TV Reviews : ‘Girls’ Takes a Romp Through Old West

You know “Buffalo Girls” is in trouble when a soldier calls Anjelica Huston “fella.”

Huston, you see, is Calamity Jane in this hapless CBS two-parter, a famed frontierswoman who shoots and hoots with the guys so much that Gen. George Custer and his troops think she is one of the guys. This is very strange because Anjelica is about as manly here as, well, Anjelica.

The story’s bursting bubble of androgyny is a measure of its futility. Loosely based on history, “Buffalo Girls” has been adapted by Cynthia Whitcomb from a novel by Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”). Its narrative device is a memoir that Calamity is writing for her young daughter, who is living a privileged life in London with her snooty foster father, unaware of her ties to the Old West. The girl’s biological father is Sam Elliott’s Wild Bill Hickok, whose face belongs on a coin.

Just why the women in this story are known as buffalo girls is unexplained. Unlike Calamity’s self-mythologizing friend, Buffalo Bill Cody (Peter Coyote), they don’t slaughter buffalo. Nor do they resemble them. Calamity’s co-buffalo girl in the Dakota Territory is Melanie Griffith’s Dora DuFran, a hooker-laden madam with a heart of gold, a chest made for plunging necklines, lots of tumbleweed between her ears and a boyfriend named T. Blue (Gabriel Byrne).

Under director Rod Hardy, this riderless horse often slows to a walk, and Dora’s half of the story is deadlier even than Calamity’s, which at least offers the attraction of self-parody.

We meet Calamity as she and Hickok are riding with Custer shortly before his date with Sioux at the Little Big Horn. Just before the big wipeout, they leave Custer and head for town. “All these years, I never could quite figure you out,” Hickok tells Calamity. Soon, after the buckskinned Calamity has been rouged and gussied up by Dora, Hickok is figuring her out in a barn.

Wild Bill exits early. Calamity’s loyal sidekick through much of the story is No Ears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman), a Native American with amazing powers. He not only knows that Calamity is pregnant the day after she tumbles in the hay with Hickok but also informs her that she’ll deliver “in the spring.” She accepts this as fact because, after all, he’s No Ears.

Ultimately, the story sends Calamity to London, where she befriends sharpshooting Annie Oakley (Reba McEntire) in one of Cody’s Wild West shows and invades a stodgy gentlemen’s club whose members (they obviously don’t get out very much) think she’s male.

In the shadow of Big Ben, meanwhile, a berserk Sitting Bull tries to scalp Calamity and No Ears gets ears. Is this a comedy? Yes, that’s it, it must be a comedy.

* “Buffalo Girls” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).