A week ago today, at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, Your Humble Narrator had the honor to introduce the afternoon's movie selection...
The White Buffalo (1977)--Charles Bronson plays Wild Bill Hickok, opposite Chief Broom himself, Will Sampson, as Crazy Horse, in this tall-tale weird western. Both men have been plagued by nightmarish visions of the title ungulate, and have decided to try to hunt it down. Eventually their paths converge, and though they're both staunch racists, a tense alliance forms between them. Based on a highly researched, floridly written novel by Richard Sale, who also wrote the screenplay, this was a rare flop for Bronson, though he brings it the same confident bearing he had in his other western roles.
Directed by J. Lee Thompson, a long way from The Guns of Navarone, the movie is terrible, but entertainingly, sometimes hilariously so, and it has a cast of veterans that's hard to resist: Jack Warden as Hickok's crabby sidekick Charlie Zane, as well as Kim Novak, Clint Walker, Slim Pickens, Ed Lauter, Martin Kove, a young Richard Gililand, and the venerable Douglas Fowley (Roscoe in Singin' in the Rain) as a train conductor. Stuart Whitman and Cara Williams are ignominiously served in their brief roles, and John Carradine plays an undertaker, because of course he does.
White Buffalo are a very real part of the religious beliefs of many indigenous people in America, usually seen as a positive omen, an auspicious harbinger of peace, prosperity and blessings. It would take someone more knowledgeable than I am about such cultures to say if the treatment in this movie is offensive--or rather, just how offensive it is. The animal, one of the clumsier and less convincing creations of the great Italian creature-maker Carlo Rambaldi of Alien and E.T. fame, is treated here basically as a monster; probably Executive Producer Dino De Laurentiis was thinking of Jaws, less than two years earlier, and hoped the movie could cash in on the killer animal vogue, along with the likes of Grizzly, Orca and Tentacles. Even so, especially in his Moby Dick Waterloo at the finale, you may feel a pang of sympathy for the poor beast.
I also enjoyed moderating the lively post-movie discussion...
The movie was presented as part of Museum of the West's excellent ongoing Reel West Sundays film series, in connection with their exhibit Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western, which runs through December 31 of this year (the 2 p.m. Sunday flicks are free with regular museum admission; $10 just for the movie). Still in the Saddle includes artifacts of The White Buffalo, like a dinky little jacket that the apparently very slight Bronson wore in the film...
Before the event, Chief Curator Andrew Patrick Nelson took me to lunch, along with film historian Richard M. Roberts...
...at The Frybread Lounge, a native-owned cafe in Old Town Scottsdale, where, to prepare myself for the task ahead, I had a bison burger...
..."Rez style," that is, on frybread instead of brioche. A seriously lean and delicious burger; if you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend.
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