Exclusive vintage film projection in Library Auditorium, Thursday October 6th, 3pm.
October will be a month of Westerns! We are starting off this week with a DeMille Western, THE PLAINSMAN (1937) this Thursday, October 6th.
Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper), Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur) and Buffalo Bill (James Ellison) go up against Indians and a gunrunner.
It looks like this film will have some Good, Bad, and Ugly (and beautiful) elements
The Good: DeMille will be about at the highpoint of his powers in Hollywood at this time, and is focused on being cinema’s “Greatest Showman”, so he will bring all his clout, budget, and mastery of large set-pieces to bear in this rousing Western adventure tale, with grand, sweeping vistas and sets stuffed from foreground to background. Nominated for the top 10 Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute.
The Bad: DeMille’s focus on showmanship and entertainment will lead to creating a whole new story with these characters. Ignoring history in place of entertainment, a fictionalized adventure film bears little resemblance to reality beyond the fact that these are historical people from the post-Civil War frontier.
The Ugly: Along with discarding history, every review of this picture I read bemoans the treatment of Native American people as dehumanizing and little more than target practice. This sounds terrible in this regard. A stark example of Hollywood’s disregard of treatment of native peoples.
The Beautiful: Parts of the film were shot in Kanab Canyon, Kanab movie fort, and Paria, Utah.
Why does BYU have it? – We have a huge collection of Cecil B. DeMille papers! Accessible in Special Collections.
Production Quote
“Five acres of sets, some of them with a history dating to pre-sound days, were demolished to make room for The Plainsman. Where the gates of Jerusalem have stood for a year, a street in Deadwood City was constructed. The walled city of Acre is now the docks of Leavenworth after the War Between the States. Windsor Castle has become the riverboat docks of St. Louis.”
– Katherine Coughlin, “Producing The Plainsman,” Movie Classic, January 1937
Review
“Played with spirit and intelligent understanding by principals and entire supporting cast, with class individual performances sticking out all over and directed in the same style, all the substantiating features—locales, photography and particularly the musical accompaniment— have a definite place in the general scheme. All of them have been applied by DeMille to produce quality thrill and action entertainment, the exploitation values of which are limited only by how intensely showmen want to work and how much money they have to spend.”
– Motion Picture Herald, November 28, 1936
From last week:
MONKEY BUSINESS ended with a water fight, featured a mohawk haircut in 1952, Ginger Rogers hold a glass of water on her forehead while she lays down and stands back up (at age 41!), a breaking of the 4th wall in the opening credits, and a really well-trained chimpanzee mixing beakers of chemicals. .
Upcoming Archive Events:
October 21
BEWARE OF DARKNESS (1973)
A spiritual medium bridges our physical world to the realm of deceased spirits. A visiting psychologist who studies the limits fear wants to see how far she and her husband are willing to go to experience the thrill of the unknown.
BYU Motion Picture Archive restoration premiere. You have never seen anything like this!