OUT WEST ON A BAD STAR TRIP

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TO SOME DEGREE ALL GUNFIGHTER westerns are meditations on celebrity. As the hero proceeds along his increasingly corpse-strewn path, making one vivid assertion after another of his deadly prowess, he becomes a public figure, a source of rumor, legend and awe, just like a movie star. His reputation--always preceding him, simultaneously distancing and entrancing his public--becomes both a source of strength, making tremulous the hands of his enemies, and a source of danger, in that it encourages people who want a piece of his fame to form an entourage around him. Or challenge him to a deadly encounter.

Wild Bill, which is one of the dankest and most claustrophobic westerns ever made--a movie that deliberately shuts itself off from the clean, redeeming beauty of prairie, mountain and desert--takes the celebrity metaphor into new realms of darkness and hysteria. Written and directed by Walter Hill (48 HRS.), it presents Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Bridges) as a moron with a fetish: if anyone touches his hat, he will shoot him. Not that he really requires an excuse to ventilate any and all comers. It is just that this is what the man does when he's not repairing to an opium den and losing himself in bad pipe dreams. Or drinking too much. Or resisting the advances of Calamity Jane (Ellen Barkin).

The guy's on the kind of bad star trip tabloid journalism has made all too familiar to modern audiences. The trouble for him is that the founding of the Betty Ford Clinic is over a century in the future. The trouble for us is that The Plainsman, in which Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur played these figures in accordance with the conventions of their time--as protagonists in something pretty close to a screwball comedy--is 60 years in the past. In other words Wild Bill was born too soon for professional help, and we, it seems, were born too late for the more cheerful forms of mythologizing.

Hill's largest invention, one entirely in keeping with his apparent determination to make the most radically revisionist western ever, is a backstory shared by Wild Bill and Jack McCall (David Arquette), who history teaches us brought the gunman's career to an end by shooting him in the back. Seems that the former loved and rather crassly left a decent woman named Susannah Moore (the lovely Diane Lane). Seems McCall is her child by a previous liaison. Seems Hill has seen too many movies in which young western gunmen are anachronistically portrayed as if they were modern juvenile delinquents with a large yellow streak running down the center of their characters. Seems too that giving the punk something like a coherent motivation--the only one in the movie--goes against the anarchic mood of the piece.

Or maybe not. Maybe Jack's implosive ambivalence--rage and cowardice are constantly, even comically, at war in him--can also be read as the bold and loopy signature of this crammed, darkly jostling movie, the almost saving gracelessness of which lies in the utter, doubtless misplaced, passion with which it is realized.