The Buster Keaton Story - 1957

The Buster Keaton Story (1957), is a film made perhaps too soon, and which many fans of Buster Keaton would agree should never have been made at all.  It is an example of one of the most unrealistic biographies produced by Hollywood, bearing very little fact in the story.  But it is an interesting attempt at trying to portray the life of a giant of the early days of the film industry in an era where that giant, Buster Keaton, was only just beginning to be rediscovered by a new generation.

The bright spots of this story are Donald O’Connor, who plays Buster Keaton and Ann Blyth, who is a fictional character, a sort of composite of his wives.  She has a fictional name and a fictional back story.

The film began shooting in June 1956, a very busy year for Ann, who was 27 years old when this film was made, but, incongruously, her film career was actually winding down.  There would be only one more year after this.
 

In March 1956 she appeared as a guest on the Perry Como television show, and in May, she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, Mother’s Day, May 13, 1956 as a recipient of Sullivan’s Mother of the Year Awards (along with fellow recipients Betty Grable, Deborah Kerr, Betty Hutton, Rosemary Clooney and June Allyson).  A bevy of beautiful moms.

By August, it was reported that she had to cancel a singing engagement at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, slated for September, because MGM, to which she was under contract at the time, ordered her back to start another film as soon as The Buster Keaton Storyfor Paramount was finished up. 

Her work in The Buster Keaton Story was understated and solid, but apart from the acrobatic final scene, which we’ll get to, seemed not much of a challenge.  From The Schenectady Gazette in an article by Louise Boyka from May 1957: “Attractive Ann Blyth does much to keep up the caliber of the film with her high quality acting and personal appeal." 

But Ann’s sincerity could not help the basic faults of this film, which suffered a loss of credibility through the clumsy handling of the film’s producers

 

With so much fictional in this movie about such a remarkable figure in film history, viewing it will quickly become an exercise in frustration.  This is not the place to go looking for the truth about Buster Keaton.  There are documentaries, such as the excellent Buster Keaton - A Hard Act to Follow (currently here on YouTube), but the best source on Buster Keaton’s genius are his own films.  Happily, many have been restored and make up some of the finest comedies made of the silent era.  That he was an exceptionally talented man, and brilliant, though down-to-earth storyteller cannot be denied, but The Buster Keaton Story ignores his genius and slides into lazy cliché.  We have the beginning of the down and out vaudevillians trudging through the snow to the theatrical boardinghouse where Buster is fighting for food as a child in a scene which we will later recognize from one of his movies. 

Though the film does lean heavily on Buster’s drinking to supply the drama and the tension, it does not really go into the reasons for his drinking.  In the movie, we are told that sound films have destroyed the silent era, and have left him without a job.  We even have a reference to John Gilbert’s professional demise because his voice was no friend to the microphone, a myth which has been proven false, but which is one of the clichés that the film perpetuates.

Written by Sidney Sheldon and Richard Smith, produced by them, and directed by Sheldon, the main fault of this movie is the script.  It is rife with clichés and so full of inaccuracies that the embarrassment Buster Keaton apparently felt at its premiere and the critical hammering the film received, giving both the careers of Ann Blyth and Donald O’Connor a black eye, is really the fault of the script and the production.  The direction was lackluster. 

And I can’t help but wonder what Peter Lorre was doing in this film as a belittling director.  It was a role that could have been played by anyone, so much so that it feels odd to have a man of such strong screen presence and a notable history of quirky roles play it.

Cecil B. DeMille has a cameo playing himself, and Jackie Coogan plays the silent star Elmer Case, but I think that’s it for the greats of the silent era.  Richard Anderson, an actor I’ve always liked, has the thankless role of the boring nice man who doesn’t get the girl.

Buster’s real-life parents also get bit roles.

Rhonda Fleming has a fun and flashy role as a snobby starlet, complete with liveried chauffer and hounds on a leash.  She turns Buster’s head for a while. 

