March 3, 2007
The Plainsman Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:55 PM EST I watched The Plainsman last night, one of the many famous movies I’ve suddenly realized I’d never actually seen. It is from 1936, a Cecile B. DeMille epic with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur playing Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It has its oddities, and also its accuracies. Hickok was one of the only great gunslingers to have fought for the Union in the Civil War—he got his start in that cause on his father’s Illinois farm, which was an Underground Railroad station—and an early scene in The Plainsman, which starts at the close of the war, shows Cooper’s Hickok silently perturbed by a white man kicking and otherwise abusing a black porter. This is uncharacteristic, I think, of 1936 movies, but true enough to Hickok. The gunfights are also less implausible than most depicted in movies, since the historical Hickok was the victor in the only Western fast-draw duel recorded by history—he killed Davis K. Tutt Jr. in Springfield, Mo., in 1865—and the scenes where a solitary Cooper shoots down numerous antagonists also seem less absurd than is generally the case, since Hickok actually did that, and on several occasions. Similarly, the scenes of Cooper shooting various members of war parties off horses at prodigious distances can be set against the allegation that the historical Hickok made a celebrated shot, downhill on a windy day, at a range of better than 750 yards. Some of the oddities of The Plainsman happen very early on: Lincoln, on the eve of his assassination, worries about the economy absorbing masses of soon-to-be-released soldiers, which sounds more of a 1936 New Deal concern than one from 1865, but I could be wrong about that, and I’m confident that if I am a co-blogger will swiftly point it out. More jarring, and not only because it also seems a bit anachronistic, is a scene in which the manufacturers of small arms plot to sell repeating rifles to the Plains tribes, lured by prospective super-profits and appalled by the imminent disappearance of their mass market, now that the Civil War is over. This sounds like Merchants-of-Death stuff, and almost certainly was, for 1936 was the year that North Dakota Sen. Gerald P. Nye’s “Senate Munitions Committee,” as it was called, abruptly closed up shop. That happened following Nye’s injudicious attack on Woodrow Wilson, whom Nye viewed rather the way a lot of people view Bush and Cheney today—as someone who had lied America into a war of choice. The theory then, and a theory now, was/is that arms manufacturers need wars to sell their wares, and that this need is the main source of wars. As Nye put it, “When the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.” Arms sales, however, are rarely the cause of wars. The Plains tribes were arming, to the extent that they could, to resist being starved to death on worse and worse land, not because predatory Lords of Capital were forcing weapons into their hands (and at one point The Plainsman seems to acknowledge the fact). In 1936 Nye’s committee failed to nationalize the arms industry, but the ever-popular Merchants of Death theory did inspire Congress’s three neutrality acts, which made it more difficult for various governments belatedly attempting to arm against the very real threat of fascism. The most “progressive” moment in The Plainsman is thus also the saddest, a reminder that bad ideas are at least as tenacious as good ones, and at least as easy to cheaply dramatize.
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