A Paramount Picture. A Cecil B. DeMille Production. Produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Screenplay by Waldemar Young, Harold Lamb, and Lynn Riggs. Material compiled by Jeanie Macpherson, based on stories by Courtney Ryley Cooper and Frank J. Wilstach (additional, uncredited writing by Wallace Smith, Stuart Anthony, and Virginia Van Upp). Art direction: Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson. Musical direction: Boris Morros. Original music: George Antheil. Photography: Victor Milner, A.S.C. Film editor: Anne Bauchens
Picture started: July 21, 1936. Picture closed: September 8, 1936. Picture reopened: September 13, 1936. Picture closed: September 23, 1936. Length: 10,154 feet (twelve reels). Cost: $974,084.85.Released: January I, 1937. Gross: $2,278,533.33
Cast: Gary Cooper (Wild Bill Hickok), Jean Arthur (Calamity Jane), James Ellison (Buffalo Bill Cody), Charles Bickford (John Lattimer), Helen Burgess (Louisa Cody), Porter Hall (Jack McCall), Paul Harvey (Yellow Hand), Victor Varconi (Painted Horse), John Miljan (Gen. George Custer), and Frank McGlynn Sr. (Abraham Lincoln)
In early 1936 Paramount commissioned a review of its business activities. The report was not particularly flattering regarding DeMille’s track record in the past three years:
1Nor was the report particularly favorable toward Paramount’s dealings with DeMille. The Crusades had been made under a two-picture contract, with the second scheduled picture to be Samson and Delilah. DeMille had been advanced $60,000 of the $75,000 due under the contract for Samson and Delilah and had spent $142,000 in preliminary costs, exclusive of studio overhead charges, preparing the script and getting ready for production before it was decided to abandon the project.
On February 10, 1936, Paramount president John Edward Otterson and vice president Watterson R. Rothacker began negotiations with DeMille for a nine-picture contract. The negotiations did not result in a new agreement, but Otterson ordered that DeMille be paid $3,000 per week by Paramount until further notice. Adolph Zukor intervened and finally worked out an arrangement whereby DeMille would keep the advances he had received and produce a Western to be titled Buffalo Bill at a cost not to exceed $600,000, exclusive of star Gary Cooper’s salary. DeMille was to receive an additional advance of $36,000 against 50 percent of the profits, grouping Buffalo Bill with The Crusades in a revision of the original two-picture deal, and was to be responsible for any costs exceeding the $600,000 budget. “The result,” concluded the report, “is that DeMille and his unit actually cost the company $269,300, excluding overhead, from the date CRUSADES was completed to May 16, 1936 while Paramount was trying to make up its mind.”
Although The Crusades performed rather respectably at the box office, it would never recoup its costs. The studio wanted DeMille’s big pictures, but they also wanted to curb expenses and avoid are peat of the overruns on The Crusades. In canceling Samson and Delilah Paramount avoided what it perceived would be another expensive historical drama. And by insisting that DeMille work with Gary Cooper, the company hoped to add star power and box-office insurance.
Although B-Westerns and stars like Gene Autry, Buck Jones, and George O’Brien were popular with movie audiences, big-budget studio Westerns had been more or less in limbo since the box-office failures of The Big Trail (Fox, 1930), Billy the Kid (M-G-M, 1930), and Cimarron (RKO-Radio, 1931).2
Buffalo Bill, a film to be based on the life of William F. Cody, no doubt appealed to DeMille because he claimed to have met Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill as a small boy when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show came to New York. But RKO’s Annie Oakley (1935) dealt with Cody’s later years as a showman, and so DeMille turned to his earlier years as a frontier scout for the basis of his story. Inspired by the film version of The Last Frontier (Metropolitan-P.D.C, 1926), which was based on a 1921 novel by Courtney Ryley Cooper, DeMille decided to weave history and fiction into a rousing, idealized Western adventure pitting gun runners and Indians against Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody, with a romance between Wild Bill and Calamity Jane added for spice.
