Buffalo Bill and the Indians (Limited Edition) [Blu-ray] [2020]

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON(1976, US, 118 min, color, aspect ratio: 2:35:1 widescreen, sound: mono, subtitles in 11 languages)EXTRA: 10 min on location featurette1976 was America’s bicentennial year and Robert Altman ‘celebrated’ the event in two dark and very negative statements which amount to sad metaphors for the state of a nation. First up was Nashville (1975), a very open grand fresco in which the homey good ol’ American family values of Country and Western music are undercut by a complete lack of the same in some 24 characters manipulated/manipulating for power over each other in a maze of intertwining mini-narratives. For Altman the hypocrisy at the base of American society is clearly exposed as people supposedly treasuring democracy all reveal a basic passivity which undercuts the ideology. He asks the question, what kind of democracy is possible when less than 40% of the population vote and powerful vested interests are allowed to exert a grip on society? Altman pin-pointed the central darkness in a country torn apart by Watergate, the Vietnam War and assassination paranoia with the climactic on-stage killing of a singer echoing the Kennedys and King a decade earlier and prefiguring John Lennon’s death in 1980. Still, Nashville turned a profit and that was surely down to the popularity of Country music which had people watching in the spirit of the film’s sung chorus – “You may say that I ain’t free / But it don’t worry me.” Altman delivered a dark message, but coated in a sweetness that made it digestible for audiences. In his next film with big stars, an even bigger budget and more freedom than he had ever had up till that point, he removed the audience-friendly coating and delivered his critique raw.Altman could have made any film he wanted after Nashville’s success, but he chose to make Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), a dry, angry denunciation of popular folklore, of the whole Western genre, and by connection a whole country which has exchanged history for fiction and respect for nation-building leaders for personality and the empty circus of celebrity. Despite the presence of huge stars (Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster) and the handsome Panavision cinematographic presentation, there is no sweetening ingredient in the mixture and audiences avoided it like the plague. Worse still, critics failed to understand it, and it has gone down as one of Altman’s biggest artistic and commercial flops. Producer Dino De Laurentis was horrified to see what he thought was going to be an old-fashioned Western spectacle (did he not see McCabe and Mrs. Miller?), recut it for European release and withdrew funding for what was going to be Altman’s next feature, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Doctorow even appears in Buffalo Bill, but his novel was destined for Miloš Forman, not Altman. In recent years though, Buffalo Bill has undergone a reassessment and critics have started to see why the Berlin Film Festival jury awarded it the Golden Bear in 1976. Altman was at his formidable best in the 70s and the film is just one of a string of pearls that all deserve equal attention. This Momentum/Studio Canal DVD is superb in every way with crystal-clear visuals (aspect ratio: 2:35:1 widescreen) and a pin-sharp mono soundtrack (in both German and English). Subtitles in 11 languages (including English) are given. Those interested in what Altman was doing in the 70s beyond accepted classics like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville should ignore the other negative reviews here and definitely check this out. What follows is a thematic review. Don’t read if you haven’t seen.Buffalo Bill is as closed as Nashville was open, Altman choosing to locate his film wholly in a stockade of wooden buildings in the middle of the ‘Wild West’ on a plain with huge mountains looking down from a distance. This stockade is Altman’s metaphor for a modern America (actually shot in Canada!) establishing itself as a palimpsest over an ancient Amerindian civilization. As in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman takes modern America to mean a capitalist operation in which commercial enterprise lies at the center of white man’s endeavor. That enterprise in this film is Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show” in which Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) is the head of a business run by his manager-in-chief Nate Salisbury (Joel Grey) with publicist Major Burke (Kevin McCarthy) and family relative Ed Goodman (Harvey Keitel) aiding along with journalist Prentiss Ingraham (Allan Nichols) guaranteed to praise the enterprise to the skies. Underneath the management are the various acts employed in the show especially Sure Shot Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband/manager Frank Butler (John Considine) and underneath them are the workers supporting the show played by Altman regulars like Robert DoQui and Bert Remsen. It’s a social pyramid not unlike the one in Nashville, but with far fewer characters and just the one narrative focused on Buffalo Bill. Into this tightly organized capitalist society come the two leaders of the opposing American civilizations – Sioux Chief Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) and American President Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick). They are backed up by Sitting Bull’s interpreter Halsey (Will Sampson) and Cleveland’s First Lady (Shelley Duvall) respectively. The basis is set up by Altman as a celebration of American history which (this being bicentennial year) should be serious and respectful, but the director does something rather naughty. He inverts the brief by revealing commonly accepted history as lies. The film is serious and respectful (replete with numerous appearances of the American flag and a rendition of the star-bangled banner), but of the real truth which fictions like the “Wild West Show” and almost all Westerns made up to this point either evade or ignore. It debunks the creation of ideology which glorifies the success of the white man and the entirely fictional notion that America was created out of ‘manifest destiny,’ of the white man’s inherent right to tame the barbarian and establish civilization out of commercial enterprise wherever he pleases. The tone is one