Bill Rendered

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL'S HISTORY LESSON Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN Screenplay by ROBERT ALTMAN and ALAN RUDOLPH

America's most interesting active film maker, Robert Altman, has created a sly, wry, wise study of what fame does to people cursed with that most mixed of blessings. Buffalo Bill Cody (superbly played by Paul Newman) was a legend created out of flimsy cloth by a pulp writer and promoter named Ned Buntline (impersonated by Burt Lancaster), who lurks around the fringes of the film.

Buntline serves as a kind of chorus, singing counterpoint to the sleazy commercial tones from Bill and his more sophisticated manipulators. They seem to really believe that Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show is indeed "America's national family." They make it their business to paper over the fact that the star can no longer differentiate between the legend that has been created for him and the much plainer reality of his past.

Letch for Sopranos. Buffalo Bill is a foolish figure. Called upon to make speeches when, for example, Sitting Bull joins his troupe or President Grover Cleveland visits it, he turns out to be the master of the grandiloquent opening and the bumbling close ("May the sun never set on this great land, unless it comes up again next morning"). He has a letch for operatic sopranos and a strange hatred of birds, and he is comically unsteady on his snow white charger--especially when he tries to make it rear in the grand manner. One suspects Altman has based his Buffalo Bill on movie stars he has known--people whose celebrity has cut them off from the reality that the rest of us share, as well as from their earlier selves, the selves that first touched a common chord and gave them their alienating fame.

The aging frontiersman is surrounded by an entourage of relatives, managers, flacks (Harvey Keitel, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy) who are devoted about equally to managing his affairs profitably and to seeing that his egocentric whims do not cut too deeply into those profits. As usual in Altman's films, the minor characters are hilariously venal, conning themselves relentlessly, the better to con the public. The film's best running gag has Geraldine Chaplin as sharpshooting Annie Oakley, sniping closer, ever closer to Frank Butler, her husband, who must hold her targets steady while fighting against growing fear as she keeps testing the limits of her possibly lethal talent. Altman understates this joke, as he does literally hundreds of others, with his cinematic trademarks: overlapping dialogue and quick-flick cutting of film printed in faded colors, like old snapshots.

Moviemakers and playwrights love to employ a show as a metaphor for the world; customarily the works that use this device are impossibly pretentious and unpersuasive. As Altman presents it, this tatty wild West show is ill-choreographed and never delivers all it promises. Yet on the whole, it is an extremely graceful journey over ground that has tripped many in the past.

The only real trouble is that Altman seems to lack a sound sense for end ings. The big scene is between Newman and the ghost of Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), who silently appears and disappears as Newman wanders through a midnight monologue about the vexing relationship between whites and Indians. Altman and Co-Scenarist Rudolph have some arresting notions on this subject -- that the white drive is to convert dreams into profits, while the Indians wish to convert dreams into experience. But the scene, in which a man stupefied by celebrity tries to comprehend such delicate matters, is windy and inconclusive. By no means is it the conclusion that this otherwise strong and interesting movie deserves.

Richard Schickel

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