This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Action, Drama, W, Western. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Director: Walter Hill
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt, Diane Lane, David Arquette, James Gammon, Bruce Dern, Christina Applegate, James Remar, Keith Carradine
Action icon, Walter Hill, both wrote and directed this rather surreal western that is based on a play, which came from the novel, Deadwood. Hill tries to balance Hickok, the legend with Hickok the man. In doing so, he makes the decision to make the famous gunslinger a hero, whose battles and killings were all justified, yet his past and future both haunt him. There is some stylish direction, but the dialog is often too wordy and overdone.
The Wild Bill story presented here, moves rapidly through Wild Bill’s life until he gets to Deadwood. After this, significant amounts of back-story are given through periodic grainy, angled scenes. Bridges does a good job in the title role and Ellen Barkin does her best as Calamity Jane, but she was too good-looking for the role, despite obvious efforts to downplay her beauty. John Hurt and the gravelly voiced James Gammon (The Hat Prince of the Duster) play his long time friends. Arquette is the weaselly killer, Jack McCall. The movie follows an artistic but roughly factual path, until the third act, when it gets too stage-like, and destroys what little gritty realism the film had up to that point.
Wild Bill has some pretty good scenes and several noteworthy performances, but is too surreal for the topic and struggles to get away from its stage roots in the third act. I have a soft spot in my heart for a good ole’ head-em-off-at-the-pass, shoot-em up Westerns, particularly those that tell a true story about the deadly character that I read about as a kid. Unfortunately, this attempt ultimately fails and doomed this film to an eternity of obscurity.
