Robert Altman made great films, such as Nashville, The Player, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. What defined these movies was a great and engaging script that kept the audience involved for the entire film. Such is not the case with Buffalo Bill And The Indians. It as if Altman was in too much of a rush to make this film, because he wanted to make a statement about Native American history. There were a lot of interesting bit roles in this film, but these characters were never developed very well. I felt robbed that not much time was devoted to explaining them a little more. Altman assumed that the audience understood that it was 1885 and the Wild West was now "tamed". That was clear, but still I feel that the film would have been much stronger if it began with a flashback to nine years before, explaining where each of these characters were at the time. That way we would have had more understanding for the points Altman was making. For example, it is hard to believe that the great actor from the Heche days, Burt Lancaster, was reduced to this engaging and enigmatic role, who waxing philosophically, but we have no idea who he is and how he relates to Buffalo Bill. This is the downside of this film. The script seems winding. There is a lot of dull time where one is just yawning and wondering when this movie will start going somewhere. Is that part of the point of the film? Altman never makes it clear. It is quite possible the point was that this town in the prairie had basically become filled with bored, opportunistic townies who sought significance even if it was tormenting someone by hanging him up on a rope and swinging him like a baby. In many ways this movie was uneven. For example, the ideas were brilliant. The idea was that Buffalo Bill was no longer the man he once was, but now just a money grubbing tool who made up myths and tales about his exploits. Buffalo Bill must have been a very handsome and engaging man in real life. He may well have been a great actor and promoter. You could not help like Buffalo Bill, and Paul Newman plays him brilliantly. Bill was also very childish, probably an alcoholic, who used to have infantile temper tantrums. The racial arrogance was also very clear. Buffalo Bill was very happy to exploit the myth that Native Americans were just 'savages who brutalized women'. It was a terrible moment when Sitting Bull tried to speak with President Cleveland and was rebuffed and treated with contempt. I also loved the ending. Buffalo Bill had this mad and crazed look, like now he was the great hero he never was. He now was beating and defeating Sitting Bull, which was a complete fabrication of history to promote white man's ego. I also loved how President Cleveland was just another part of the opportunism to seek significance from Buffalo Bill's mythology about how the West was really "tamed". Although he was "the Great White Father", he was mainly about finding a way to win re-election and defeat his opponents. There was another beautiful moment, where a woman sang an opera song, and the camera showed the various reactions of members of the audience. It was hard to determine whether they were awed by the beauty of her voice or bored. And that was a confusing moment for me, too. I did not quite get it. The whole movie was afraid to really state what it really wanted to state. There were great moments, but not enough to engage the audience and win it over.

A good many movies are misjudged at the time of their release--sometimes overpraised, such as DeMille's elephantine The Greatest Show On Earth, and sometimes undervalued or not valued at all, such as this oddball revisionist Western. Director Altman had just finished Nashville, and folks expected another blockbuster that wove a wide tapestry of the modern world; Paul Newman was churning out rather bloodless blockbusters like The Towering Inferno, and nobody expected a commitment to a wild west character who lives a dark lie. Many reviews of this film are appropriately appreciative of its quirks, not expecting a traditional western, but accustomed to the oddities of Altman's usual style. This film is jammed with wonderful character portrayals, and not only gives a willing viewer a fascinating look at what traveling vaudeville was like in the old West, but tosses out some food for thought. Though towards the end it betrays its theatre origins with some talky excess, I found Buffalo Bill colorful, entertaining and unusually satisfying

The best part of "Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson" is the first ten to 15 minutes. We join a Wild West show rehearsal circa 1885, and watch as its staff work at creating a show that takes itself a little too seriously. The feeling of observing a real, living thing comes across, only a bit funnier than reality."Tell Joy not to get on the horse in back," mutters the show's MC, Salisbury (Joel Grey) regarding an actress playing a white woman abducted by Indians. "It looks fake. We're in the authentic business." Later, Salisbury shoots down a band's idea of real frontier music as "too Ukrainian."All this is easy to miss when so much is going on at once, while horses nearly run down a pedestrian in the foreground. This is a Robert Altman film, after all, or "Robert Altman's Absolutely Unique and Heroic Enterprise of Inimitable Lustre!" as it bills itself.As Jeff Lebowski might say, Altman's not into that whole brevity thing here. A two-hour extravaganza, "Buffalo Bill" stars Paul Newman as Bill and makes its points about how show business and American mythmaking became one with repetitive, haymaker swings. The end result is a comedy that's not that funny and a social statement that's not that convincing, but Altman's secret sauce of a busy camera and piquant performances makes for a pleasant if shapeless affair.Newman's something of a disappointment, giving less a performance than a caricature. I get the feeling he was directed by Altman to just play a slightly older and more pompous Hud with a goatee. He fills out Bill by drinking rotgut from a schooner, loving and spurning a succession of opera singers who never stop singing in frame, and watching over his stardom with a kind of prissy defensiveness that belies his self-cultivated frontier image. He can be a joy to watch still, working his eyes and playing to his mirror, maybe winking at the audience about what they expect from him as both Bill and Paul. If only he had better material."You ain't changed, Bill.""I ain't supposed to. That's why people pay to see me."There's also the business of his dealing with the Wild West Show's newest star attraction, Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), which gives the story much of its social perspective. Bill thinks of Bull as an ungrateful pet who needs cultivation in "the show business," while Bull thinks Bill sells lies in the guise of history. Hence the "history lesson," which feels shoehorned in from a more socially committed source play. Altman wants to tell that story, but most times he'd rather have fun with the show-making part, and while you are watching this, you wish he'd cut loose and do just that.The film succeeds in short bursts, though the eccentric casting choices Altman throws at you here don't work as well as they did in his other films. Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley? Harvey Keitel as Bill's nerdy nephew? Some Altman vets like Robert DoQui and Allan F. Nicholls are barely in the film while stars like Newman, Keitel, and Burt Lancaster get longer spotlight time. John Considine is fun as Annie's flinchy husband, "the handsomest human target in the West," though that running joke, like so many others, is plugged more times than one of Annie's nickels. I was impressed also by Kevin McCarthy's publicist character, not only for the juiciness of his grandiloquent performance but the magnitude of his handlebar mustache."Buffalo Bill" takes a lot of time saying a good deal less than it thinks. But the spectacle of "the show business" and the minor bits of Altman kookiness and sardonic commentary around the edges keep this a diverting if underfilling entertainment.

