MonsterHunter

Robert Altman and Paul Newman team up to give us some revisionist history about America’s greatest hero, Buffalo Bill. Mind you, I have no idea what Buffalo Bill ever did that was so dang great. I’m guessing that he killed hisself some buffalo and Indians or something back in times when that sort of thing could pass for an occupation.

Shoot, hang on for a second, while I go look him. Okay, I checked this character out and he seemed to be one of those dudes that rode the Pony Express, scouted for the U.S. Army, and ran some type of Wild West Show. He also won the Congressional Medal of Honor, had it revoked and then had it restored again.

The legend of Buffalo Bill seems to have been created mostly by Ned Buntline, an author of dime novels and when Bill and Buntline got crossways with each other (that’s how we say it on the prairie) Bill simply started writing his own dime novels, romanticizing all the things he did. As you can see, Bill then is deserving as being called a hero for this great land of ours. (One report says that he killed 4280 head of Buffalo all by himself in just seventeen months! Can you imagine the trouble all those buffaloes would be causing nowadays if Bill didn’t single-handedly make them extinct?)

So, if you, like me, love your frontier heroes, especially Buffalo Bill, his blue ox Babe, and their faithful companion Tonto, then you must skip this movie! They portray Bill as a fraud, resorting to such gimmicks as giving the Indians in his show slower horses so he looks better, wearing a wig, using buckshot in his six shooter, and being a heavy drinker. Worst of all, they claim that Bill had a thing for ugly women that sang opera! Have they no shame?

You can see then that this is one of those deals where Altman is going to make some kind of commentary on the nature of our country and its desire to invent its own past (since it has relatively little of it compared to places like Europe and Asia) as well as the fact that we have a desperate need to make our heroes into celebrities and force them to live a bigger-than-life persona that no one could possibly inhabit for any amount of time without being utterly destroyed as a person. What better way to show all this than to use American’s first movie star, Buffalo Bill?

Of course, actual motion pictures were still a few decades off, but Bill was turned into the 19th century equivalent of Elvis, Hulk Hogan, and Sly Stallone. He just did it with a travelling wild west show instead of through concerts, wrestling matches, and mountain climbing movies. Altman’s premise is an enticing one: show us what Bill was like through the prism of the show business machine and what happens when he signs up his former foe, Chief Sitting Bull, for a season in an effort to boost returns at the box office.

Throw in the fact that the creator of the Buffalo Bill legend, Ned Buntline, has shown up and is hanging around just adds to the possibilities. And for the first part of the movie, everything plays out as you would hope. Paul Newman, like Buffalo Bill, is a natural star with his rascally smile and piercing eyes and you can’t help but be held enthralled whenever he’s on screen doing something whacky. For instance, everyone was worried about his drinking, so Bill swore that he’d restrict himself to one drink a day. Of course this means that he’s walking around the whole movie with a cup full of hooch the size of a Big Gulp!

The movie is at its best when they play with movie-western stereotypes we’ve all been raised to expect. After Sitting Bull (through his right hand man, Halsey) gives Bill some spiritual mumbo jumbo about the leaves and stuff, Bill fires back something along the lines that it don’t matter much about the leaves so long as he knows which way the wind is blowing, then whispers to one of his men that he was just giving some that “murky logic” back to Bull that he gave him. Is he Buffalo Bill or Reggie Dunlop from Slapshot?

Eventually though, the movie doesn’t generate much in the way of laughs or for the matter anything in the way of interest, at least until the closing moments. The problem seems to be that for the middle of the movie, Altman seemed to lose track of the point he was making and got swallowed up by the story and by the impenetrable machinations of Sitting Bull. If Altman manages to demystify Bill and the whole idea of the frontier hero, then he doesn’t do much with Sitting Bull or the Indians.

Sure, he portrays them as hard-driving negotiators, demanding blankets for their tribal pals, telling Bill what he will and won’t do at the show, like some kind of Sioux-diva, but by and large he falls back on that whole “Indians are mystical and inscrutable” gimmick that we’ve seen so many times before. This does little to make Sitting Bull anything more than the legendary character he’s generally regarded as. I suppose that could be the whole point - that he was the real thing, while Bill was the mere product of a publicity machine, but that doesn’t make Bull interesting in the slightest.

