General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Plainsman

The Plainsman is a 1936 American Western directed and produced by Cecil B. DeMille for Paramount Pictures, starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok, Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane, and James Ellison as Buffalo Bill Cody. The film compresses the lives of several frontier figures into a single fictional narrative about gunrunners arming Plains Indians in the years after the Civil War, and it ends with Hickok's historically accurate murder at a Deadwood poker game.¹^•² Some reference works date it to 1936, the year of production, while the AFI Catalog gives its release date as 1 January 1937.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and producer	Cecil B. DeMille, a Cecil B. DeMille Production for Paramount Pictures, Inc.¹
Release	1 January 1937 per the AFI Catalog; production ran from 21 July to 23 September 1936¹
Principal cast	Gary Cooper (Wild Bill Hickok), Jean Arthur (Calamity Jane), James Ellison (Buffalo Bill Cody), Charles Bickford (John Lattimer)¹
Writers	Waldemar Young, Harold Lamb, and Lynn Riggs, from stories by Courtney Ryley Cooper and Frank J. Wilstach's book Wild Bill Hickok, the Prince of Pistoleers¹
Length	112–113 or 115 minutes on 12 reels (10,154 feet); home-video editions run about 113–114 minutes¹^•³
Box office	Grossed $2.27 million on release⁴
Critical standing	100% Tomatometer from 22 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The story opens at the close of the Civil War, with Abraham Lincoln's assassination in the East set against General George Custer's campaigns in the West. Wild Bill Hickok, newly returned from the war, reunites in Leavenworth, Missouri, with Buffalo Bill Cody, Cody's new wife Louisa, and his old flame Calamity Jane. The villain is the gunrunner John Lattimer, who supplies seven-shot repeating rifles to the Cheyenne and Sioux, enabling attacks such as the massacre of half the garrison at Fort Piney. Custer orders Cody to carry ammunition to the fort while Hickok pursues the chief Yellow Hand; Calamity Jane is captured and tortured alongside Hickok before the threads converge in Deadwood City, where Hickok is shot in the back by Jack McCall during a poker game.¹^•²

The film's own opening narration acknowledges its method: "The story that follows compresses many years, many lives, and widely separated events into one narrative, in an attempt to do justice to the courage of the plainsman of the West."¹

Production

Scale was the selling point. DeMille's unit built a three-acre set for Deadwood City, demolishing five acres of older standing sets, some dating to pre-sound days, to make room; a trade paper noted that where the gates of Jerusalem had stood for a year, a street of Deadwood rose in their place.²^•⁶ The recreation of the battle of Little Big Horn was filmed on location on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, employing some two thousand Native Americans as extras, with additional shooting at Birney, Montana, and Laramie's Pole Mountain, Wyoming.²^•¹ To keep control of the second unit, DeMille worked from a model of the location and detailed shot plans, which he conveyed to second unit director Arthur Rosson by telephone.²

The crew included cinematographers Victor Milner and George Robinson, art directors Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson, editor Anne Bauchens, and composer George Antheil, whose score was his first for film.¹^•⁵ Jean Arthur learned to use a bullwhip for her role as Calamity Jane, and a young Anthony Quinn appears as the Cheyenne who brings news of Custer's defeat; Quinn later married DeMille's daughter Katherine.²

The ending survived studio pressure. DeMille recalled in his 1959 autobiography that Paramount executives, uneasy about killing Gary Cooper's hero in the last reel, first asked him to let Wild Bill live, and then, in Adolf Zukor's words, at least to let Charles Bickford's character rather than "that little rat, McCall" do the killing. DeMille refused to remake history to that extent, and Hickok dies as he did in life.²

History and liberties

The film is a pastiche rather than a record. It presents Hickok, Cody, and Custer as close companions operating at the behest of President Lincoln, who is shown demanding that the frontier be made safe hours before his assassination, a chronology scholars describe as patently absurd.⁷ Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times called it one of those "action-crammed, spectacular and inaccurate canvases" DeMille delighted in painting, and noted that Arthur's Calamity Jane, who talks low, refuses to chew tobacco or curse, and faints at the sight of Hickok's torture, bears only a passing resemblance to the traditional figure.⁵^•² The film nonetheless became a major landmark in screen treatments of Wild Bill Hickok, in William Everson's judgment, and helped fix the popular image of Calamity Jane as a rip-roaring cowgirl fighting alongside Hickok and Cody.⁸^•⁹

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reception was strongly positive. Variety called it "a big and a good western," praising the scripting and editing, and Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator in 1937, judged it "certainly the finest Western since The Virginian: perhaps it is the finest Western in the history of the film."⁴^•⁵ The picture grossed $2.27 million, a healthy if not record return for Paramount.⁴

The film also marked a turning point in Gary Cooper's Western career: after Fighting Caravans in 1931 he had made no Western until The Plainsman, and DeMille made Cooper one of his favorite leading men in subsequent pictures.¹⁰^•² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from 22 critics alongside a 56% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings, a gap consistent with modern reviewers' complaints about hokey dialogue and its fictional compression of history.⁵ UCLA Film & Television Archive has restored and preserved the film with assistance from the Cecil B. DeMille Trust, and it remains available on digital and DVD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.¹¹^•³

Remake and other uses

Universal Pictures produced a remake, also titled The Plainsman, released in 1966. Directed by David Lowell Rich and written by Michael Blankfort, it runs 1 hour 32 minutes and stars Don Murray as Hickok, Guy Stockwell as Cody, and Abby Dalton as Calamity Jane, again pitting the trio against gunrunners.¹²

The name also belongs to The Auburn Plainsman, the student-run, editorially independent news publication of Auburn University, which operates as a designated public forum and the campus's primary news source.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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