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Amazon.co.uk Review
Every once in a while, DeMille and his small army of writers stumble upon an actual historical fact. Bill Cody did fight to the death with an Indian chief named Yellow Hand. George Custer and James Butler Hickok did both buy the farm in the summer of 1876. (Custer's Last Stand is handled imaginatively, if cheaply, as a vision narrated by a wandering Cheyenne warrior--none other than C.B.'s son-in-law Anthony Quinn in one of his earliest screen appearances.) Jack McCall (veteran weasel Porter Hall) did find himself in Deadwood, South Dakota, at the same time Wild Bill was drawing aces and eights in a poker game ... though McCall was not necessarily affiliated with DeMille's favourite villain, Charles Bickford, in the business of running guns to the Indians. --Richard T. Jameson
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Master of the epic DeMille crafts a big and bold Western that's finely acted, interesting in its telling and big on idealism. You obviously have to forget real time lines, this is a splicer as DeMille and Co take some of the Wild West's most famous characters and stir them into one Oater stew! Friendships and affairs of the heart form the basis of thematics, with the war against the redskin giving the characters reason for being. Gun running and politico musings drift in and out of the narrative but leave a mark, while DeMille proves classy in action construction as a number of warfare sequences raise the pulse considerably.
The flip-side...
There are no bad apples in the cast (Cooper wonderfully macho, Arthur whip-crackingly gorgeous and Bickford suitably weasel like), though Burgess doesn't quite grasp the dramatic thrust of being Buffalo Bill's good woman. The running time is a touch too long, with several passages of dialogue serving only as time filling exercises, while the back screen projection work is irritable if a little understandable given the time of production. Ultimately there are flaws that make this only a comfortable recommendation to classic era Western fans who can accept it as a 1930s dressed up bit of frontier malarkey. Casual observers, mind, are unlikely to get past the historical hodge-podge and hooray idealism. 7/10
Veteran epic director Cecil B. CeMille's 'The Plainsman' is a hugely mounted, dramatic and blazing Western with Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Lincoln and Custer in one and the same movie! And add numberless scores of exotically feathered Indians and cavalry men.
In this universe violence equals heroism, but the Sioux chief is given time to defend his people, and Jean Arthur's loveable Calamity has her own way of prevailing against the man she is seen chasing all through the film! Gary Cooper's Hickok is shy and awkward, and he is never quite made to kiss her.
The action scenes are riveting, the sets are beautiful, the humanity in the picture is convincing, and in the end, as we see Hickok place himself with his villanous hostages with his back to the saloon door, everybody with even a feeble grasp of Western mythology know what is up ...
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