Donald O’Connor’s work in the film, despite the material, is good.  He handles the drama with subtle intensity, and most especially the physicality of Buster Keaton, very well.  Mr. O’Connor is an old vaudevillian himself, and when he speaks of Buster’s childhood on the road, we can imagine he knows all about that.  He was a vaudevillian from his childhood.

He performs and re-creates a few of Buster’s famous stunts for indeed, most of Buster’s gags were actually stunts and I can think of no other dancer, no other actor who could have played Buster Keaton as well as Donald O’Connor.  He was the most acrobatic young dancer/actor in Hollywood at the time, able to do things neither Gene Kelly nor Fred Astaire could ever do.  It is this kind of athleticism needed to portray Buster Keaton, who was sublimely athletic.

Buster Keaton served as a technical advisor on the film and in her book on her husband, Buster Keaton Remembered, Eleanor Keaton writes, “For eight weeks Buster helped Donald with the comedy sequences, and he had wonderful time working with him.  However, the finished film  The Buster Keaton Story was awful.”  On the particularly difficult illusion of diving through the brick wall from Sherlock Jr, she writes, “Donald did an admirable job executing this risky stunt...  It was a very dangerous stunt.”

There are two elements of Buster Keaton’s real life that would’ve made a very interesting movie had that movie been made.  When it comes to his drinking, Buster Keaton was spurred on by two great heartbreaks.  One was the fact that his studio, The Buster Keaton Studio, set up for him by producer Joseph Schenck, whose sister-in-law, Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton married, was taken from Buster because he had a tendency to go over budget on his elaborate films.  Buster was put under the thumb of producers and writers writing gags for him, and when he came to work for MGM, his creativity was stifled and he became frustrated.  He was paired on screen with larger-than-life lovable motor-mouth Jimmy Durante.  Buster was now a second banana, and miserable.

The second great sadness of Buster’s life was his first marriage to Natalie Talmadge, with whom he had two sons.  Talmadge was a spendthrift who went through Buster’s money and quickly lost all affection for him.  When they divorced, she refused to allow her sons to see him, and even changed their surname to her maiden name.  She bore such a hatred for Buster the rest of her life that she refused to allow his name mentioned in her presence.

At the time The Buster Keaton Story was made, both Natalie Talmadge and MGM were still alive and had lawyers and would’ve come down hard on this film if it had come anywhere close to vilifying them.  So we have no mention of Buster’s first wife and unhappy marriage, and we have no mention of MGM.  The studio he works for is lamely called Famous Studio and the bad guys are sound pictures.

There is a scene in the movie where Ann Blyth’s character, a casting director for Famous Studio (kudos to the film for placing a woman in a position of responsibility and authority, which was common in the early days of film), falls in love with Buster, who barely knows she’s alive.  After one of his drunken benders, she bails him out of jail and marries him when he is too drunk to realize it.  The scene seems far-fetched, but it does have some basis to reality.  Buster’s second wife, a nurse at the sanitarium where he was being treated for alcoholism, actually did marry him under similar circumstances, and Buster would later remark that he could not remember the ceremony.

The greatest part of Ann Blyth’s fictional character resembles Buster Keaton’s third wife, a young Hollywood dancer named Eleanor Norris and with whom he was happily married for twenty-six years until his death in 1966.  Eleanor was a supportive and stable influence on the real Buster Keaton and Ann Blyth’s stoic endurance of Buster’s foibles, her understanding and kindness make her more Eleanor-like than any of his other relationships, but she is not really Eleanor. 

The real Buster and the real Eleanor Keaton on This is Your Life.

Donald O’Connor was able to match Buster’s quirky difficult social interaction with people that made him sometimes come off as rude, and mimicked his physical jerks quite well.  You can spot the little tricks of habit throughout the film.

There are two particularly fine scenes between Ann Blyth and Donald O’Connor.  One is when he has reverted to drinking after his latest failure, and she struggles to guide him to the couch, where he flops, mumbling about episodes from his past.  She kneels beside him, trying to soothe him, and they talk over each other, their words overlapping in a heartbreaking inability to reach each other.

