Or Robert Altman's absolutely unique and heroic enterprise of inimitable lustre. You can't get through the title and credits without wilting under the oppressive self-consciousness and self-congratulation of this debunking of an American hero (or this kicking of a dead horse). Altman's remedy for the anti-Indian attack of past Hollywood Westerns is to turn the attack in the opposite direction. It's simply a hatchet job. And it's too bad, because there are better possibilities in the material. The basic situation isn't well enough set up -- isn't well enough backgrounded -- for Altman to reap any rewards from the meeting of two living legends, the bumptious Buffalo Bill and the ruined Sitting Bull, in the degrading arena of Show Business. Altman has a curious tendency to undercut himself at all points. His movie is almost all jokes, and almost all commonplace ones (the hairpiece worn by Buffalo Bill, the buckshot he uses in his sharp-shooting act, and so on), but his muffled manner squelches almost all potential laughs. The monotony of the movie afflicts both eye and ear: Paul Lohmann's image always looks as if it's filtered through a butterscotch candy wrapper, and Richard Baskin's musical score relies on a Sousa-ish marching-band theme which is repeated with thumping irony. Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Harvey Keitel, and Geraldine Chaplin. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd