YouHeart
I gave it a 7.5 out of 10
Lela
The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
vincentlynch-moonoi
This is an entertaining Western, but my impression is that it's fairly lacking any real historical accuracy. But, that's Cecil B. DeMille (director).Gary Cooper (as Wild Bill Hickok) is an off-and-on romantic interest to Jean Arthur (as Calamity Jane). They are both friends with James Ellison (as "Buffalo Bill" Cody). Charles Bickford is the bad guy here (as usual in this type of film he is selling guns to the Indians). And, watch closely and you'll see Anthony Quinn as an Indian.Shoot 'em up! To the extent that during a battle with the Indians, Hickok and Cody kill an unbelievable number of Indians...and I mean ridiculously unbelievable. But, despite its historical inaccuracies (a major character dies in a way that was totally inaccurate to the facts), it's fun, and well worth watching.Cooper and Arthur are excellent here, although this isn't the kind of role we usually think of for Jean Arthur. I wasn't familiar with James Ellison, but he was also quite good (this film was the pinnacle of a rather thin career), and there's good chemistry between Cooper and Ellison. So if you want to have fun, tune in. If you want to learn about Western history, don't.
discount1957
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
Nick Zegarac (movieman-200)
"The Plainsman" represents the directorial prowess of Cecil B. DeMille at its most inaccurate and un-factual. It sets up parallel plots for no less stellar an entourage than Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper), Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison), Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur), George Armstrong Custer and Abraham Lincoln to interact, even though in reality Lincoln was already dead at the time the story takes place. Every once in a while DeMille floats dangerously close toward the truth, but just as easily veers away from it into unabashed spectacle and showmanship. The film is an attempt to buttress Custer's last stand with a heap of fiction that is only loosely based on the lives of people, who were already the product of manufactured stuffs and legends. Truly, this is the world according to DeMille - a zeitgeist in the annals of entertainment, but a pretty campy relic by today's standards.TRANSFER: Considering the vintage of the film, this is a moderately appealing transfer, with often clean whites and extremely solid blacks. There's a considerable amount of film grain in some scenes and an absence of it at other moments. All in all, the image quality is therefore somewhat inconsistent, but it is never all bad or all good – just a bit better than middle of the road. Age related artifacts are kept to a minimum and digital anomalies do not distract. The audio is mono but nicely balanced.EXTRAS: Forget it. It's Universal! BOTTOM LINE: As pseudo-history painted on celluloid, this western is compelling and fun. Just take its characters and story with a grain of salt – in some cases – a whole box seems more appropriate!
alexandre michel liberman (tmwest)
The Plainsman is an entertaining western, no doubt a classic, which is actual even today. Gary Cooper is Wild Bill Hickok, ideal for the role, together with John Wayne and James Stewart, they were the best actors that played western heroes in their generation. Jean Arthur is great as Calamity Jane, nobody that I know played it better than her. Even if might not be historically accurate, the film manages to capture the most important about Hickok and about the time it takes place. Sometimes you have to sacrifice History to make your point and that is what DeMille does here. The friendship of Hickok with Buffalo Bill, the selling of rifles to the Indians by a great manufacturer to compensate for the losses he would have because of the end of the civil war, Custer and Little Big Horn, the uneasy relationship between Buffalo Bill's wife, a religious woman, with Hickok a man who had killed plenty, also the unusual love affair between Hickok and Calamity all this makes 'The Plainsman' a non conventional and interesting film. Anthony Quinn has a very short appearance, that already shows what a great actor he was going to become. A lot of care was taken to show the original guns of that time.