The truest and most delightful part of the film comes at the very end when Buster decides to revive his vaudeville act where he is free to create.  He does not make much money, but he is overjoyed to be making people laugh.  Ann Blyth is standing in the wings, and he grabs her impulsively and pulls her on stage with him to re-create a famous skit that he has performed many times, and with which she is familiar.  His real-life third wife Eleanor also performed such skits with Buster in later years in Europe and on television.

This skit performed in pantomime is Buster’s true medium.  They play a husband and wife who arrive home in the wee hours of the morning after celebrating too much on New Year’s Eve.  They are both a bit tipsy and exhausted.  They prepare to go to bed, but as Buster’s fumbles and hurts himself on a chest of drawers, Ann wearily stretches out on the floor and falls asleep. Donald as Buster discovers her there and through a series of acrobatics, physics and applied geometry has to get her into bed while she is completely unconscious.  He has to move her dead weight.

It is a funny skit and, for me, the only laugh out loud moments of the movie.  I can imagine Donald and Ann working through the scenario in rehearsals.  They must’ve been laughing their heads off.  Especially funny is one moment where he holds her in his arms and is trying to figure out a way to get her on the bed such that her head goes with the pillows and her feet go in the proper direction, but he can’t figure out how to do it.  So he sits down on the bed and attempts to throw her over his head, hoping she will land in the right position, but he doesn’t toss her high enough and she flops right on his neck, strangling him. 

 

When he extricates himself and stands, she lies limply over his shoulder like a towel.  It’s very well done and really requires a great deal of athleticism from both of them.

The film did make money and earned $50,000 for Buster Keaton as technical advisor, with which he and his wife were able to buy a comfortable home.  Moreover, it brought more notice to this great artist’s place in film history, and those are two things for which we as film fans can be happy.  Watching this to learn more about the real Buster Keaton’s life or work is fruitless. 

However, for those fans of Ann Blyth and Donald O’Connor, watch it simply for their last pairing on film.  They work well together.  They look like old friends who understand each other and it is a very pleasant thing to see them when you remember Ann got her start in film in a series of four musicals for Universal and Donald O’Connor was her first co-star.  We’ll talk about them down the road.

Here they are six years earlier at the premiere of Harvey in 1950, taken from a newsreel of the event.

And just because I like it, here's a clip from 12 years earlier of their duet from Chip Off the Old Block  (1944):

 

You can watch The Buster Keaton Story here on YouTube.

Our friend Robby Cress notes some location shooting from this film at his Dear Old Hollywood post.

 

On April 3, 1957, Buster was surprised by Ralph Edwards and the merciless This is Your Life show, in which Donald O’Connor appeared, dressed in his Buster outfit, to wish him well.  The program was part of the film’s publicity efforts.  Watch it here onYouTube, but jump to 24:00 minutes because it is the second half of the video.  The first half belongs to Laurel and Hardy. (We mentioned Ann Blyth’s turn as honoree/victim of This is Your Life two years later in 1959 in this previous post.)

Come back next Thursday when we travel back to 1949 and a trip to Ireland with Ann, Bing Crosby, and Barry Fitzgerald in Top o’ the Morning.

 

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Buster Keaton A Hard Act to Follow (Thames Television, 1987)

Keaton, Eleanor, and Jeffrey Vance. Buster Keaton Remembered (NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers) 2001, p. 38

Schenectady Gazette, May 17, 1957, article by Louise Boyka, p. 19.

This is Your Life, Ralph Edwards Productions, April 3, 1957

The Warsaw (Indiana) Times-Union, August 3, 1956, syndicated article by Harrison Carroll, p. 5.

