The Plainsman review: Gary Cooper's fringe and Jean Arthur's yelling

You should probably watch The Plainsman tonight if you want to see Gary Cooper look incredibly cool in a leather jacket with way too much fringe. But stay far away if you get easily annoyed by 1930s Hollywood playing fast and loose with real history.

It is basically a giant, dusty playground of a movie. 🤠

The plot is pretty simple on paper. Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody are trying to stop some bad guys from selling repeating rifles to the Indians.

But really, it’s just an excuse for the director to throw hundreds of extras on horses and let them ride around in circles. It feels less like history and more like a very expensive school play where everyone got to bring their own hat.

Let's talk about Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. She is screaming almost all of her lines, and honestly, I kind of loved it.

She has this scene where she's driving a stagecoach and whipping the air like a crazy person. Her hat is constantly falling off, and you can tell she didn't care about looking pretty, just loud.

Then there is Gary Cooper. He plays Wild Bill with this incredibly quiet, almost sleepy energy that makes everyone else look like they are vibrating.

There’s a moment where he’s playing cards—because of course he is—and he just stares at a guy for what feels like two full minutes. It’s hilarious because the other actor looks genuinely terrified that Cooper might actually fall asleep on him.

The film does have some of that classic, clunky pacing you find in other old westerns like The Oregon Trail. Some of the edits feels weirdly placed, cutting away right when things get interesting.

Sometimes the action just stops so two guys in giant fake beards can talk about treaties in a room that looks like it was built yesterday.

Oh, and a very young Anthony Quinn shows up as a Cheyenne scout. He does his best, but the movie’s treatment of the Native Americans is... well, exactly what you expect from 1936.

It’s not malicious, just extremely simplistic and awkward. It makes you realize how much the genre has changed since then.

My favorite tiny detail? The sound effects.

Every time a gun fires, it sounds like someone dropping a heavy book on a wooden floor. Thud.

And yet, when the big battle starts near the end, the sheer scale of it is kind of amazing. There are no computer graphics here, just real guys falling off real horses into real dirt.

It’s messy and chaotic, and you can almost smell the horse sweat through the screen.

If you want a perfectly accurate documentary, go watch PBS.

But if you want to see Cooper hold two pistols at once while looking like he’s about to sigh heavily, this is the one.