Calamity Jane

Serious account of the frontierswoman mixes fact with mythmaking

I say “serious” because the previous Western about Calamity Jane was the amusing musical with Doris Day from 1953. Yet this isn’t a serious biopic of Martha Jane Canary since it involves glaring mythmaking, as well as the fact that the story focuses on the day Wild Bill Hickok was shot playing poker in Deadwood and the subsequent capture of the killer, Jack McCall, which means we’re talking about a matter of a few days.

Jane was rumored to have fronted a mob that aimed to lynch McCall, but the idea that she joined a small posse to track down Bill’s murderer appears to be fiction. Yet it makes for a good story, right? (Which is driven home at the very end of the movie). Another deviation from reality is the semi-wintry setting when, in fact, Hickok was shot and his murderer caught in August 1876.

Another dubious element is the idea that Jane and Hickok were a couple, soon to be married. Actually, he married Agnes Thatcher Lake five months before his death, although she was back in Wyoming when he was killed. Hickok possibly met Jane for the first time after she was released from military custody in Fort Laramie (or discharged from a hospital, as she claims) and joined the wagon train that Wild Bill was on, which arrived in Deadwood in July 1876. While Jane claimed they were close, even married, historians tend to suggest that they barely knew each other. Then again, what happens on the frontier stays on the frontier, so who really knows?

It is true, however, that Jane was a rowdy, foul-mouthed frontierswoman and sharpshooter with a penchant for liquor. All of this is depicted in the movie. She was also a storyteller, which means she made things up or stretched the truth to entertain people.

Before watching this Western, I had my doubts since the director helmed the substandard "Stagecoach: The Texas Jack Story" eight years prior. But he either had more money to work with here, or he...