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HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Burke's Law, Switch, The Name of the Game, The Dick Powell show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

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Oh, and while I still have you on the line, here's one more thing.  In response to the number of kind people who've requested print copies of my eBook Classic Films and the American Conscience, which is a collection of essays from this blog -- I still can't print that book because you wouldn't be able to lift it, and I couldn't afford to print it.  BUT, I'm putting out a new, smaller, collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century.   It will be issued in eBook as well as print, and I'll let you know more about it down the road.  I hope to have it published sometime in May. 

This week marks the seventh anniversary of Another Old Movie Blog.  Thank you so much for the pleasure of your company.

Calamity Jane Pt 2 - "The Plainsman" - 1937

“The Plainsman” (1937) never lets an absence of fact stand in the way of telling us a good story. Director Cecil B. DeMille is in his element here, treading on history and myth with great flourish. Here Calamity Jane is part of the tapestry of the American West and not just a freak show refugee. We can thank Mr. DeMille for this, for if he bends the truth a bit, he at least makes the attempt, and most certainly Jean Arthur makes the attempt, at showing Calamity Jane to have angst and tenderness, humor and compassion, which were most certainly part of her character as much as the men’s clothes and bullwhip.

Other parts of her character were eliminated, such as the drinking and raucous behavior that occasionally landed her in jail in real life, and this is a shame, because we might have learned more about Calamity Jane if she had been allowed to be more than just Wild Bill Hickok’s girlfriend.

Not that DeMille’s Calamity Jane was fooling audiences at the time. The review in the New York Times by Frank S. Nugent charges DeMille with “taking history by the tail and throwing it out the window." I particularly like the line “ you frontier authorities will probably be confounded, and will confound Paramount for telling you the sweetest story ever told about Wild Bill and Calamity Jane...the changes that time and Jean Arthur have wrought! She doesn't chaw tobacco anymore. She doesn't cuss. She doesn't run around with the boys. She just talks low and husky, is cute when she's being tomboyish, and she loves Wild Bill so much, she almost faints when the Indians start torturing him..."

In “The Plainsman” Calamity Jane is one of the trio of American West icons. Wild Bill Hickok, played by Gary Cooper, helps his pal Buffalo Bill Cody, played by James Ellison (who we’ll meet up farther down the trail in “The Texan and Calamity Jane” as her new prospective boyfriend), deal with a Cheyenne uprising and the scoundrels who sold them repeating rifles.

The movie starts in Washington, D.C. towards the end of the Civil War, where President Abraham Lincoln discusses the proposed transcontinental railroad. He wants the frontier to be made safe for the plow. Then he excuses himself from the meeting because he’s going to Ford's Theater. We covered what happened at the theater that night in this previous post on “Prince of Players” (1955).

Before we get too far, we might as well just forget picking out historical inaccuracies. There are too many of them. Suffice it to say in any movie about Calamity Jane, approach it as entertainment and not as a documentary on her life. Very little of what you see is probably true.

After Abe’s left the room some unscrupulous arms manufacturers conspire to sell rifles to the Indians because with the Civil War winding down, they are not going to make such huge profit anymore. The man they have dealing directly with the Indians is Charles Bickford. Though he's the head bad guy, we don't see that much of him in this movie. We get a bigger impression of his smarmy toady Jack McCall, played by reliable smarmy guy Porter Hall. He seems to bump into Gary Cooper a lot.

When we meet Wild Bill he is at the river landing in St. Louis, about to board a riverboat. He has just been discharged from the Army, and he runs into his old pal and fellow scout Buffalo Bill Cody and Cody’s new bride played by 19-year-old Helen Burgess (whose career was sadly cut short when she died of pneumonia the following year).

DeMille gives us one of his patented scenes of history that is a feast for the eyes. The camera leisurely moves over an enormous steamboat, and more extras than you can possibly count all moving busily in this bold young city on the Prairie. There are calls of “Mark Twain!" from the river navigators plumbing the depths, and most of you I'm sure know this is where the writer, Mark Twain, chose his pseudonym. We take it all in, and that's what Mr. DeMille meant us to do.

