Wild Bill (1995)

Memorable, crazy movie

Beautiful, moving film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There were two Great Westerns made in the early 1990's. One was Tombstone which I wasn't expecting to be Great. I mean....how many ways can The Gunfight at The OK Correl be told? So I ignored Tombstone until it came out in Video. Big mistake. Great Movie. Val Kilmer is the best Doc Holiday ever. As with Shane, it may never be in a theater near me again. So now Wild Bill comes out? Better see it in a Big Screen Theater. I did one weekend evening. Beautiful. The only problem was it was the first time I had seen a movie in Downtown Detroit. There weren't many of us in The Theater, but many who were there were carrying on with a narrative of their own. 'Look out behind you Wild Bill, he's got a gun....'someone said. 'Hump her Bill' said someone else! So...I went back one weekday afternoon and appreciated Wild Bill much more. Now I own it and watch it often. With Westerns, I don't look for 'factually correct', rather I look for Great Performances and Storytelling from people who clearly love Westerns as I do. Don't miss Wild Bill.

First, I loved the performances and everyone looked and acted fairly believable although Calamity Jane was way to pretty and shapely. What the movie lacked was any semblance of the truth. I know that the creators wanted to find some kind of artistic or psychological truth but the fact is that when you set out to make a movie about a famous person whose life is shrouded in exaggeration and legend, you really owe it to them to flush out the real life with some accuracy although it is always fine to take some license to make it entertaining. The famous death scene is really done in such a ridiculous way that it mars the whole movie. Calamity Jane isn't there and Jack just walks in and shoots him in the back. Wild Bill is shown with his back to the wall whereas he really had his back to the door. Jack killed him in cold blood with an ambush from behind and was later found guilty and hanged for it.

Most reviews seem to look at this through the prism of "Deadwood," which seems unfair as the elongated TV format allows for far more character development. So to point out that the characters in "Wild Bill" aren't as-- well, you get the picture. Viewed alone, the movie deserves praise for performance, set design, a sense of period dialogue and historical accuracy in visual recreations. Yes, WB really did wear Navy Colts backwards, cavalry-style, in a red sash; yes, he did have greasy lanks of hair and wear a big floppy hat, a thick tie and a vest that didn't match his jacket which didn't match his pants. And for about an hour, I think the movie is pretty amusing. But when it sinks into Deadwood over its last hour, it appears to use too much of the stagey dialogue of one of its sources, a play by someone named Thomas Babe. At this point, it pretty much abandons history which is bad enough, but also cinematic fluency, of which Hill is a master: it becomes static, talky, dreary, and completely loses its momentum. And someone--Babe?--made the decision to give the McCall-Hickcock dynamic an Oedipal overtone--he's the "son" of a woman once loved , then abandoned, by Hickcock. This is an attempt at coherency, to bring the murder into some sort of classic framework. Yeah, swell, however: McCall was much older, a buffalo hunter who'd lost dough to Wild Bill the night before. He didn't stand for the abused son, he stood for the randomness of frontier violence, where booze, pride, stupidity and a culture of pointless aggression could easily spell an ambush murder like McCall's. THAT, to me, would not only have been more accurate, but more fluent and a better movie.

Wild Bill is a dark, moody Western about the last days of legendary lawman James Butler Hickock that sometimes shows off its true colors (by that, I mean its riveting action sequences, not its appearance) but suffers from a disorganized screenplay, some dull characters, an imperfect running time, and while it's not a bad Western, it's not a great one either.Jeff Bridges gives a noteworthy performance as Wild Bill, John Hurt gives most of the movie's seldom-seen charisma as his friend Charley Prince (I'm not sure if this character is real or not) and then there is a truly great performance by Ellen Barkin as frontierswoman Calamity Jane. In shorter, laconic terms, Wild Bill boasts a great cast and some witty dialogue. Director Walter Hill (who also directed The Long Riders (1980) with the Carradine brothers) does a phenomenal job with the action scenes as well. The killings in this film look harsh and brutal as they in deed were. And the violence is not overdone to the point where it becomes depressing.But like I mentioned earlier, the story is disorganized. There were too many black-and-white flashback scenes, which I've seen many done better many times before in other films, that dragged on and slowed the movie down for me. John Hurt's narration was sometimes effective, sometimes overdrawn. And the pacing was in need of a revision. I'm sure the filmmakers could have worked it out a different way to tell the past of the characters without constantly using flashbacks and could have removed some additional scenes that went into and out of nowhere. Because they unfortunately are the movie's major flaws. They slow it down.Wild Bill, again is not necessarily a bad film. I did mildly enjoy it at times, but it is a very dark motion picture without much point behind itself. The action scenes are good, the acting is great, and the general atmosphere of a dark time in a weary man's life is convincing. But ultimately, Wild Bill is just too slow and kind of a disappointment.