Buffalo Girls (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Western	None
Rating	?
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	155:30
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (78:22)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Rod Hardy
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Anjelica Huston Melanie Griffith Gabriel Byrne Peter Coyote Tracey Walter Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman Jack Palance Charlayne Woodard John Diehl Liev Schreiber Andrew Bicknell Paul Lazar Russell Means
Case	?
RPI	$24.95	Music	Lee Holdridge

    Buffalo Girls is a very interesting film based on Larry McMurty's best-selling novel of the same name. Not at all your normal Western. For starters, it focuses on the life of some of the women of this place and time, and secondly it shows the end of an era, the end of the Wild West and the effect this ending had on the people involved. It is also different from other Westerns in that it portrays what is probably a far more realistic version of events than earlier films have. You couldn't get further from Doris Day's presentation of Calamity Jane than the version portrayed here.

    Set at the time when the Wild West is not nearly so wild, the Indians have been defeated and humiliated, their land taken from them. The great plains of buffalo have been decimated by hunting and the exploits of Buffalo Bill Cody. The beaver have been trapped to near extinction. This leaves the people who used to rely on these natural resources and the conflicts with no clear options for the future. The main focus of the film is the woman known as Calamity Jane. It is told with a voiceover that uses excerpts of Calamity's letters to her daughter, and it is this daughter who drives the storyline.

    Calamity is a strong woman in a time when strength was not a womanly attribute, and as such she would not accept the strictures that were placed on women by the society which surrounded her. Thus she headed out to the wild West and lived much as a man, sometimes even passing herself off as a man. There was one chink in her armour, and that was her feelings for Wild Bill Hickock. Through interesting circumstances she ends up carrying Hickock's baby daughter. Unfortunately, this was not a time for a woman alone to raise a baby, and she ends up giving the baby to a childless English couple who take her back to England. When she hears, a number of years later, that the English lady has died, she decides to travel to England to get her little girl back. The only way she can get there is to join Bill Cody's famous Wild West Show which is heading to England for a command performance in front of Queen Victoria.

    While this is a very quick synopsis of what is a two-part mini-series, it is the wonderful tapestry of characters which makes this film so great. Calamity meets and travels along with many interesting and varied characters on her journey. Bartle Bone and Jim Ragg are two trappers now out of work as there is little left to trap. Tracey Walter and, in particular, Jack Palance play these parts to a tee and their banter is one of the highlights of the film. Of course there are the giants of the legend, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, and a very interesting portrayal of Annie Oakley. General Custer appears briefly at the start and gets the drubbing that he so richly deserves. Dora DuFran, the mistress of a brothel, played by Melanie Griffith, is another great character. No Ears, an Indian who has his ears cut off when his village was massacred, travels along with Calamity to England and yet again is a very interesting character to spend some time with (if a little stereotyped). The list continues but of course is topped by Angelica Huston's portrayal of Calamity Jane herself.

    If you are looking for The Gun Fight at the OK Corral then you best look elsewhere. If you are looking for a very interesting and complex set of characters and a very good two-nights-worth of entertainment then you need look no further.

Video

    The film is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. As this is a television production produced in 1995 I am guessing that this is probably its original format.

    The sharpness is not the best, affected both by grain and some pixelization. Shadow detail is alright, but there is some low level noise present. The image seems a little under-saturated and lacking in contrast occasionally. In a couple of scenes there is extreme grain, or break-up of the picture such as at 129:01.

    For most of the film there are a limited number of bright colours; a very brown and earthy palette predominates. There are flashes of colour in the Wild West show. The colours are slightly affected by the grain.

    There are some MPEG artefacts and they are particularly noticeable in moving objects. Objects that are moving have little or no definition and occasionally descend into pixelization such as at 4:24 and 4:31 in the characters' faces. Posterization is also present such as at 4:34. There is some dot crawl present in the opening titles and also around Queen Victoria's throne at 124:55. There is some aliasing present, along with a fair amount of edge enhancement (2:48). There is constant grain that can become distracting, particularly in the darker scenes.

    The subtitles are easy to read, and fairly accurate to the dialogue.

    This is an RSDL disc, with the layer change at 78:22. It is in the fade-to-black in between the two halves of the mini-series and is thus invisible.

    They have only included six chapter stops, which leads to big jumps considering the length of film.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Some of the accents are a little thick but I could understand what was being said. There were no problems with the audio sync.

    I enjoyed the score for this film. It had an American Wild West feel, but was not over the top.

    Engaging the surround decoder brought a very nice ambiance to the surround speakers that added to the overall effect.

    There is some bass present in the sound track that was directed to the subwoofer but certainly nothing earth shaking.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    A static menu presented at 1.33:1 and not 16x9 enhanced. The background is a scene from the film of a rider on the prairie with head shots of the main characters inserted in a row across the top. There is no audio.

    There does not appear to be a Region 1 version of this disc. There is a Region 2 version and it appears identical to our release.

    There are a couple of nights' entertainment on this disc. It is a great story about people in a world that is changing faster than they can come to terms with. It documents what was the end of an era from a woman's point of view.

    The video is somewhat disappointing.

    The audio is good for a stero track.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall