Young Bill Hickok (1940)

Wow! Such a good movie.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Hollywood had a huge love affair with westerns up until about 1960. Most of the ways they portrayed the west were complete nonsense and they had a habit of injecting real-life characters into situations that never occurred. Heck, the lives of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Bill Hickok are completely unrecognizable in the hundreds and hundreds of films in which they appear. "Young Bill Hickok" is yet another one of these entirely fictitious films from this era and it even throws in Calamity Jane (a rather unattractive woman in real life) to boot. Playing so fast and loose with the truth drives history teachers like me crazy, but my love of a fun B-movie kept me watching.Roy Rogers plays Bill Hickok and he looked even less like Bill than Gabby Hays who is on hand (as usual) to play Roy's loyal sidekick. As for the plot, it's all a lot of nonsense about Bill tracking down some Confederate raiders and their unknown leader as well as Bill wanting to marry a Southern lady. I won't bother going into any more details as none of it seemed to bear any semblance to Hickok's life.Overall, the film is a pretty ordinary Roy Rogers film. There's lots of singing for no apparent reason, Hays is quite funny in support and in the end good triumphs over evil. The only moment of the film that really caught my attention was the jail break--that was very clever and you just need to see it. Worth seeing for Rogers fans--otherwise just another one of 23281235413 B-series westerns.

In the final days of the Civil War, young Bill Hickock (Roy Rogers) is sent by the War Department to deliver a shipment of gold for the Union cause. Acting as a decoy, he sends the gold with Gabby Hayes and Hayes' sidekick Calamity Jane (!), hoping to outsmart the European backed saboteurs that want to take it.Not so wild this time around, Young Bill Hickock's bland script takes too much time getting started and doesn't really generate much excitement or great music. This Republic Picture does have some decent production values though.Astonishingly, the script veers into JFK style conspiracy theories near the end, with European powers using John Wilkes Booth as a pawn in order to divide the US again, in order to gain control of the west! However, it's still not enough to make this really worth recommending, except for maybe the most die-hard Roy Rogers fans.The best thing in the movie is the feisty performance by Sally Payne as Calamity Jane. She's pretty cute and does a good job.

"Young Bill Hickok" freely uses the names of historical figures to tell a formulaic story of adventure in the closing days of the Civil War. Roy Rogers portrays Wild Bill, earning his name after he wards off a band of Morrell's Overland Raiders singlehandedly. The central story involves the shipment of gold to help finance the Union's war effort, while foreign agent Nicholas Tower (John Miljan) attempts to disrupt the enterprise, enlisting the aid of seedy John Morrell (Wally Wales as Hal Taliaferro). On the side of the good guys are crusty Gabby Whitaker (George "Gabby" Hayes) and Calamity Jane Canary (Sally Payne). Jacqueline Wells provides the love interest for Hickok, and her presence sets up some tension in the film, first as a Southern lady and Confederate sympathizer, and also as Hickok's bride to be who must take a back seat to his duty to help the Union cause.Before the film is over, the Civil War has ended with Lee's surrender, and the news of Lincoln's assassination arrives. Tower's association with John Wilkes Booth was established midway through the film as Hickok discovers a letter signed by Booth in Tower's office. The inclusion of these historical snippets adds some interest to the proceedings, but ultimately have no affect on the main story itself. Generally Roy Rogers portrayed himself or a character named Roy Rogers in his films, but as in this movie, he occasionally was cast as a legendary Westerner. For more of this type of fare, try "Billy the Kid Returns", "Young Buffalo Bill", or "Jesse James at Bay".

In his early years at Republic Pictures, Roy Rogers specialized in historical westerns (DAYS OF JESSE JAMES, BILLY THE KID RETURNS), in contrast with the contemporary settings of his wartime and postwar westerns (DON'T FENCE ME IN, THE GOLDEN STALLION, etc.). YOUNG BILL HICKOK (1940) casts Rogers in the title role and dramatizes the famed gunfighter's first meeting with Calamity Jane (played by Sally Payne in the first onscreen portrayal of the character since Cecil B. DeMille's epic western of 1936, THE PLAINSMAN, which also featured Hickok and paired him with Buffalo Bill, who's absent from this film). The film starts out promisingly as it details a plot by an unnamed foreign power to take advantage of the divisions of the then-raging Civil War to try to take over California. John Miljan plays the foreign agent, Nicholas Tower, without a trace of an accent or any other hint of which country he's supposed to represent. (The name Nicholas may signal a Russian origin, but weren't the Soviets our wartime allies?) Tower conspires with Morrell (Hal Taliaferro), a local outlaw, to disrupt the stage lines serving California, and when Morrell's Raiders go into action, they run afoul of young Bill Hickok (dubbed Wild Bill by a reporter for "the Chronicle") who soon allies with wagon freighter Gabby Whitaker (Gabby Hayes) and his salty young female partner, Calamity Jane. After introducing all the characters and setting up the basic premise, which offered a good deal of potential for suspense, the action quickly settles into familiar B-western territory as Hickok has to defend himself against a charge of masterminding the theft of a gold shipment he was assigned to guard. Gabby and Jane spring him from jail and work to get the goods on Tower. At a certain point it becomes simply one chase after another, albeit with the usual topflight Republic stunt work.While the drama wavers in the second half, the spirit of fun is maintained by the delightful performances of Gabby Hayes, in his trademark wizened old westerner role, and the film's genuine revelation, Sally Payne, as the no-nonsense Calamity Jane, whose command of western vernacular is equaled only by Gabby's. (A horse is never a horse, but a "Cayuse.") The homely, mannish Jane was always a challenge to Hollywood, which couldn't resist the urge to make her pretty by casting such top stars as Jean Arthur (THE PLAINSMAN), Yvonne De Carlo (CALAMITY JANE AND SAM BASS) and Doris Day (CALAMITY JANE) in the role. Here she looks and sounds a little closer perhaps to what the real woman was like, although the best Calamity Jane onscreen may arguably be Ellen Barkin in Walter Hill's WILD BILL (1995).There are a handful of short songs that don't intrude much on the action, including one performed together by Gabby and Sally. Special mention should be made of B-western regular Hal Taliaferro (aka Wally Wales) who delivers a sharp portrayal of bandit Morrell who distrusts the "foreigner" Tower but takes the job anyway because the pay is good. Long-haired, unshaven and tall, with piercing eyes, Taliaferro cut a suitably seedy and menacing figure but with a touch of humanity. It's too bad the importance of his character diminishes as the film progresses, with Tower taking up greater screen time. Iron Eyes Cody is on hand as one of Gabby's Indian workers. Jacqueline Wells (aka Julie Bishop) plays northerner Hickok's southern-born fiancee, lending a bit of romantic conflict to the equation as they bicker about the ongoing war.