Pompous showman Buffalo Bill Cody bribes the United States government into transferring custody of Sitting Bull to him and his show, only to find the old man a little more eccentric and unbroken as he expected.
Light years away from Joel McCrea's loving and famous performance, William Cody is portrayed as the walking, breathing embodiment of "Manifest Destiny", already fulfilled and ten-years past it's prime, fronting a two-bit circus that's more of an insult to the past than a tribute.
Paul Newman, as Cody and Will Sampson, as Sitting Bull's interpreter, are good, though the script (like every Robert Altman movie I've seen) is pretty talky, with whatever wittiness it exudes rendered impotent by it's smug demeanor, a smugness hammered home by the film's climax, featuring a drunken Newman ranting at the ghost of Sitting Bull, before symbolically killing him in effigy, in a staged combat for the masses.
This is a perfect example of the kind of films by Hollywood's new guard of the nineteen-seventies, casually killing off the cherished heroes of their parent's (and sometimes their own) childhoods, for the sake of being called a "rebel" or "a maverick" by swooning critics. BLAH!
Light years away from Joel McCrea's loving and famous performance, William Cody is portrayed as the walking, breathing embodiment of "Manifest Destiny", already fulfilled and ten-years past it's prime, fronting a two-bit circus that's more of an insult to the past than a tribute.
Paul Newman, as Cody and Will Sampson, as Sitting Bull's interpreter, are good, though the script (like every Robert Altman movie I've seen) is pretty talky, with whatever wittiness it exudes rendered impotent by it's smug demeanor, a smugness hammered home by the film's climax, featuring a drunken Newman ranting at the ghost of Sitting Bull, before symbolically killing him in effigy, in a staged combat for the masses.
This is a perfect example of the kind of films by Hollywood's new guard of the nineteen-seventies, casually killing off the cherished heroes of their parent's (and sometimes their own) childhoods, for the sake of being called a "rebel" or "a maverick" by swooning critics. BLAH!