Robert Altman (1976)
In the mid-1980s, four consecutive Robert Altman films were adaptations of theatre pieces (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982); Streamers (1983); Secret Honor (1984); Fool for Love (1985)). Until then, Altman had made only one movie based on a stage play – Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson), inspired by Arthur Kopit’s Indians (first staged in 1968). I remember looking forward to watching Buffalo Bill in the 1970s, especially because Joel Grey, whose post-Cabaret screen appearances were rare, was in it. I don’t remember passing up the opportunity to see the film at the cinema then or, during the decades since, on television or in previous BFI retrospectives. It was, according to IMDb, released in Britain in 1976 but maybe didn’t get far beyond London. It certainly can’t have set box offices on fire: Buffalo Bill is determinedly uncommercial.
The centre of the film, as of Kopit’s play, is William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Wild West show. The famed soldier and bison hunter’s spectacle, with its white-washing, travestied re-enactments of events in the frontier and Indian wars and various circus-like elements, toured America (and Europe) from the early 1880s until late in the first decade of the new century. I’m guessing that Indians consists almost entirely of the company’s offstage interactions. They account for a fair amount of Altman’s movie too but the screenplay (by Alan Rudolph and the director) also opens things out to show the show, or parts of it. Exchanges involving Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) and his entourage are often entertaining. The performance bits are thoroughly convincing – a rendering of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (years before it became the American national anthem) has the band and the singers perfectly out of sync – but that’s not enough to stop the extravaganza getting tedious, except for a couple of the sharp-shooting routines involving Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and her in-the-line-of-fire manager (John Considine). The film’s opening titles are an amusing spoof of greatest-show-on-earth hyperbole. By halfway through, though, you’re dreading the next illustration of what audiences were flocking to see a hundred and forty years ago.
Nashville, this picture’s immediate predecessor in the Altman filmography, critiques American politics as a form of show business. Buffalo Bill and the Indians applies similar treatment to American history, and its definitions of the hero. Buffalo Bill, wistfully reflecting on the magnitude of General Custer’s celebrity, laments that ‘My father never saw me become a star’. When Bill, the show’s producer (Joel Grey) and its publicist (Kevin McCarthy) recruit Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) as a guest performer, the audience’s first reaction is one of derision: he isn’t the fearsome savage of popular imagination but a small, dignified, human figure whose conduct repeatedly exposes the showmen’s bombastic fraud. After Sitting Bull’s death, his colossal interpreter William Halsey (Will Sampson, fresh from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) replaces him in the company. Impersonating his Chief, Halsey doubly satisfies expectations – he’s willingly vanquished in the gladiatorial combat with Buffalo Bill that becomes a show highlight, and he looks the part. Giving the public what they want, instead of more challenging reality, anticipates the enduring traditions of Hollywood casting in the century to come.
Paul Newman is probably miscast. He doesn’t have the braggadocio that seems essential to the film’s conception of Buffalo Bill. The presence in the cast of Burt Lancaster (as Bill’s biographer, Ned Buntline) keeps reminding you of this – I don’t mean to deprecate Lancaster but he did have a gift for combining grandeur and hollowness. On the other hand, the film would likely be more tiresome with a crudely flamboyant protagonist and Newman is never not interesting in the role. As a different kind of master of ceremonies, Joel Grey, with his startling quick movements and lightning changes in mood, is impressive. Harvey Keitel (in the same year that he appeared in Taxi Driver) seems uncomfortable as Cody’s eager-to-please nephew who keeps saying and doing the wrong thing. One of the best vignettes is a presidential visit to the company by Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick) and his first lady (Shelley Duvall). I could have done without the succession of glamorous opera singers for whom Bill has a weakness, coloratura-maniacs to a woman.
The whole thing is clever and coherent but it doesn’t seem to build much. That said, I must admit my attention wasn’t fully engaged: I was still too thrilled by the result, just over an hour before the BFI screening began, of the Epsom Derby. It was won by Adayar, a son of the great Frankel, whose progeny I follow. Having taken so many years to catch up with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, I may have half-wasted the opportunity of finally watching it but you can’t argue with emotional priorities. It brought another smile to my face to discover, as I read up about Altman’s film afterwards, the name of the director of the first Broadway production of Arthur Kopit’s Indians. Gene Frankel.
5 June 2021