The Last Frontier had originally been planned as a Thomas H. Ince production, and Ince had sent director B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason to Canada to shoot footage of buffalo herds. Ince’s death halted the project, but it was revived when Producers Distributing Corporation took over the Ince studio interests. Cowboy star Jack Hoxie played Buffalo Bill in the silent film, which had been successful enough that E.B. Derr had initiated the making of several sound sequences for a revival of the film when he took over the production reins at Pathé after DeMille’s departure for M-G-M. The part-talking version was never released, and although the newly shot footage survived in the RKO-Pathé Culver City vaults at the time of DeMille’s inquiry in April 1936, all known prints of the original silent production had been junked.3 But, even though he was unable tore-screen The Last Frontier, DeMille apparently remembered the picture well enough that he told his casting director that the actor selected to play Buffalo Bill in his new film “should be played by a Jack Hoxie type.”4
Although DeMille and his writers were dealing with incidents that had occurred only sixty years earlier, they discovered they had a great deal of creative latitude because there were few surviving primary accounts of Wild Bill Hickok’s career. Historians, surviving old-timers, and even contemporary official records often could not agree on how many, or even the correct names, of men Hickok was said to have killed in his line of duty as town marshal of Hays City, Kansas. Hickok’s romance with Calamity Jane was based on the flimsiest evidence. “It is known that he bought her a dress once,” DeMille recalled many years later. “That is definitely known. How and why he bought her the dress is not known.”5
One fact that was known was that Wild Bill Hickok had been shot from behind by Jack McCall. Paramount was appalled at the idea that Gary Cooper, as Hickok, would be killed at the end of the film, but DeMille was adamant in serving history on this point, although he seemed willing to compromise if there was any compelling evidence that Hickok’s death would hurt the picture’s box-office potential. DeMille asked fellow director Frank Lloyd to read the script for The Plainsman while the film was in production, and on August 3,1936, Lloyd suggested:
The last scene which shows Hickok in Calamity’s arms should show Hickok coming to sufficiently to say, “I reckon it’s going to be lonely for me from now on, Calamity.” And Calamity saying, “No, Bill, you’ve always kept good company and you always will.” Bill’s eyes close, which we know is in death. The sound of the Plainsman’s song should start on the soundtrack—and you Lap Dissolve to a plainsman advancing to the camera, happy and carefree, with the music in crescendo, and you see the spectral form of Hickok riding with them in a glorified exit. In other words, he has joined the throng of the pioneer plainsmen of the west who have passed on.6
DeMille ignored Lloyd’s sappy dialogue suggestions, but he did incorporate the idea of a “phantom curtain call” for Gary Cooper and a rousing, printed on-screen afterword about Wild Bill Hickok’s contribution to the winning of the West.
The Plainsman would mark a distinct shift in DeMille’s approach to filmmaking. Former Paramount publicist William Pine became DeMille’s associate producer, taking on many of the day-to-day production chores that DeMille or production secretary Emily Barrye had assumed in the past. DeMille’s extensive use of carefully planned second-unit footage also began with this film.