In a minute, we meet Herself, Calamity Jane. Not standing out in the crowd, only one of the Western menagerie. She is hitching a team of horses to her stagecoach. She wears loose buckskin trousers and shirt, and an army kepi. And, what appears to be quite red lipstick. Her short hair is brushed back off her face in a manner similar to the longish hair of Gary Cooper and Buffalo Bill Cody, making all three of them sort of resemble each other.

We might interject here that according to Calamity Jane, the Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005) which we referred to in our first post on this Calamity Jane series on Monday here -- the real Calamity Jane had dark hair and was tall, at about 5'9" and about 170 pounds, which one of her contemporaries recalled many decades later, was “all frontier muscle." (Page 112.) Whether this is a picture of her in her 40s or her 20s, we don’t know, but it’s of course drastically different from the blonde, delicate-looking Jean Arthur who stood about 5'3".

But there is something in Arthur's characterization that seems so natural. Particularly when you compare it to other actresses who've played Calamity Jane that appeared more affected and stagey.

We see Jean Arthur hitching up her team, climbing on the stagecoach, and throwing her whip. She does it with a natural athletic gracefulness quite different to many actresses in the role whose stomping around in hands-on-hips postures is done deliberately to look to mannish. She seemed perfectly at ease with what she's doing and this is the chief accomplishment in Jean Arthur's work.

Author James D. McLaird quotes from a play written by Thomas Newson in 1878, only a couple of years after the incident in 1876 when Wild Bill Hickok was shot by Jack McCall (I know this is a movie spoiler, but it's also history). Playwright Newson describes the character Calamity Jane in his stage directions: “Her movements are all free and unstudied, yet in no sense unbecoming. Her conversation is animated. She imitates no one; is an original in herself; despises hypocrisy; and is easily melted to tears. She is generous, forgiving, kind-hearted, sociable, and yet when aroused, has all the daring and courage of the lion or the devil himself..." (p. 103). This seems to be Jean Arthur’s take on her as well.

Calamity Jane was in her mid-20s, and she was already a celebrity, having dime novels and plays written about her. The darker side of Calamity Jane, her alcoholism, which caused her more than once to be thrown into jail for rowdy behavior is not mentioned in the novels or the play. That behavior, the other side of the coin, is left to the newspaper journalists of the day to illustrate in dry, ironic observations of the heroine of the plains, the so-called Queen of the Prairie. We are missing that description in this movie and in the rest of the movies in this series.

Jean Arthur carries no such baggage, and yet there is that angst about her which make us sense there is more to her than just buckskin leggings. There are certain aspects of the real Calamity Jane that are suggested in this movie. That they are only suggested and not portrayed is, of course, in part to do with the Production Code of the day. But, the Code was not entirely the obstacle of keeping the truth about Calamity Jane from the public. The truth is nobody really knew the truth, and the truth was made up of a lot of little slivers of fact, that never quite came together -- not in the media, and they never quite came together for Martha Jane Canary, and maybe that's what tortured her.

We get a few hints. While Jean is hitching up her stagecoach, a man walks by and flirts with her briefly and she returns his greeting in a friendly way. We see she has many men friends without needing to chase them. Gary Cooper is the one she wants. When she and Cooper first greet other, we see that she is crazy for him, plants a kiss on him which the disdainful Mr. Cooper wipes off and he insinuates that she is “a woman that has a fellow in every stage station and a beau in every cavalry troop west of the Missouri.” Through the Production Code gauze we are being told that she is promiscuous, which she was. She was also for periods of time, a prostitute, and in this movie a few times she uses the word “mopsy” to refer to a mistress or prostitute. Only a low woman would know such a western saloon word.

But this is the West and as Cooper tells Buffalo Bill Cody's frightened bride, “There's no Sunday west of Junction City. No law west of Hay City, and no God west of Carson City.”

Though Cooper shrugs off Miss Arthur's affection, he carries a pocket watch with a picture of the two of them. She wears around her neck a set of beads that he once gave her.

