The White Buffalo Reviews

A discovery. Western with a snowy fantastic agonic touch and nice support cast, Even Novak is ok, Warden superb and that giant indian...

Given the creative team behind this, many of the major players of the kitsch-minor classic 70s King Kong, I was ready to view The White Buffalo as a kissing cousin to that oddity. Imagine my surprise when I finished watching it only to discover a film of great promise and premise, undercut only by its technical limitations and anemic supporting roles.

 

I’m not comfortable proclaiming The White Buffalo as a sleeper classic, but it’s close to earning that reputation. If nothing else, it deserves better than the cinematic wasteland it’s been subjugated to. Taking parts of historical truth, forming them around Moby Dick-as-American folk tragedy, and giving two minor actors a chance to shine, The White Buffalo definitely deserves a cursory look.

 

If only then that the film were longer, which is a criticism I don’t frequently make, to really give its loaded themes, symbols, and parade of colorful supporting players more chance to shine. Any film should be lucky and happy to include Slim Pickens, Clint Walker, John Carradine, and Kim Novak among its supporting players, but none of them are given enough material to work with to really land a lasting impression. Carradine’s cameo and Novak’s nothing role (she tries to add some poignancy and sadness to it) are particularly egregious uses of actors with history and loaded cinematic lineage left with nothing to do. Wasting Pickens seems like a sin for a western to commit, that man is the face and voice of the genre in a way that could be argued as equal to that of John Wayne.

 

Yet the film provides some stellar moments for Jack Warden, Charles Bronson, and Will Sampson, the film’s strongest asset and performance. Warden and Bronson find a solid groove, creating history between their characters, and a shared weariness at the narrative they find themselves in. Bronson, in particular, is an actor I’ve never “gotten” aside from Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, which played well with his natural quiet strength and cragginess. But those traits and so much more are evident here, and it may be one of Bronson’s more essential performances for the way it takes his star persona and exposes the neurosis and fears lurking underneath.

 

Will Sampson is known primarily for playing Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he’s a standout here. Transforming his take on Crazy Horse into Ahab-on-a-horse, culminating in the climatic confrontation with the titular beast where he rides it and stabs it with a fervor and spiritual possession that borders on the maniacal. Going back to the earlier criticism of not enough time being spent to really develop certain characters, Sampson’s Crazy Horse gets his tragic origin for his quest, then disappears for far too long. The White Buffalo is better when treating Crazy Horse and Bronson’s Wild Bill Hickok as tragic equals, as two kindred spirits intertwined in this quest through forces and obsessions larger than they are.

 

Perhaps the biggest black mark against The White Buffalo is the terrible effects work used to animate the titular beast. In an era with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman: The Movie, and Alien released within close range of this film, there’s just no excuse for how bad they are. The buffalo never looks real, never moves in a believable way, and threatens to turn the movie from somber, clear-eyed examination of the fear of death, or the obsession of revenge as code of honor, and into a kitsch B-western. Thankfully, director J. Lee Thompson knows how to make scenes moody and evocative, and this skill goes a long way towards masking the weakness of the central special effect. Thompson’s dream-like compositions nearly transform the beast into a hallucinatory hell-beast, and then we see the visible tracks and wires used to animate it and the illusion is punctured.

 

There’s still more strengths to The White Buffalo that manage to overpower the blows of its weaknesses enough to give it a recommendation. I’m happy to glance through the reviews of the recent video release and see its reputation and critical notices improving. It’s just frustrating that so many aspects were left underdeveloped or taken for granted.