Walter Hill has gone to considerable lengths to make Westerns, putting them in modern dress (Extreme Prejudice) and even in the garb of other genres entirely (The Driver, The Warriors, Streets of Fire, Trespass), but in a sense he has never prior to this one gone to greater lengths. Never, that is, to the lengths of making an anti-Western (anti-heroic; deglamorizing, debunking; lots of mud puddles) in addition to an "art" Western (black-and-white segments of differing degrees of graininess and solarization; baroque camera angles; English subtitles for the Chinese proprietors of an opium den). An examination of a man's life from the end of the line, complete with inculpatory flashbacks and dream scenes, his Wild Bill is too much a Wild Strawberries. Jeff Bridges, to be sure, cuts a fine figure in the title role: nice hat (and a deadly fetish about any other man touching it); nice mustache; nice Samson-length hair; nice pair of holsters with reverse-grip pistols. And the building-up of his legend is economically and excitingly chronicled at the outset, with a quick succession of well-staged action highlights. But the almost insurmountable problem of a movie about the life of James Butler Hickok is the problem with the life itself: its defining event is the man's death, an unheroic one at a poker table in Deadwood with a hand of aces and eights. Hill manages to drum up enough for his protagonist to do -- of a fearless and fearsome nature, if not actually heroic -- to keep boredom at bay, but the inevitable end proves to be a long-drawn-out, talky, stagy affair. (One of the credited sources for the script is in fact a stage play, Thomas Babe's Fathers and Sons.) Devotees of Hill in particular and/or the Western in general might nonetheless find this to be a fitting followup, even an "interesting," even a "moving" one, to the director's preceding Western, Geronimo. Where that one affected an autumnal, a contemplative, a pensive, a melancholy mood about its subject-matter, and by extension about the current status of its genre as a whole, this one, from the opening black-and-white image of Hickok's coffin, is downright wintry, brooding, gloomy, despairing. One can sympathize. John Hurt, Ellen Barkin, David Arquette. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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