of sour irony from beginning to end.In fact William Cody was a charlatan. He was made into one of America’s best-loved folk heroes named ‘Buffalo Bill’ by dime novelist Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), and in turn Buffalo Bill created his Show which became tremendously successful at the end of the 19th century. Bill has no claim to fame outside the making of money, his famous ‘exploits’ hunting and shooting Indians pure fictions which were foisted onto the world by himself (with Buntline’s help) to make a fast buck. Altman (with screenwriter Alan Rudolph) make their Buffalo Bill a drunken buffoon, vain, self-obsessed, racist, and absolutely sure not only that his lies will be accepted as the real facts, but they ARE the real facts. “Everything historical is yours” and “We’re going to Cody-fy the world,” he is told by sycophantic admirers aiming to get rich through his fiction-factory. Paul Newman (an icon of the present day playing an icon of the past) puts in one of his best performances as this preening monument to self-love, forever looking at his own reflection in mirrors or at his own image in paintings, downing whisky in a giant beer glass, indulging his vanity with soprano singers (two of them) before the final one (Evelyn Lear) says no. Buffalo Bill and his Wild West MUST be right because everyone assents to the image and it passed down into the late 20th century as virtually unchallenged fact. The staged reenactments of famous Western situations (the burning of a pioneer’s home, the waylaying of a stagecoach, the staging of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, etc) are all scrupulously faithful to the images we have learned from various Westerns down the years, but they are all identified as fictionalizations as Sitting Bull (through Halsey) tells Bill. Moreover, in reality Bill can’t live up to his glamorous celebrity image. When he heads a posse to chase down the absconded Indians he returns empty handed and doesn’t even possess the requisite virility to satisfy his soprano lover in bed.The narrative of Altman’s film centers around the brief time Sitting Bull was an ‘act’ for the show in 1885, and while the chief is there he serves as a check (and a threat) to Bill’s preposterously preening image of himself and the fictions he creates. Clearly Altman/Rudolph are on the side of the Indians here as they are depicted as men of great dignity and resource. Not liking the location of their teepees, they choose to relocate on a ridge on the other side of a supposedly ‘un-crossable’ river. Sitting Bull demands blankets for his whole people which Bill assumes means thousands, but is only a little over 100, the Sioux population having been decimated by the white man in the meantime. The chief is virtually stoic throughout the film, only speaking a few words of his own language, while Halsey voices his thoughts with solemn gravity. At one point Halsey and Sitting Bull wake up Bill at daybreak much to the vain man’s horror (he has allowed himself to be seen without his wig!) to tell him what they want Bill to do in his show, namely depict a happy Indian village completely massacred by white soldiers down to the last man, woman, child and dog. Bill interprets this as an attack on himself (though it is actually sad fact that soldiers did destroy Indian communities in this fashion) and fires Sitting Bull from the show until Annie Oakley forces him to change his mind. Oakley is the only white character supportive of the Indians’ cause. Sitting Bull and Halsey quite unintentionally make fools out of Bill by causing him to launch a needless posse which fails and then the chief stuns Bill by earning an ovation in the arena by simply sitting there on his horse (predicting a flop, Bill resents the ovation for being bigger than the one accorded to him). Most of all, the Sioux chief’s stature is proven by his dream coming true. He has come to the Show because he dreamt he would speak to President Cleveland, a prophecy that is realized in a scene where Cleveland rudely refuses to hear Sitting Bull’s ‘simple request’ for his people. We feel completely on the side of the Indians here, their quiet stoic dignity completely trampled on by white men committed to their own superiority. After a narrative ellipse which jumps over a trip for the Show to Europe we hear Sitting Bull was killed by soldiers and are shown a campfire with his remains, his Christian cross prominently displayed. This ‘savage barbarian’ is the wisest man we see in the film, but the fact that he was Christian does nothing to change the stereotypes established by fictions such as the ones we see created in the Show. But this isn’t the last we see of him for he returns in Bill’s dream where the vain-glorious man wrestles with his conscience in his office as he walks around, drinking and procrastinating while Sitting Bull sits as still and stoic as ever, a permanent correction to the horror of the lies visited by Bill over the historical past. For Bill image is everything as he yells at Sitting Bull, “In 100 years, I’ll still be Buffalo Bill – Star! And you’ll be the Indian,” and in the film’s final sequence Altman has Bill stage a phony-baloney battle between Sitting Bull (played by Halsey, the tall heroic-looking Indian everyone wanted to be Sitting Bull in the first place) and Buffalo Bill in which Bill simply pushes his opponent over and scalps him, raising his scalp overhead and grinning into the camera as Altman zooms in on those famous blue eyes to capture this fake triumph over this fake Indian chief. A high crane shot zooms back and we see the enclosure surrounded by the wilderness as if to ask, “Is this really the America Americans should all be happy to accept?”Central to Altman’s vision is the awareness that his very film is ‘a Western,’ and a part of the fictionalizing endorsement of the image of the country which has come down from the “Wild West Show” and through numerous Western novels and films. Taking off from Arthur Kopit’s Brechtian play which inspired the film, Altman goes out of his way to stress the artificiality, alienating us from all the events we see. Tongue very firmly in cheek Altman aligns himself with Buffalo Bull as the credits at the very beginning announce, “Robert Altman’s Absolutely Unique and Heroic Enterprise of Inimitable Lustre!” as an American flag is hoisted to the sound of a cavalry bugle and we are shown a clichéd scene of