General George Armstrong Custer gets a cameo. He's going after a band of Cheyenne warriors, and Ellison and Cooper are recruited as scouts. Ellison must leave his wife and their very dusty cabin.  Jean shows up to take her in hand, and look out for her.

Holding up curtains against her waist, Jean replies that it's pretty enough to be worn as a dress. Mrs. Cody asks, “Why Calamity, do you ever wear dresses?"

“I might if I had one," Jean answers affably. As we mentioned in part one, Calamity Jane did wear dresses just as much she wore buckskin, and Arthur's delighted reaction to wearing one of Mrs. Cody dresses, getting a kick out of seeing the skirt twirl, shows us she is not presented as someone who needs to be taught to be a woman (as in later movies about her), but as a woman who was product of her environment and that is at least refreshing. Credit should be given to Cecil B. DeMille, despite the otherwise artificial aspects of her character in this movie, for presenting her as a person in a time and a place where Calamity Jane was after all, accepted.

It was rather the eastern newspapers, the eastern writers, who made much of her, who turned her into one-part heroine and three-parts curiosity or sideshow freak. The Western journalists took her for what she was, good and bad and made no great fuss over her in a world where there were plenty of other wild characters. She is no more outlandish in her buckskin than Cody or Custer or the Cheyenne.

Except for that part where the Cheyenne warriors try on the ladies hats that Jean gives them to distract them from capturing Mrs. Cody. They capture her instead.

Gary Cooper comes to her rescue, and when they are held captive together awaiting torture, we see how lovesick she is, and he finally admits begrudgingly that he loves her, now that he’s going to die anyway. Jean can't stand to watch Gary Cooper being hoisted over flames, so she tells the chief where the small band of soldiers is headed, which saves Gary Cooper's life, but dooms the men of an infantry squad.

Mr. Cooper sends her for help, and he heads out for the ambush, joining the troop under siege. His pal Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the members. It's another one of DeMille's dramatic scenes with the besieged men are fired upon from all angles by the Cheyenne who have the new repeating rifles, thanks to the unscrupulous arms manufacturers. And Charles Bickford. And Porter Hall.

She goes off, brings back Custer, the cavalry comes in saves the day. Gary Cooper still has a score to settle with Charles Bickford and when he finally catches him and his gang, he holds them up in the saloon for the military authorities to come and take them into custody. While they're waiting, they play poker.

Here is where we get the famous scene (or a CB’s version of it) where Wild Bill Hickok was murdered by Jack McCall. It seems something of a travesty to have Porter Hall gunning down Gary Cooper, doesn't it?

History buffs know that Gary Cooper is going to die when Mr. DeMille shows us a close-up of his last poker hand. A combination of aces and eights in five card draw. It is popularly called “the dead man's hand,” supposedly because this was the hand held by Wild Bill when he was murdered on August 2, 1876 at Saloon Number 10 in Deadwood, South Dakota.

However, there are different versions of what this hand of poker actually comprised. In this version and the many versions of the story, he's holding black suits -- ace of spades, ace of clubs, a pair of black eights and the king of spades. Nobody really knows if that's what he was holding and other versions of the story had him holding different cards.

While in Deadwood, Calamity Jane has left stagecoach driving to become a bartender, which she really did on occasion. She’s still using her bullwhip against bullies and people who don’t pay their bar tab. Check out the scene with a mechanical cocktail shaker. One imagines Mr. DeMille found that a tag sale somewhere, pining for the right movie to use it.

When Wild Bill is gunned down, Calamity Jane rushes to hold him in her arms and gives him one last kiss that he can't wipe off. In the play written about her so soon after this incident, Calamity does more than mourn for Wild Bill; she goes after his killers.

Calamity Jane was still in her early 20s at the time this event happened. How remarkable that she could become an icon of the Wild West when she was still a very young woman -- and over an event which she really had no great part.

Martha Jane Canary herself, though she made an unsuccessful attempt at selling stories of her life in pamphlet form in wild west shows in her later years, was one of the few people to fail to profit off Calamity Jane.

