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For any fans of actress Colleen Miller, you have come to the right movie. Miller looks gorgeous, cinematographer Russell Metty filmed her as if she was a model at a fashion shoot. Now for the debit side of the ledger: this Western is a badly done copycat of other movies. Copying "Winchester '73," there is an interior scene at an isolated road house called "La Tienda" (remember "Riker's" ?) where John McIntire's character is playing solitaire in the background. Miller's character is traveling with her old codger father (Walter Brennan) in a set-up just like "Along The Great Divide," where old codger Brennan plays the father of character Ann Keith (played by another beautiful actress, Virginia Mayo). Star Rory Calhoun plays the leader of a bunch of incompetent outlaws who never make it close to the border. Two of the outlaws, George Nader and Jay Silverheels, engage in some rough housing that seems rather strange considering Nader's Hollywood career crashing after Confidential magazine outed him. Silverheels' part playing a dimwit Indian is an racist offense against this fine actor. And what of the Indians who go on the warpath and charge head on into rifle fire? Universal-International (U-I) was a studio that made crap Westerns in the 1950s marked by real cheapness. "Winchester '73" and "Man Without A Star" were exceptions because of these movies' big stars. Too bad Colleen Miller bailed out of making movies after her experience at U-I.

1977's "The White Buffalo" is both a Western and a Horror movie at the same time. A movie where death is the key character, in the form of the "white spike," the name writer Richard Sale uses to describe the rare giant albino buffalo that both Wild Bill Hickok and Sioux Indian Chief Crazy Horse want to hunt down and kill. In this movie, Hickok is being driven insane by nightmares of the white buffalo charging him. To disguise himself, he changes his name to James Otis, puts on a pair of wire-framed dark gray glasses and travels to the Black Hills by train to kill the white buffalo. Crazy Horse's reason for hunting the white buffalo is both to get revenge for the buffalo killing his young son during its rampage through an Indian village and to redeem himself after the Sioux rename him "Worm" for breaking down over his son's death.

This movie, like "Jaws," uses an animatronic recreation of the title character. That is the only similarity between these two movies. "Jaws" is a feel good movie that makes heroes of shark hunters who are as real as three dollar bills. In "The White Buffalo," grimness prevails, with both Hickok and Crazy Horse hardened killers. In one sequence, Crazy Horse ambushes a stage coach Hickok is riding in and tries to kill everyone on board. In a scene in a bar, Hickok guns down a bunch of soldiers his enemy, Captain Tom Custer, sent in to give him a hard time before killing him. Custer runs away rather than face Hickok.

Writer Richard Sale was the co-creator and chief writer (with his then-wife Emily Loos) of the 1958 TV series "Yancy Derringer," which featured the real soldier George Custer as the chief character in the episode "Longhair." The TV episode deals in part with Custer's one year court-martial suspension from active duty for disobeying orders that led to the deaths of soldiers in his command. In this movie, when asked by Crazy Horse if he is the one the Sioux call the "Shooter," "the one who killed Whistler the Peacemaker," Hickok says the Cheyenne call him Pahaska, "Longhair." Another connection to "Yancy Derringer" is that Bronson guest starred as an escaped killer in series episode 20, which was written and directed by Richard Sale. 18 years after episode 20 aired, Bronson was now an international star who could pick the movies he wanted to star in. And Bronson chose the script of "The White Buffalo," his last Western role. Richard Sale, Bronson's former director, wrote the screenplay.

"The White Buffalo" failed at the box office and critics savaged it, complaining especially about the bad special effects used to animate the mythical white buffalo. The same critics who, in many cases, said nothing about how crummy the great white shark animatronic model looked in "Jaws." IMHO, the real reason for the critical attacks on this movie is that "The White Buffalo" presents the American West as a nightmare country, where mountains of buffalo skeletons are on the side of the road, where sudden death is everywhere and where life is short. Always in the background is John Barry's haunting, sepulchral music, to remind you of that fact. The movie closes with side by side tintype images of Hickok and Crazy Horse, showing their birth and death years, looking like images put on tombstones.

To me,"The White Buffalo" is like a motion picture version of a Vanitas painting. Vanitas paintings were mostly 17th century still life paintings that symbolized the inevitability of death. These paintings featured signs of decay and sometimes skulls. One early example is Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors," where an anamorphic skull is hidden in plain sight on the canvas. Remember those giant mounds of white buffalo skeletons? A Western like "The White Buffalo" could not be made now in a Hollywood where comic book characters predominate. As the Grim Reaper scythed through the lives of millions over the past two years (aided by Big Pharma and the New World Order), just try to think of one Hollywood movie that showed realistic images of grim and random death. Nothing is made now to match the horror quality of "The White Buffalo," with Wild Bill Hickok's revolvers blazing away but useless against the nightmare white buffalo.

In 1933, Warner Brothers movie studio under producing supervisor Darryl Zanuck was turning out movies on three week production schedules that are far better and more realistic than anything Hollywood has made since on a production slate schedule. Airline pilot Jim Blane loses his job because he had an accident and "pilot error" is ruled the cause. Blane lands his plane at a Cuban airport and the airport workers days, when Blane identifies himself at the check-in entrance, "You're not the Jim Blane?" Blane says he is just Jim Blane. Sally Eiler, playing his former girlfriend, has one of her best movie roles. She first hooks up with Blane after he leaves his bank job to be a pilot at the air show she works at. Later, Blane becomes a pilot for hire working in revolutions and wars. Action in this movie is with the minimum of exposition, events occur fast. Blane, constantly getting wounded as a mercenary pilot, is no superman. Like many of Warner screenplay writers, co-writer Rian James was a former newspaper reporter whose work experience provided a solid background to write interesting movies. Star Richard Barthelmess was great at playing characters hardened by their downturns in life. Although in real life, I doubt he thought he would go from being an above-the-title star to being cashiered by Jack Warner in under six months, his studio contract not renewed. Director William Wellman put in a lot of hard work to make this movie fast, one reason why after his Warner contract ended, Wellman went freelance. "Central Airport" was missing in action for decades until Turner aired the movie in the early 1990s. Now this old talkie is on DVD in an unrestored version which is good enough to show that 90 years ago, Warner Bros. Was at the peak of movie making.