settlers being attacked by Indians. A narrator announces a long windy preamble ending with, “…Welcome to the real events enacted by men and women of the American frontier. To whose courage strength, and above all, faith this piece of history is dedicated.” The credits are given as if for the Show rather than the film (Eg: Paul Newman – The Star / Joel Grey – The Producer, Burt Lancaster – The Legend Maker, etc) and as the writing credit appears the music ceases and an off-screen voice yells, “Cut!” as various people enter the frame to show that what we have been watching is actually not “real events enacted by men and women of the frontier” at all, but a faked show designed to entertain, the Show and the film both existing on the same artificial level of narrative-making or ideology-entrenching. As Altman himself once said, “…I don’t like Westerns. I don’t like the obvious lack of truth in them,” and he further alienates the audience by the inclusion of Ned Buntline telling stories in a saloon not far from Bill’s office of how he created Buffalo Bill. Buntline functions as a Greek chorus which builds up Bill’s image only to flatten it – on Bill riding off on his humiliating posse: “When Bill’s dressed for a ride and mounted on his stallion any doubts about his legend are soon forgot. Yes, Bill’s fine physical portrait hides any faults his mind possesses. But any tracker will tell you if you don’t know what you’re after you’d best stay home.” Buntline’s very presence is an embarrassment to both Bill and Salisbury who like to believe they are self-made ‘legends.’ He is living proof of their very phony-ness and only disappears when Bill at last meets him the night after just meeting President Cleveland. The alienation from the narrative is most clearly underlined in Bill’s dream sequence which is shot as a kind of Brechtian tableau which highlights the origin of Kopit’s play. Sitting Bull’s presence (like Buntline’s) has played havoc all through the film with Bill’s conscience as shown especially by his gradual emasculation at the hands of the three singers. Before the chief’s arrival he is potent, he uses the arrival to replace the first soprano (Bonnie Leaders) with the second (Noelle Rogers) but then events build up pressure and an inability to perform in bed with her. His ‘castration’ is completed when Nina Cavallini (Lear) rejects his advances out of hand. Sitting Bull meanwhile outdraws him in the arena and Bill knows his vanity can’t hide his real inferiority to the chief. The dream sequence shows Bill vainly stating his fame and (gag!) the ‘responsibility’ of being a celebrity (“I got people with no lives living through me. Proud people. People to worry about. My daddy died without seeing me as a star. Tall, profitable, good looking.”). This bluster is answered very effectively by Sitting Bull’s stoic silence. He represents everything that is true whereas Bill represents everything that is quite simply manufactured lies.Visually and aurally, Buffalo Bill and the Indians is of a piece with the rest of Altman’s 70s output. The pronounced use of the telephoto lens flattens the perspectives of each frame with everyone put in the foreground and everything behind blurred out. This decentralizes the image, forcing us as per usual to cast our eyes around a very busy wide frame to find out everything that is happening. There are also a plethora of zooms, especially capturing Buntline through the crowd in the bar and on key moments of Bill mouthing off his nonsense. The visual scheme is matched with the customary expert use of overlapping and off-screen dialog with several characters talking at the same time to make for that peculiar Altman babble that makes this director’s films so distinguishable. The stockade set feels very ‘lived in,’ even though we are constantly being alienated from the film’s non-existent level of realism. The film’s deliberately parodic elements mean that it’s very funny throughout. Chaplin and Considine make a hilarious double act, he setting up targets such as cigars clamped between his teeth and playing cards held in his hand for his wife to shoot down, her aim getting shaky when she learns he is having an affair. Then there is Newman’s irresistible central performance which has us truly believing his character swallows his own lies while his subordinates trip over themselves in deliberately over-flowery verbal garbage, saying nothing at great length. Some of the verbal gags are hilarious like President Cleveland’s response to being told, “Bill writes all his own sayings himself” – “All great men do that,” the ‘great man’ says after being told to say it by his advisor.In total the film delights in its own irreverence, sending up American historical myths with mouth-watering relish. We are told that the Buffalo Bill legend is a fraud, the whole Western genre (in every cultural medium) is based on lies, that myths of white male supremacy have replaced the absolute truth of the actual holocaust perpetrated on the Indian nation, and that worship of personality and celebrity culture has overtaken real events as being more important in the minds of people. Altman’s film may be set in 1885, but his points held true for 1976 and he uses Bill’s bluster again behind the political fixing of a ‘Colonel Cody’ in Health (1980) and in the rancor of Richard Nixon in Secret Honor (1984). Indeed, the pertinence of the film continues to this very day. On screen whether it be on the big screen or on the TV news muscular ‘all-American’ white men continue to destroy foreigners with a sense of moral rectitude for the values of western capitalism and ‘democracy’ as the only decent values worth abiding by, the generation of fake ideology to support wars taking place in far-off places looking set to continue far into the future. Altman’s film may be didactic and perhaps difficult to enter (especially if you come to it expecting the usual revisionist Western), but if by the end you have grown weary of Bill’s relentless tub-thumping replete with ceaseless grating brass band fanfares, then you will have got Altman’s point. It’s a very intelligent film worthy of the closest examination. He may not have liked the genre very much, but he sure understood it, this and McCabe and Mrs. Miller being two of the very best Westerns of the 70s. It all seems a long way from the early years of the 60s when Altman was doing duty behind the camera for the TV series Bonanza…

