MOVIE REVIEW : A Showdown Between Fact and Legend

Walter Hill should have been born 25 or 30 years earlier and become a movie director when Westerns, those featuring the kind of romanticized, dime-novel tales debunked in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” were appreciated.

Hill has a genuine passion for the Old West, Hollywood’s Old West, made with a dash of history and a wagonload of legend, and he showed what he could do with that material in his crafty 1980 “The Long Riders.” There, he replayed the exploits of Jesse James and his gang, using actor-brothers to portray the various outlaw siblings in the gang, and through the film’s exuberance you could almost feel Hill behind the camera, maybe wearing a two-gun holster himself, cheering them on.

But that kind of unapologetic myth-making is, sadly, gone from movies, and in his two latest passes at the genre--last year’s “Geronimo” and “Wild Bill,” opening today--Hill has had trouble finding a place for himself. With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, he seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

Wild Bill is, of course, James Butler Hickok, the frontier lawman and gambler who packed a lot of life into his 39 years and went out in grand gunfighter fashion, assassinated by young Jack McCall while holding the since-famous “dead man’s hand” (full house; aces over eights) in a poker game in Deadwood, S.D.

Hickok was the real deal among gunslingers, though he probably killed no more than 20 of the 200 men biographers of his day claimed for him. He was, by all accounts, a striking frontier figure, well-dressed and handsome, tall and menacing, and a man known throughout the West of the 1860s and ‘70s for his quick temper and sure aim.

Jeff Bridges fits the physical description to a T, right down to the flowing hair and bushy mustache, and over the course of the movie, gives us a marvelously rich and honest look at a simple man of legendary pluck trying, with his sight failing and his luck running out, to reconcile his fame with his own self-image. It’s a remarkably full performance in a movie that simply cannot fill the space around him.

After an extended prologue, a series of time-compacted, unrelated action pieces that plays like a “Wild Bill’s Best Kills” highlight film, the movie settles down in 1876 Deadwood, where Hickok is joined by old friends Calamity Jane (Ellen Barkin), California Joe (James Gammon) and Charley Prince (John Hurt), an effete Englishman who, for reasons of convenience (he narrates the story), has become Hickok’s sidekick. Wild Bill will still draw and fire at the slightest provocation, but there’s a tired soul inside that strapping frame, and a tug at his conscience that keeps drawing him to the pipe at Deadwood’s Chinese opium den.

Hill adapted his script from a variety of sources that include Pete Dexter’s novel “Deadwood,” Thomas Babe’s play “Fathers and Sons” and his own considerable research and imagination, and the seams are as visible as the stitches on the neck of Frankenstein’s monster. The movie’s tone is all over the place, from blustery shoot-outs, to moody introspection, to farce (Barkin’s take on rip-snortin’, lovesick Calamity Jane is a calamity in its own right), to a sort of wimpy Greek tragedy.

The film’s wildest leap has Jack McCall (David Arquette) being the son of onetime Hickok girlfriend Susannah Moore (the lovely Diane Lane, giving her entire performance in a series of bleached-out black-and-white flashbacks) out to avenge a perceived offense. The device works to frame the story, and Hickok’s cavalier dismissal and taunting of the young hothead underscores a frame of mind verging on suicidal. But the scenes between them are so disjointed in tone--it’s legend; no, it’s fact--that the tension is drained right out of them.

In the “Wild Bill” production notes, Hill refers, with an amen, to the line at the end of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” Would that Hill had taken the advice. He’s tried to print both the facts and legend, ending up with something that is alternately brilliant and frustratingly self-conscious, and, in the end, pretty much a wash.

* MPAA rating: R, for Wild West violence and a sex scene. Times guidelines: numerous shootings and one comically graphic sex scene.

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‘Wild Bill’

Jeff Bridges: Wild Bill Hickok

Ellen Barkin: Calamity Jane

John Hurt: Charley Prince

Diane Lane: Susannah Moore

David Arquette: Jack McCall

James Gammon: California Joe

Christina Applegate: Lurline

A Zanuck Co. production, released by United Artists. Director Walter Hill. Producers Richard D. Zanuck, Lili Zanuck. Screenplay by Hill, based on the novel “Deadwood” and the play “Fathers and Sons.” Cinematographer Lloyd Ahern. Editor Freeman Davies. Costumes Dan Moore. Music Van Dyke Parks. Production design Joseph Nemec III. Art director Daniel Olexiewicz. Set decorate Gary Fettis. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

* In selected theaters throughout Southern California.