The story is that Bill has contracted with Bull to star together in Bill’s Wild West Show. Bull proves to be a problematic performer making a bunch of demands and saying that he will do the show only because he had a dream that he would meet the Great Father (President Grover Cleveland) by signing up with the show. There are a few bumps along the way where Bull usually ends up outsmarting Bill and Bill manages to convince himself that it was in fact he that had outsmarted Sitting Bull all along.

Finally, they get a wire that Cleveland is bringing his new bride on a honeymoon and they’re going to be stopping by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show later that month. Sitting Bull’s dream is coming true and he finally gets to meet the president. He wants to ask the prez to do something for his people, but Cleveland won’t even listen to the request. Sitting Bull leaves and the next thing we know, he’s been killed at Standing Rock.

We never did find out what Sitting Bull wanted from Cleveland and the only thing this managed to do was make Cleveland look like a moron (he keep having to confer with his assistant before saying anything to Sitting Bull) which is fine, because I’m no Cleveland mark or anything, but I was expecting something to come out of this Sitting Bull thing.

It turns out that the only thing that comes from it is that it causes Buffalo Bill to have a drunken vision of Bull hanging out in his house with him! Bull sits there silently as Bill wanders around his house (more of a trailer - they are on tour after all) and bemoans the nature of celebrity. You’re tempted to tell Bill that he got exactly what he deserved. You wanted to be famous, you were complicit in this process and tried to live the legend, knowing full well it was all a bunch of buffalo chips. Now that you’re trapped by your own fame, you’re crying because you’re suffocating beneath everyone’s expectations? Well, I’m not RSVP-ing your pity party pal!

Bill, though a showman, is still a human being, and he knows that all these people are living vicariously through him and the worst part of all is that the life they’re living vicariously through him never really existed at all. You can see it when Bill stares into the mirror, examining his face and beard, that he’s wondering when everyone is going to find out what he’s known all along - that Buffalo Bill is as much a myth as the rest of that “Rugged Individualism That Tamed the Wild West” slop they try to shovel onto us at every opportunity.

Burt Lancaster is the myth maker, dime-novelist Ned Buntline and he gets far too little screen time, but makes the most with what Altman gives him. Bill wants him out of camp, but refuses to tell him so himself. For his part, Buntline says he’s not going anywhere until Bill tells him to get lost face to face. The movie doesn’t do a great job maintaining this plot point, it rarely makes an appearance until the very end of things. Buntline though does a good job of getting across the nature of celebrity when he talks about how the famous are different from the rest of us in that their decisions become commitments and that they always have to worry about whether their looks can continue to overcome their judgment.

So many times in this film, Bill looks painfully human in his lack of grasp on things, yet he smiles, blusters and talks his way through things that would knock the rest of us non western-folk-hero people down several pegs. Wasn’t it the great philosopher Andre Agassi that said “image is everything?” When Buntline and Bill finally meet near the end of the film, they don’t say much and Bill says he’d love to have him back at the show, but some of the others don’t like him. They both know it’s really Bill that couldn’t stand to have him around. Who wants to have this guy remind you every single day that everything you’re doing, everything everyone is lauding you for is completely false?

When Buntline leaves the saloon, he tells Bill “it was pleasure to invent you.” Confronted by the reality of his origins in his meeting with Buntline and the realities of the West in his dream with Sitting Bull, what does Buffalo Bill do? The next thing we see is him at the show performing with Halsey playing the part of Sitting Bull (dressed up in big headdress and war paint) in a ridiculously fake fight where he ends up killing Sitting Bull raising his headdress triumphantly for the adoring throngs! American heroes may be tortured souls, but the show must go on, especially when that’s all that you know.

Never as funny as you would hope it would be (probably because you suspect there’s a lot of truth to things here) and rather aimless in the middle, the movie is worth looking for because of Newman and the fact that the themes of our country’s need to worship famous people and to constantly re-write the recent past to our liking are just as relevant today as they were when this movie was released (July 4, 1976 - take that America!) and when the movie takes place. Like the hero it portrays, the movie is a flawed, but interesting take on the beliefs of this country, both perceived and real.

© 2008 MonsterHunter