Who's Up Next to Play Buffalo Bill?

The cadaver of William F. Cody, known to generations as Buffalo Bill, has officially been a resident of greater Denver since 1917. But Cody, whose Lookout Mountain gravesite will lose its signature restaurant and gift shop on December 31, is about to be resurrected by way of a new film that will add to the inveterate showman's rich cinematic history — and the flick seems likely to present a fresh version of a figure who's been portrayed on screen as a hero, a villain and plenty in between.

According to movie-biz bible Variety, Heads or Tails?, currently in the editing phase, is "a surreal Western by Italian directorial duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis (The Tale of King Crab)" that's "inspired by a true event that took place during Buffalo Bill’s stay in Italy."

As documented in the August cover story "William F. Cody Left His Stamp on Denver," this most American of self-creations didn't confine himself to the U.S. of A. In 1887, Cody launched the first European tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a re-creation of the Great Frontier's pacification that was wildly popular in its day but is seen by some contemporary critics as demeaning Indigenous co-stars tasked with reenacting their defeat and subjugation on a nightly basis.

The spectacle's scale was undeniably grand. By 1891, author Don Russell notes, the Wild West cast consisted of 640 "eating members," including "20 German soldiers, 20 English soldiers, 20 United States soldiers, 12 Cossacks and 6 Argentine Gauchos" along with the "old reliables: 20 Mexican vaqueros, 25 cowboys, 6 cowgirls, 100 Sioux Indians, and the Cowboy Band of 37 mounted musicians." The Julia Simone Stetler study Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Germany: A Transnational History reveals that the logistics of the massive production were analyzed by both the German and French military.

Heads or Tails? suggests that Italians may have had more to teach Cody and company than to learn. The plot "takes its cue from a bet famously waged on the outskirts of Rome between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys and the Italian cowboys on which team was better at taming wild horses," Variety divulges. "As Italian legend has it, the Italians won."
The actor in the Cody role this time around is John C. Reilly, whose filmography on the Internet Movie Database is chock-a-block with oddball characters: the sad-sack cuckold who crooned "Mister Cellophane" in the 2002 Oscar winner Chicago, a comic twist on Johnny Cash in 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Will Ferrell's awkward sibling in 2008's Step Brothers, the "lisping man" in 2015's The Lobster and more. As a bonus, he's already lensed a Western — the 2018 indie The Sisters Brothers, which teamed him with Joaquin Phoenix — so he should know his way around a palomino.

By IMDB's count, the character of Buffalo Bill Cody — as differentiated from the psycho-perv nicknamed Buffalo Bill at the center of The Silence of the Lambs — has appeared in at least 35 movies or television episodes. Appropriately enough, the first person tasked with capturing the man was Cody himself. He's at the center of 1912's The Life of Buffalo Bill, which is summarized with this: "While on a vacation, an elderly Buffalo Bill dreams of his adventures as a young man when he scouted for the cavalry, fought Indians and captured outlaws."

This short (running time: forty minutes) was followed by four more silents in which Cody factored, though he'd passed away by the time of their release: 1925's The Pony Express, 1926's With Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail and The Last Frontier, and 1928's Wyoming. He also was a minor player in an early talkie,1933's The World Changes, and made the rosters of low-profile programmers such as 1942's Overland Mail. And then there was his animated representation in Winning the West, a 1946 Mighty Mouse cartoon that finds the superpowered rodent saving Old West settlers from "feline Indians."

Of course, Cody also popped up in several movies that are better remembered: 1935's Annie Oakley, led by Barbara Stanwyck, 1936's The Plainsmen, an epic helmed by director Cecil B. DeMille, and the classic 1950 musical Annie Get Your Gun. Among the actors who got the chance to don his trademark whiskers during this period, as noted by True West magazine, were Charlton Heston, Richard Arlen, Roy Rogers, Clayton Moore and Guy Stockwell — and in the main, he was depicted as a dashing adventurer or a devilishly handsome impresario.

Things began changing in the 1970s. True West dubbed the Cody of the 1974 anti-American satire Don't Touch the White Woman! as a "fanciful buffoon" and called the variation of the proto-superstar in 1976's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson "pathetic" despite his being rendered by gorgeous matinee idol Paul Newman.

Since then, the fictionalized Codys have mainly stuck to the small screen, by way of ancillary parts in 1989-1992's The Young Riders and the failed 1994 effort to turn Lonesome Dove into a weekly series, among others. The most recent Cody credit, in a Murdoch Mysteries episode titled "Mild, Mild West," dates to 2009.

So Heads or Tails?, which doesn't yet have a scheduled release, represents something of a comeback for Cody. Clearly, he's a hard man to keep down, even though more than a century has passed since his Colorado burial.