Wild Bill Poster

Wild Bill (1995)

Action | Western 
Rayting:   5.9/10 6.5K votes
Country: USA
Language: English | Sioux
Release date: 1 December 1995

The early career of legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickock is telescoped and culminates in his relocation in Deadwood and a reunion with Calamity Jane.

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galestreger 16 March 2002

Is it the will to fight? Is it the fear of failure? Quoting one of the most important lines in this movie: "Wild Bill had chosen a way of life, that demanded he´d walk down the muddy mainstreet, instead of using the sidewalks along the houses.", one begins to realize that legend has its price. Now, it may not be a historical correct version of the life and death of the great Wild Bill, but it´s a lesson on what happens when the your name gets to carry you, instead of the other way around. -and Jeff Bridges is simply superb as the uncompromising and stubborn gunslinger. Great Movie!!!

Samiam3 25 August 2010

Fmovies: Perhaps I love Deadwood too much; the critically praised, HBO series for which director Walter Hill appropriately won an Emmy for the pilot. I clearly set my expectations a little too high of this one, which predates the Deadwood series by eight years or so. Coming from Walter Hill, the man behind the Warriors and The Long Riders, there is no way that Wild Bill should have been this sloppy.

His portrayal of the life and death of James Butler Hickok results in a motion picture that self-destructs in spectacular fashion. It is vastly underwritten, poorly acted, edited as if it were a labyrinth of jungle vines to be cut down by a machete, and on top of that the movie is also severely anti-climactic.

All that Hill gets right is that parts of the movie are well shot, and he is able to capture the look of the times on screen, but on the pages, it is a different matter. The opening twenty minutes (give or take) are especially excruciating. What we see is almost a joke, totally amateurish and more oriented towards obnoxious gunplay than character illumination. I felt like I was watching kiddies play cowboys and Indians on the street with little wooden pistols.

Jeff Bridges portrayal of Hickok is devoid of talent and humanity. It is so obviously a performance, with hammy delivery, poor timing, and failure to capture Bill's misery and self loathing and his love for Calamity Jane.

When all is said and done, Wild Bill is a dud. It is clumsy and careless, and is easily one of the worst westerns I have ever seen.

Bob-45 29 April 2005

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickock: Soldier, buffalo hunter, lawman, adventurer, wastrel, whoremonger, opium user, syphilis-carrier, brawler. Wild Bill wasn't just worldly, he was world-class worldly. Yet there was a boyishly but noble, almost sensitive charm to this raging bar fight of a man. His murder by the hand of a coward smacks of Greek tragedy, though he was spared the final indignities of disease and self-abuse. "Wild Bill" pretty well accurately chronicles the life of the man. Walter Hill has beautifully established the enigmatic poetry of him. Jeff Bridges perfectly embodies his spirit, while his friends, "Calamity Jane" (Ellen Barkin), Charley Prince (John Hurt) and "California Joe" (James Gammon) provide letter perfect foils, thematic analyzers and comic relief. With the success of "Deadwood" on HBO, "Wild Bill" would probably be a deserved hit with audiences now. At the time, a movie whose gaminess made a Leone western look positively Disneyish by comparison was probably too off-putting for audiences. Now, it's time to examine the beauty of the performances amidst the accurate ugliness of actual conditions in mining towns like Deadwood in 1876. This is Barkin's best performance, Gammon's most charming and Hurt's most beautiful line readings. Who could ever forget the haunting look on the face of Song Lew (Karen Huie), proprietress of the opium den after saving the doped out Bill. Or Bill's disgust with the "opium of the masses" Marjoe Gortner (himself a former evangelical preacher) doles out to the suckers in the form of religion. How the movie beautifully integrates the old joke that "the best way to find a whore is follow the church bells" into the storyline. Christina Applegate is even very effective in her peripheral role, with her baby face and voluptuous body, a child whose eyes already reflect a soul dead from surrender to his conditions. "Wild Bill" is strong stuff indeed. If I can fault writer-director Walter Hill (and I believe it is still too soon to render a final judgment on this movie), I would fault his decision to shoot the flashbacks as erratic dreams, with unstable camera and black-and-white. I'd have chosen one OR the other, not both. No matter, "Wild Bill" will continue to haunt me, as great films do. for years to come. I just wish he'd added at least one flourish so effectively used in "The White Buffalo," another less well made, but impressive movie about Hickock. That would have been to include the scene of Bill passing the mountain of bleached Buffalo bones. For Bill's passing was perhaps a fitting climax to the death of that era; and, with it, the death of the "American West" of legend.

