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So bad you laugh
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Jaws meets Moby Dick on the Plains. Great white shark, a white whale, a white buffalo? White elephant, more like.
The Quint-Ahab figure is Wild Bill Hickok, no less and he partners up with Crazy Horse to hunt down the albino buffalo. So it’s obviously based on fact, huh. The “white spike” is haunting Mr. Hickok’s dreams and so he has to kill it. Mr Horse needs to kill it because it gored his daughter to death and she cannot rest in the spirit world unless he does. Or something.
Although I make an exception for the great Dead Man, I dislike mumbo-jumbo Westerns. Quite good ones, like The Last Hunt (also about a white buffalo) or The Missing come close to being spoiled by stupid magic and hocus-pocus. The White Buffalo isn’t half as good as those movies and the mumbo-j. effectively sinks it.
Charles Bronson is Wild Bill. We are in 1874 and apparently Hickok, fresh from his appearances on the stage with Buffalo Bill, took the name James Otis and set off to the Dakotas by train to track down and kill the white buffalo that charges him in his nightmares. He is aging, has syphilis and his eyesight is failing. He wears cool shades. He wears long hair, dandy clothes and has two large pistols in the red sash around his waist. He was obviously traveling incognito.
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He looks so like Wild Bill
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Amazingly, he is recognized and there is some bunkum about Tom Custer (Ed Lauter), the general’s brother, wanting to kill him. Still, it gives the excuse for a gunfight in which soldiers can be shot. Tom makes a run for it.
Will Sampson, a Creek, is Crazy Horse (renamed Worm until he kills the buff) and is quite good, as far as the script allows anyway.
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Crazy Horse aka Worm
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One problem is the buffalo itself, which is too evidently in those pre-CGI days a lumbering mechanical device on hidden tracks with smoke blowing from its nostrils. The shark was scarier. Actually, it rather resembles a cuddly toy. They do all the charges in slo-mo, maybe to make it look more ‘realistic’ (because as we know buffalo always charge in slow motion) but all that does is give us more time to notice how fake the beast is. Maybe it was more impressive on the wide screen in a theater. Or maybe not.
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Rather like an angry lamb
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The slogan on the posters was “You won’t believe your eyes!” Well, indeed, they were right, we didn’t.
The movie was expensively filmed in Colorado but a large amount is done in the studio and that looks even faker.
So I’m afraid it’s not awfully good. In fact it’s dire.
I suppose it doies have one or two points in its favor. There’s a scene in a crowded saloon where Bill and his old-timer pard, one-eyed Charlie Zane (Jack Warden, rather good) take on a band of hide-hunter toughs and blast them to hell. These toughs are the henchpersons of Whistling Jack Kileen, an excellent Clint Walker, meaner and heavier than usual and quite convincing. You wouldn’t want to tangle with Whistling Jack Kileen, though of course Wild Bill doesn’t mind.
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They seem to be having fun. I fear it won’t last.
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We have good old Douglas Fowley as the train conductor in his last Western movie of 64 (and countless TV shows). Slim Pickens drives the stage and actually I think he is on the same run he was on in the remake of Stagecoach. They put an undertaker in the story and of course only John Carradine, typecast in that role, would do. Stuart Whitman (Marshal Crown from Cimarron Strip, is there, and Kim Novak, in her second Western of two, plays Poker Jenny with whom Bill declines to, er, canoodle on the grounds of the ‘dose’ he says one of Jenny’s ‘scarlet sisters’ gave him (her fault, obviously).
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Cadaverous Carradine (left)
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So there are a few familiar faces to enjoy.
But Englishman J Lee Thompson, the Guns of Navarone and King Solomon’s Mines fellow, couldn’t direct Westerns, as the other one he did, Mackenna’s Gold, also a turkey, proved.
Bronson made the movie as part of a contract with Dino De Laurentis, who didn’t understand Westerns, as was demonstrated by the other De Laurentis/Bronson one, Chino.
The White Buffalo movie justly bombed.
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I would advise you to watch it only if you want a laugh.
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6 Responses
My admiration for you has shot up at least a hundredfold. You did something that I have never been able to do, nor will ever be able to do. You sat all the way through this turkey.
Your review was much, much better than the film. I especially liked your comment about Wild Bill traveling incognito.
I applaud you.
P.S. ~ It is a shame that Will Sampson was wasted in so many bad films.
😉
I'm afraid I was never a fan of Mr. Bronson, though I do think he would win an acting competetion if the other contestant were a block of wood.
I agree about Will Sampson. He was great in Josey Wales, of course.
Jeff
Too much snark in this review, too little substance. It’s easy to try to wrangle sarcastic one liners rather than explore some deeper observations and deductions about a film. I think with all the attempts at humorously denigrating and humiliating this picture, a wiser course would have been to disclose your inherent bias against Bronson from the start and then own up that it could conceivably be coloring your judgment and preventing a more fair assessment from being rendered.
It’s not a perfect film nor entirely successful in what it is able to achieve, but it remains a fascinating one on more than a few levels. Just casting Bronson in a more surreal dream like meditation on mortality and limitations against the natural way of things, such as accepting abstract fears about loss of power and self preservation, was pretty interesting in and of itself. I find the movie grasping for different and unique ways of telling this particular story and hitting its marks more often than not. It’s actually about ideas more than just Bronson shooting people. And it deserves deeper recognition and reflections than just cheap shots at its limited special effects or digging up stale jokes based on personal animosity toward its star.
I agree that it is sometimes easy to be glib or sarcastic but I really do believe that this is a very poor movie.
I don’t have a “bias” against Bronson. I just don’t think he was a good actor. That’s a legitimate viewpoint, I think.
Of course a lot of our reaction to films is subjective and I’m happy that you like this one. I’m not trying to convert you! Just expressing my opinion.
Dear Professor
The best proof of Jeff fairness is his
“The Westerns of Charles Bronson” essay you will find on this blog.
Of course he says again that Charles was at his best in a as silent as possible role but it is still a complete review of Chuck’s film trail.
Bronson came too late as most of his generation to have a chance to play in good westerns even if he was one of the major stars of the 1970s with Burt Reynolds. It is interesting to see how James Coburn or Ernest Borgnine who were with him in Vera Cruz and The Magnificent Seven for instance managed their career, having maybe some luck in meeting someone like Peckinpah, to leave a more significant mark in the history of the genre.
Sincerely