Article: Wild Bill.

Wild Bill, starring Jeff Bridges, is Walter Hill's best film in years. It's a movie about the self-destructive power of myth. By the end, Hill makes that self-destruction seem like the archetypal American story. Wild Bill Hickok's extended demise is like a dirge for our national innocence. That innocence, if it ever really flourished, was lost long ago.

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok was "created' by a country bent on inventing a unique past for itself. Even while he was alive--and long after he was shot in the head in a bar at 39 by a drifter named Jack McCall--he was the stuff of dimestore-novel puffery. With his fringed buckskin and ivory-handled Colt Navy ...

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