of ethnic types as a Red Indian brave.

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! Add to the mix Gary Cooper as the lead actor, and it sounded great.

The trouble was.....it wasn't. I found myself looking at my watch just 40 minutes into this, being bored to death. 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 was several years before he hit his prime as an actor.

In a nutshell, his western shot blanks. Head up the pass and watch another oater because most of 'em were far better than this one.