Imagining Wild Bill by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

The White Rose

But Hickok was ready to make a comeback, and television had the sprawl to give storytellers room to take on some bigger issues. One of the most imaginative Hickok television appearances, a made-for-cable production, came out just in time for the millennium. Purgatory fit the millennial mood by mixing exhausted twentieth-century Western movie and television themes with metaphysical questions right out of Dante. The pop theology worked well because the mythical American West is the land of second chances, an American purgatory.

The film had its debut on the TNT network on January 10, 1999. Written by long-time Sam Peckinpah collaborator Gordon T. Dawson and directed by German television veteran Uli Gellen, the story began in Sweetwater, a generic Western town near the Mexican border, in 1886. The loathsome Blackjack Britton, played by Eric Roberts, and his huge gang planned to rob the bank. Sonny Miller, a kid obsessed with dime-novel Westerns, begged his uncle, the sadistic Cavin Guthrie, to let him ride along. The kid, played by Brad Rowe, started showing off and attracting attention, so Guthrie made him wait outside the bank. A stage arrived, and Sonny met Dolly Sloan, the “Harlot with a Heart,” who told him that dime novels didn’t get the story right. The robbery went bad, and Dolly was shot and died in Sonny’s arms. The gang escaped by riding into a fogbank during a storm and passing through a tunnel that opened onto a broad green valley.

They came to a town called Refuge, where they were welcomed by a friendly sheriff played by the actor-playwright Sam Shepard, famous for his own Western dramas. The sheriff offered them free drinks and lodging, while only lightly admonishing them about cursing. Blackjack played along, but soon he was scheming to loot the town, which he thought was full of cowards or members of a pacifist religious sect summoned to regular worship by the doomsday bell tolling in a church belfry. Any acts of aggression by the gang provoked an ominous Indian gatekeeper, a silent Chiron the Boatman figure who watched the town from what appeared to be a cemetery gate, to summon storms and bring down lethal bolts of lightning. Miscreants were hauled off to the abyss.

Sonny pursued an attractive young woman named Rose, played by Amelia Heinle. As tensions between gang members and townspeople increased, Sonny, absorbed in his dime novels, recognized that the sheriff was Wild Bill Hickok, late of Deadwood, and dead for almost a decade. The storekeeper was Jesse James, played by John David Souther. Doc Holliday, played by Randy Quaid, was the town doctor (although the real Holliday was a dentist), and Hickok’s deputy was Billy the Kid, played by Donnie Wahlberg. All the gunfighters were dead as they would have been in real life in 1886, except for Holliday, who died of consumption in 1887, a minor gaffe in the script.

When Sonny confronted Holliday with his suspicions, the doctor warned Sonny that his life was in jeopardy. “A few bad choices, a man can lose his soul.

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