Amid other notable instances of inter-genre experimentation, the 1970s was a decade of neo-Westerns, a fitting trend for a period defined by the collision of new stylistic trends with a stubborn fixation on the past. These competing tendencies were distilled with a growing mania for reassessing the roots of the American mythos, shuffling through old story structures, coming up with new configurations. At their best, these movies add something vital to the discussion. Films like Ulzana’s Raid, Buck and the Preacher, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and many others advance and develop the genre’s range, either by introducing new perspectives or clarifying and deepening points made by previous works. Yet for every one of these there are also lesser attempts, which serve up mere retreads of the things classic Westerns were already doing just under the surface, falsely assuming these older films had nothing transgressive to present.
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson isn’t quite guilty of making these unfortunate assumptions, but it ends up feeling redundant in the same fashion, largely by virtue of its windy, overblown presentation. Its tangents and expansions are interesting at their core, but the way which they are staged renders them inert and flaccid. The strangest part of this is that Altman had already filmed a near-perfect neo-Western himself five years earlier, with McCabe &1 Mrs. Miller. All of that movie’s quiet desperation and sub-rosa subversion is here rehashed in double-underlined fashion, implicit messages made bombastic and obvious, creating the effect of a director badly ripping off himself.
Adapted from Arthur Kopit’s 1967 play Indians, Buffalo Bill retains an odd staginess, even spread across its spacious outdoor milieu. This is partially intentional, one element of the ironic theatricality of the production, but that doesn’t make it any less tiresome. The story involves the various headaches associated with running the title character’s traveling vaudeville revue, set somewhere in the waning days of the 19th century. One of the crucibles in which the modern myth of the West was formed, these shows helped rebrand a brutal colonialist campaign as thrilling mass market spectacle, forming the foundation for all Westerns to come. At the center of this fictionalization is a version of Bill (Paul Newman), who’s conceived as a mixture of compelling and repellent characteristics, but is mostly just a doofus, the usual Newman charm obscured underneath a foppish, vainglorious exterior.
The pretentious title, which inflates Kopit’s brusque, effective label into a 10-word mouthful, hints at what we’re in for. There’s a meta false-start introduction recalling the similar opening of Brewster McCloud, but while the racial tokenism there felt like an early career stumble, it expands further here. Natives are treated as wise, but also in on the hustle, granting disapproving looks at the rambling foolishness of the whites who have hijacked their land. The central conflict of the story is between Bill’s blustering, bullshitting loquaciousness and the terse dealmaking of Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), who himself never speaks, conducting business through an intermediary. Both men realize that the fix is in, the West’s horizons have been enclosed, and it’s all about cashing in. Only the volume of words spilled differs, and only the eventual bottom line really matters.
The central jockeying between the two is displaced across a wide network of creative bureaucrats, all of them serving some function within the wide world of the Wild West spectacular. It’s apparent that, as is often the case, Altman at heart wants to be making an insider Hollywood parody, a mode which often inspires his worst work, not to mention that of many other directors. An inveterate outsider, he maintained a career-long aversion to industry nonsense, but it’s usually best to establish a firm foundational structure when doing this kind of caricature, and here the whole thing plays as far too wooly. The spiraling expression of legends within legends, dueling accounts and accounts of duels, all get swept up in one sprawling, exhausting effusion of untrammeled wackiness.
The jokes presented, from Bill’s procession of always-singing female companions, to the ironic application of constant American flag imagery, cry out for some structure. The same goes for the eventual visit from the president himself (Pat McCormick as Grover Cleveland, with Shelley Duvall as the First Lady), which is a culmination of several plot threads so tangled that the entire scenario feels bungled. There is a possible version of this movie that presents a scintillating, razor-sharp satire of the corporatization of American cultural signifiers, but there are so many ideas on display here, and so little control over their application, that it’s hard to imagine what such a movie would look like.
The clearest throughline relates to a series of prospective deals in which the participants peacock as much through aesthetic signifiers as the words spoken. Each character’s level of prestige is determined by the intricacy of their clothing design, which also applies to Sitting Bull, decked out in a fancy hat and giant cross necklace. Less influential participants merely don huge fur coats (more pale shades of McCabe?), swallowing them up in their mass, as opposed to Bill’s finely filigreed buckskin wear. Image is of course paramount, with a resulting focus on the emerging art of photography. The old story about the Native belief in the medium as a form of soul theft, meanwhile, gets transformed into Hollywood-style wrangling over pictorial rights. The whole tenor of these negotiations comes off as flattering to Natives, rather than approaching them honestly, reducing them to a mere condemnatory reflection of the colonizer’s foibles, a status no different from that of the disapproving servant stereotype so often foisted upon non-white characters. Later, a photographer snapping a group shot explains the concept of posterity to the participants, a notion which galvanizes Bill to reshuffle everyone’s places. The general sense is that, for those running the show, such posterity matters more than life itself; as Bill himself states, Custer’s genocidal campaign and eventual death was a boon for both sides, one that “gave the Indians reason to be famous.”
Bursting with misapplied ideas, Buffalo Bill ultimately has the feel of an entire miniseries compressed down to two hours, which might suit its approach if so many scenes didn’t also drag. The film cries out for condensing, to clarify the core conflict while allowing the intricacies of the title character, a paramount poser and dissembler, to express better. In this sense, it compares poorly with Secret Honor, another theatrical adaptation about a similar type of powerful fool, but one which realizes the compression needed to achieve the proper effect. Yet it’s also entirely possible the footage which resulted from the shoot was not salvageable in any sense; as always, Altman’s quicksilver approach is a hazardous one. What worked so well in the similarly shambolic Nashville does just the opposite here. It seems fitting to draw a comparison to Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin), who spends the movie in the frustrated pursuit of pure excellence, always convinced she can land the perfect shot, as circumstances conspire to distract her aim. This leaves her as Altman’s clearest directorial stand-in, the figurehead of a flawed venture doomed to permanent imperfection.
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