I bought this, being a big Westerns fan, and liking Paul Newman as an actor. I also loved Altman's Short Cuts in the 90s. But honestly, this film is drivel. It all takes place in the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and is more about the lie of the Wild West than anything approaching a narrative. Sitting Bull arrives and says nothing, instead using a mountain of a man to say his bidding. It's awkward and clumsy and cluttered. The film was so boring I actually turned it off and I almost never do that. This though is achingly poor as a movie and wastes the talents of all concerned.

I'm a big movie fan and a big Paul Newman fan, so how come I'd never heard of this film until I ran across it on TV the other night? It was made in 1976, is directed by the great Robert Altman, stars one of the biggest names in Hollywood, co-stars fellow Hollywood legends, Burt Lancaster and Harvey Keitel, yet it's virtually unknown. I guess the reason lies in the other two reviews it's received here. It's not quite what you'd expect of a Paul Newman movie. It's quirky, strange, oblique, troubling, funny and dark. This Buffalo Bill is no hero, instead he's a self-promoting charlatan with a sexual fetish for female opera singers. This is not your average cowboy movie. At the heart of the film is an intelligent, tragi-comic meditation on the nature of stardom and the triumph of image over reality. Newman is, therefore, ideally cast as the blustering braggart Buffalo Bill, fixing his blonde wig in the mirror. He's baffled that the Indians in his show are unwilling to cooperate in his self-delusion by parodying themselves for entertainment. He doesn't see the problem. Burt Lancaster is excellent as the laconic commentator behind the scenes who is excluded precisely because he knows the real Bill. If you like films that are a long way out of the ordinary and that aren't afraid to be ironic and laconic, give this one a try. You never know, you might love it as much as I do. I'm delighted to now own it on dvd, complete with extras, including a featurette, 'From the Prairie to the Palace.'

This widescreen film has a super clean print with nice clear Dolby Digital 2/0 ch mono sound.it has a choice of English or Czech audio and optional Czech subtitles.the only negative is that it doesn't have English subtitles.If you like Paul Newman this is a decent enough piece of fun though he has made better movies.it has the benefit of a top notch supporting cast including Burt Lancaster,Harvey Keitel,Geraldine Chaplin and Will Sampson though some might find the slow pace and lack of action a bit boring.

present for my son

Out of kindness I gave it two stars.

Very poor transfer, not really any better than the DVD. DO NOT BUY, a waste of money !!!

It`s obvious from reading the negative reviews that these people aren`t familiar with the films director Robert Altman. In fact i couldn`t recommend this to anyone who either doesn`t like Altman films or doesn`t know who he is. If i`m honest the first time i saw this was about 5 years ago and i wasn`t too impressed but knowing that his films get better with each viewing prompted me to seek out the dvd and give it another chance. Now i did see an Altman film recently which i can`t imagine watching again by the name of `Dr T and the Women` also 'Pret A Porter' is really poor. Anyhow i`m glad i bought this dvd and i`m sure it will stand up to many more viewings. Recommended to Altman enthusiasts everywhere.