I give "Wild Bill" a "9".

moonspinner55 31 May 2008

Wild Bill fmovies. Historians may scoff, but Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" is an absorbing and intriguing western with elegiac overtures yet much of the emphasis placed on the battles. Jeff Bridges does a fine job as scruffy, mangy, weathered James Butler Hickok in the 1870s Midwest, getting into brutal fights while doing nothing more than standing at a bar (John Hurt's narration tells us, "Being 'Wild' Bill was in itself a profession."). Ellen Barkin plays Calamity Jane like a lovestruck toughie who clucks behind Hickok, waiting for a commitment; David Arquette is Jack McCall, a young man defending the honor of his mother, whom Hickok loved and left. Occasionally, director Hill hits a stumbling block (there's an inconsequential bit with Keith Carradine as Buffalo Bill Cody which disconnects the mood, and also a black-and-white flashback filmed in high-contrast where Hickok attempts to talk sensibly with a no-nonsense Indian tribe). Still, the hand and gun bouts are fully charged with adrenaline, and there's a genuine feel for these sad, meandering people that recalls strong sections from other westerns, particularly "McCabe and Mrs. Miller". A bumpy film, but not a bad one at all. **1/2 from ****

Torchy 7 August 2001

I've been checking out the comments on this film and they seem to be in line with most of the other reactions I've heard. It's important to say up front that this is not a film for Western fans. It's not a film for action fans. It's not for history buffs who care only about the facts. It's not a film for people who want to see a good story told simply.

Wild Bill is one of the richest and most disturbing films ever made about the American West. It shows us a complicated man without trying to explain or rationalize the contradictions in his character. He's capable of love, but he also commits acts of brutal violence. He cares for his friends but he holds them all at arm's length. And he feels compelled to play the part of the living legend to the end, come what may.

I suspect that Walter Hill chose this subject because he identified strongly with Wild Bill himself. But whether or not this is true, the contradictions in Hickok's character are a part of this country's character. Hill was lucky to have Jeff Bridges in the lead. It's one of his finest performances. Though Wild Bill doesn't voice doubts about his life out loud, Bridges' face shows us that he doesn't understand himself the reasons for many of his actions.

The story is not told in chronological order, but the organization of the sequences is not haphazard. In fact it's beautifully thought out. This is not a film for everybody, but I think it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten so far. I feel like fans of Walter Hill's work will see the same thing I do: a beautiful and haunting meditation on why this country is the way it is.

poe426 13 September 2002

"The hardest steel is forged in the hottest fires..." The Wild West in the years following The Civil War must've been very close to the West as Walter Hill envisions it here; if not in fact, then most certainly in tone. Life was cheap: pick up any one of the magazines or books devoted to same and take a gander at the bodies on display in storefronts and on boardwalks (or laid out in the sun, or dangling from the limbs of trees). The man who walked away from a gunfight was the man who got there first with the most. He what hesitated, was lost. Jeff Bridges as WILD BILL is a man with a hair-trigger; he HAD to be. (Otherwise, he would've been BELLY-UP BILL, and a lot less interesting.) He literally fights- with fists or with guns- at the drop of a hat. Not the kind of man you take lightly. He drowns his sorrows in booze and pipes and the black and white flashbacks (with the camera canted just enough to suggest an off-kilter dream state) are great. See this one because you like hard-hitting, no-nonsense westerns or because you prefer superior craftsmanship- but SEE it; to miss it would be to pass up one of the finest westerns to ever come thunderin' down the trail.

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