Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280038
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To make an inviting undertaking even more so, Melanie Griffith also stars - as Dora DuFran, mercurial madame of the plains. And country singer Reba McEntire proves able and lovable in the role of crack shot Annie Oakley. There really isn't much plot, and what there is tends to dawdle and meander, but these three women make ``Buffalo Girls'' a can't-miss and don't-miss event.
It airs tonight and Monday night at 9 on CBS (WDBJ, Channel 7), getting the annual May ratings sweeps off with a bang. Even if you don't love every minute of it, you'll probably love every minute of them.
On the surface, the miniseries, based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, is a touching remembrance of what Calamity Jane, in her narration, calls ``the last of the wild west times ... them last few days of wildness'' as the century drew to a close. But just beneath that surface, ``Girls'' is also a tribute to womanhood, its infinite variety represented by the macho Jane, the frilly Dora and the no-nonsense Annie, all sisters under the skin.
These are people of stature, of independence, of integrity, and they're colorful as all get-out. Unfortunately, all three are never in the same scene together. In part two, Jane leaves Dora behind in the Dakota Territory when she goes off with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for a tour of England. She meets Annie in New York before they sail.
Though Jane and Annie don't get along at first encounter, eventually they, too, recognize they are kindred spirits and Annie raises a toast: ``To all us Buffalo Girls. We gotta stick together.''
There are plenty of other memorable characters scattered throughout the four hours. Jack Palance and Tracey Walter play Bartle Bone and Jim Ragg, two crusty coots who have obviously been lifelong friends, and for friends like these, life can never be long enough. They meet up with Calamity Jane as the film opens, all of them joining briefly with pompous George Armstrong Custer as he heads for his date with destiny at the Little Bighorn.
Not everybody is fascinating. The apparent love of Dora's life is Teddy Blue, played uninterestingly by Gabriel Byrne; it never becomes truly clear why these lovers are so star-crossed, except that he wants to live in the country and she wants to live in the city, what there is of it. That would be Dodge City, perhaps the muddiest town ever seen in a Western.
Jane's pals include, briefly, Sam Elliott as Wild Bill Hickok and, throughout the film, Floyd Red Crow Westerman as No Ears, so named because he lost both ears in a battle. ``He don't make sense,'' Bartle says of him, ``but he ain't never wrong.'' For the most part, watching all these people interact is pure pleasure - sometimes rollicking, sometimes wrenching. If the characters leaped off the page in McMurtry's book, they leap off the screen in the TV version, too.
Cynthia Whitcomb adapted the book, making it less of a downer and turning a character who was imaginary in the novel into a real person, which seems an improvement. Director Rod Hardy knows how to make the dialogue crackle and also how to put over the visual moments, like a scene in which Bartle and Jim watch hundreds of Indians disappear into the distance as they leave the lands that once were theirs.
The image alone says more than a thousand words of rhetoric.
Produced by essentially the same team that made the TV classic ``Lonesome Dove,'' the miniseries is rich in virtually every detail. ``Return to Lonesome Dove'' was such a feeble sequel to the original that it seems only fair to consider ``Buffalo Girls'' the real sequel. The themes of old ways passing and the cruelty of change were there in ``Lonesome Dove,'' too.
When first encountered, Huston as Calamity Jane is pretending to be a man, a ruse that ends when she bathes in a pond and her breasts show through her long underwear. ``I lived like a man and sometimes even passed myself off as one,'' she says in her narration. ``It gave me a kind of freedom that few women ever knew.''
``Buffalo Girls'' is about freedom as well as about the waning of an era and the indomitability of women. Huston, Griffith and McEntire make it seem not just bigger than life but, at times, better. Ya-hoo.
- Washington Post Writers Group
Tom Shales is TV editor and chief TV critic for The Washington Post.
by CNB