The Plainsman is a 1936 American Western film
directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur.
The film presents a highly fictionalized account of the adventures
and relationships between Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody,
and General George Custer, with a gun-runner named
Lattimer (Charles Bickford) as the main villain.
The film is notorious for mixing timelines and even has an opening scene with
Abraham Lincoln setting the stage for Hickok's adventures.
Anthony Quinn has a role as an Indian.
A remake using the same title was released in 1966.
Couple of Duke's 'Pals' to ,look out for
Anthony Quinn, George 'Gabby' Hayes
and the first screen performance of Hank Worden
User Review
Trails cross sometimes
28 November 2007 | by robert-temple-1 (United Kingdom)
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?