For a tale of the Old West and wide-open spaces, it is surprising that so much of The Plainsman was shot on Paramount studio sound stages. Twenty-nine of the forty-six originally scheduled shooting days were set in the great indoors. Thirteen days were to be spent on the studio back lot. Only four days of principal photography were to be shot on locations near the studio. Most of the outdoor action was shot in Montana and Wyoming by second-unit director Arthur Rosson. DeMille would increasingly rely on Rosson to shoot location scenes for his next several pictures, and they developed a close working relationship, but the second-unit director’s initial efforts did not meet with DeMille’s favor. A June 20, 1936, telegram to Rosson in Birney, Montana, is typical of the direct and specific instructions the filmmaker would offer to those who worked with him:
CONFIRMING TELEPHONE CONVERSATION THE CAVALRY CHARGEHAS NO THRILL WHATEVER stop APPEARS TO BE CRANKED NORMAL stop FOR MOST OF THE CHARGE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WHETHER THEY ARE INDIANS OR CAVALRY stop IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GET A THRILL FROM A CHARGE COMING DIRECTLY AT CAMERA stop APPROACH SHOULD BE DIAGONAL SO THAT WE CAN SEE MEN ARE GALLOPING…. THE EFFECT OF THIS SCENE MUST BE FAST SPEED AND THUNDERING HORSES NOT LITTLE TO YPUPPETS TWO OR THREE MILES AWAY stop YOU HAD BETTER NOT HAVE THEM DRAW THEIR SABRES BUT USE REVOLVERS AND RIFLES stop LOCATION OF CHARGE IS NOT GOOD stop SHOT WITH TREE IS BEST. USE SOMETHING TO BREAK THE FOREGROUND. DON’T HAVE ANYTROTTING stop THIS MUST BE THE CLIMAX OF AN EXCITING SEQUENCE PHOTOGRAPHED ASSUCH stop BE SURE AND UNDERCRANK INDIAN CHARGE. … I WOULD PUT ACAMERA CAR IN FRONT OF CUSTER AND THE FLAGS AND LET ME SEE SOMETHING THAT WILLMAKE AN AUDIENCE GET UP AND CHEER INSTEAD OF THE SLEEPY HOLLOW SCENE THAT YOUSENT DOWN. REGARDS7
Much of Rosson’s footage was designed to be incorporated in rear-screen process scenes. Rear projection was common in the 1930s, but DeMille stretched the use of process photography to the limit in The Plainsman, even staging battle scenes on sound stages with major elements derived from second-unit footage projected behind his principal players. The results were certainly economical, though not always convincing to the eye.
One of the things that kept DeMille from going on extended location jaunts was his new role as on-air host of the Lux Radio Theatre. The program aired live from Hollywood on Monday evenings from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. over the CBS radio network. DeMille was credited as “producer” of the show, but more accurately he would be described as “master of ceremonies,” introducing the stars and the stories and conducting scripted interviews with various celebrities between acts. In truth the program required little of his time, a dress rehearsal and two broadcasts (for the East and West Coasts), but, for the most part, it did necessitate his being in Hollywood during the broadcast season. Although he was already well known for his film work through the years, DeMille’s tenure on the Lux Radio Theatre made him a familiar household friend to millions of listeners as he promised the glamour of movieland with his weekly “Greetings from Hollywood.”
The reaction by audiences in various cities who previewed The Plainsman was as much as DeMille and Paramount could hope for. The November 23, 1936, screening in New Orleans “did not start until eleven forty last night and finished at one thirty and not one person of the audience left the theatre,” DeMille wired his wife the following day.8Audience member Fred Wendt wrote: “I think this picture is perfect—congratulations! The only disappointing incident is when Gary Cooper is killed. However, when thinking it over I conclude that if ’Wild Bill’ were not killed, The Plainsman’ would be just another cowboy picture and the public would forget the whole thing almost immediately.”9
On December 9, 1936, Everett R. Cunnings, district manager of the Tri States Theatre Corporation, wired Paramount in New York: “Our Omaha theatre previewed The Plainsman last night with Cecil B. DeMille in person stop Large audience applauded and cheered picture and DeMille was showered with congratulations stop Newspapers so impressed they ran reviews of picture in news sections stop My entire staff joins me in congratulating DeMille and Paramount for producing not only the finest picture of the season but what will prove the biggest grosser stop It is replete with running comedy stop Add together The Virginian, Texas Rangers, Covered Wagon and Trail of the Lonesome Pine and you have The Plainsman[.]”10
When The Plainsman hit theaters in early 1937, the charges of reckless financial abandon and inept bungling leveled at Paramount executives only months before now seemed short-sighted and off the mark. The picture was a tremendous hit, wiping out the deficits piled up by DeMille’s previous Paramount pictures, and inspiring a new cycle of epic Westerns including Wells Fargo (Paramount, 1937), Stagecoach (Wanger-United Artists, 1939), Destry Rides Again (Universal,1939), Dodge City (Warner Bros., 1939), The Westerner (Goldwyn-United Artists, 1940), and DeMille’s own Union Pacific (1939). After years of uneven success, DeMille hit his stride with The Plainsman and once again became a consistently potent box-office force. Not surprisingly, he returned to American historical themes for five of his next six films.