In 1902, the year before her death, according to author McLaird, she reportedly gave an interview to a newspaper where she said that she and Wild Bill Hickok were to be married in a few days, when Wild Bill was murdered. Maybe she started believing the stories.

Facts very quickly became irrelevant in the forming of Calamity Jane's fame. Rather, it seemed the case of detractors wanting to paint her as a ridiculous person, admirers wanting to make her far more angelic than she was, and the fascination of the public for the great adventure at the American West represented.

Women were part of that great adventure. They were wives and schoolteachers. They were captives and orphans, and sometimes they were what the eastern towns would consider to be the scourge of society. And Calamity Jane represented all of this, all rolled into one person. There is a temptation, particularly in the 20th century, to define Calamity Jane in feminist terms. But she confounds even that reasoning. She was just who she was, and the fact that she never fit in and defied explanation was perhaps the irresistible draw to this hapless misfit.

What would she have thought if she saw herself getting the star treatment in the movies? When Jean Arthur played this role she was at the top of her game or soon would be. Calamity Jane in this movie was an equal to the characters of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. They were the dynamic trio, they were the Mod Squad of the 19th century. Although she may be quaint and odd in her buckskin and her bullwhip, she is not a sidekick or comedy relief. Indeed, as previously mentioned Jean Arthur plays her with a kind of sensitivity we don't get to see from later portrayals of Calamity Jane in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The Plainsman” was not the first occasion we see Calamity Jane in the movies. According to James D. McLaird, the first known film was in 1915, “In the Days of ’75 and ‘76”, locally produced in Nebraska. She and Wild Bill were married in that one.

He notes the first nationally distributed film that featured Calamity Jane starred William S. Hart and Ethel Gey Terry in 1923, but that no print of this movie exists. So “The Plainsman” is the earliest major motion picture to feature the character of Calamity Jane in existence, and this a starring role by one of Hollywood's major actresses of the day.

In his excellent biography, Jean Arthur, The Actress Nobody Knew (Limelight Editions, New York 1997), author John Oller notes that Mr. DeMille's first choice for Calamity Jane was Mae West (p.94).

Let’s all consider that a moment and choke on our coffee.

But, C.B. was pleased with Jean Arthur's dedication to the role. Apparently, she wanted to play the role without makeup, and with close cropped hair, but the studio apparently wouldn't let her get too scruffy.

In The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, edited by Donald Payne (Prentice-Hall Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey 1959), the director notes that he was pleased with Jean Arthur, particularly by how she learned to use the 10 foot bullwhip “as competently as Calamity Jane did when she was driving a stagecoach. I offered my wrist is a convenient target for the curling end of the whip during Jean’s practice sessions. The wrist for a lash marks for days; but Calamity herself would have applauded the skill of her portrayer.”

Mr. Oller in his book on Jean Arthur also notes the coincidence that Jean Arthur's mother was a child in Deadwood, South Dakota at the time Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were living there.

In what was certainly part of promotion for the film, and perhaps part defense of playing the notorious social outcast, Jean Arthur wrote an essay called “Who Wants to Be a Lady?” for Screen and Radio Weekly, (quoted by Oller, p.p. 96-97) which was published September 20, 1936. Noting that Calamity Jane lived her own life the way she chose in the environment and circumstances that presented themselves to her, “really emancipated women are always natural, because they do what they want to do. They are not dulled with ‘culture,’ either, because there's nothing false or ‘put on’ with them. They may be smart and well-informed, but they are not stuffy. Because of this there are thousands of emancipated women who don't wear slacks, smoke or drink cocktails, a type, clerk, keep house, raise children.

"Doing what they want to do, they are emancipated without knowing it.”

Emancipated, or deeply troubled, a victim of her time and circumstance or survivor of it, or just her own worst enemy, Calamity Jane means many things to her many interpreters. Come back next Monday when Calamity Jane slides from stardom and becomes queen of the B-movies in “The Texan Meets Calamity Jane” and “Calamity Jane and Sam Bass.”