Post by Eddie Love on Nov 21, 2010 0:52:49 GMT -5
Not unlike Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale, in the 1970s the late Dino DeLaurantis was obsessed with vanquishing his own personal beast – the worldwide success of JAWS. He made three attempts to surpass that film’s epic box office returns, first with his remake of KING KONG and lastly with the killer whale saga ORCA. Sandwiched in between was the Western variation on the nature run amok theme: THE WHITE BUFFALO. And it is simply one seriously odd movie.
The film stars Charles Bronson as a shades-sporting Wild Bill Hickock who returns west under an assumed name and in pursuit of the titular beast who haunts the dreams from which he awakens gun-blazing each night. After a couple of barroom gunfights, Bill takes to the mountains with a one-eyed mountain man (Jack Warden) and another legendary figure traveling under a nom de buffalo, the native American leader Crazy Horse (Will Samson) – whose tribe was attacked and his child killed by the white buffalo. Together the three hunt the beast.
It’s possible this movie is one of those films where the screenplay itself is a good bit better than the finished film. There are long, contemplative scenes in the first hour. These feature lots of dense, colloquial language to their florid dialogue, and perhaps a subtler director could have given this a moodier more naturalistic, atmospheric rendering. But J. Lee Thompson was on his way to being a kind of Bronson house director at this point and he doesn’t exhibit much ambition. One assumes the beast of the title is a metaphor for, I don’t know -- the vanishing American frontier? -- something, but by the end of the film you get the feeling, no – it’s really pretty much just a big white buffalo, and the guys are running around trying to kill it.
These scenes and those earlier of the charging buffalo attacking the native tribe are really awful, just ridiculous. As are the scenes of the buffalo starting avalanches and, it would seem…earthquakes? There are some nice snowy exteriors, but elsewhere about half the film is shot indoors with giant, un-melting flakes of “snow” falling on the stars. There are also odd exchanges where Hickock and Crazy Horse yell at each other while simultaneously gesticulating in some kind of sign language. Odd, as both are clearly conversant in English. Later, along with Warden's grizzled mountain man, they share a long, dark night of the soul in a mountain cave, that is kind of like the classic drunken scene onboard the Orca in JAWS. Except that the scene here makes absolutely no sense.
Bronson at this point in his career wasn’t suited to this kind of reflective character. He doesn’t seem interested in playing off his persona. The supporting cast includes several old hands showing up for cameos. These include John Caradine, Stuart Whitman, Clint Walker and Kim Novak. Each is okay, and much of the first two thirds of the film seem to suggest a kind of revisionist, mature take on the Western gunslinger tale. Then the all-too literal physical climax plays out and the action borders on being frankly boring.
But the rambling dialogue of the film’s early scenes plus the almost surreally comic buffalo rampages, make this movie a real curiosity. No, it’s not terrible, but it’s not good, either. But it is kind of jaw-dropping.