"In so far as they cannot be assimilated by modern culture, the wild peoples will have to disappear from the surface of the earth." – Karl KautskyPaul Newman plays Buffalo Bill, a one-time soldier who now runs a successful Wild West Show. Bill hires an Indian warlord called Chief Sitting Bull to guest star in his show, but to Bill's annoyance Sitting Bull proves to be a decent and honourable old man rather than a murderous savage.Bill attempts to get Sitting Bull to re-enact various battles between cowboys and Indians, but Sitting Bull refuses to be portrayed as a caricature. Rather than act out Custer's Last Stand as a cowardly sneak attack initiated by red skins, Sitting Bull instead requests to portray the massacre of a peaceful Sioux community by marauding US Cavalry soldiers. What follows is a battle of myths. Sitting Bull wants to portray his people as the victims of genocide, whilst Bill hopes to portray himself (and by extension the history of White American settlers) as a noble hero and the natives as brutal savages in need of either expulsion or civilization. Bill's history is wrong, of course, but he is the victor as he owns the show, controls the money and knows exactly what his white audience wants. His myth gets printed.And so these various themes – politics, show-business, the commodification of history, the blurring of fact and myth – play out in typical Altman fashion. And like most of Altman's films, this is a giant ensemble piece which takes place in a self-contained environment (the ropey confines of a Wild West Show). Elsewhere Altman's camera glides through his landscape, floating from character to character, various narrative strands gently picked up and followed. It's a graceful sort of film-making, Altman less concerned about delivering spectacle, than gently exposing the conditions under which such spectacle thrives. On the most basic level Altman deconstructs Old West iconography, presenting the cowboy as a show-biz creation who is himself duped by the very myths he bolsters. Altman's Buffalo Bill wears a wig, can't shoot straight, can't ride a horse and requires all his mock battles to be rigged in his favour, and yet he's constantly proclaiming himself to be a grand hero and seasoned man of the west. The film's great joke is that we the audience are so seduced by Paul Newman's star persona, his charisma, the way he commands his on screen lackeys, that we don't quite notice how much of a bumbling idiot he is. The film's characters go out of their way to illustrate this mightily confused blurring of reality and illusion. Altman makes us aware that his film is populated by mere actors and implies that both the personal and show business personae of Buffalo Bill are equally fraudulent. As such, Bill is constantly looking at reflections or portraits of himself, his personality always distorted. Altman also exposes the symbiotic relationship between show business and politics. Upon seeing President Cleveland, Bill exclaims "There's a star!" and of Sitting Bull he says, "If he wasn't interested in show business he wouldn't be a chief!" Later it is revealed that President Cleveland consults an aid before speaking and that Bill has someone else write all his material, both men the unwilling orators of a national myth. Altman then implicates both the audience and the public in the writing of both history and show business. "Truth is that which gets the most applause," one character correctly remarks. The show that is most seen, most palatable, most digested by the masses, is the show that is embraced as historical fact. Nations are built on noble lies, Altman says, and art exists to either propagate or challenge these national myths. This is made most direct when, in the film's final scene, Bill studies a portrait of himself on a white stallion. "Is he sitting on that horse right?" Bill asks, then turns to the camera. "If he's not sitting on that horse right, how come you all took him for a king?" Altman's point is clear. The facts, the cinematic clues, that Buffalo Bill was a fraud were always there. We just chose not to look. The implication is that seeing is always a matter of choice, perception a function of the needs of a dominant ideology. Altman is challenging the audience to see the flaws, to see our history and our present as it really is. And so Altman demonstrates that history itself is increasingly becoming another commodity of capitalist economy; history then is not a Truth, but a matter of choice, able to be traded, bought and sold. The resulting alienation from its process of creation and from the interconnection of its events leads to a loss of truth which only performance can replace. Tellingly the film ends with a photograph - a staged event of a staged event - the audience asked to recall an earlier scene in which this shot was composed. Without this prior context, anyone stumbling upon the photograph would assume that a tall and muscular Indian, carefully positioned by Buffalo Bill to draw attention away from the old and timid looking Sitting Bull, is the real deal. It is this loss of context, of objectivity, that Altman is ultimately condemning. History is like a photograph, deliberately composed, and so without context values may be constantly reformulated according to the narrow requirements of the dominant ideology. Compare this to the end of Brian De Palma's "Redacted", in which a soldier's smile is recorded as truth, when in fact it is forced, a lie and masking something far darker. Altman's film amounts to the same thing, though his photograph is then sold and paraded about as political currency.8.9/10 – Masterpiece. See Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now".