Product Details

• Actors: Charles Bronson, Jack Warden, Will Sampson, Kim Novak, Clint Walker
• Directors: J. Lee Thompson
• Writers: Richard Sale
• Producers: Dino De Laurentiis, Pancho Kohner
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• VHS Release Date: July 7, 1994
• Run Time: 97 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 630197719X
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,197 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The White Buffalo, strange western of Night and Snow, December 14, 2003

By 

Michael Ziegler (Philadelphia, Pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Buffalo [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie is based on Richard Sale's book concerning two characters enroute to their mutual destiny, Crazy Horse and Wild Bill Hickock. They are both called to hunt the sacred White Buffalo for a different purpose. Crazy Horse, to re-claim the right to be called by his name and to wrap the hyde around his dead child so that she can enter paradise. While Hickock is drawn by a sixth sense toward his encounter through nightmarish dreams in the belief that the confrontation will solve the sickness that has been in his brain. The movie is so full of western slang that you almost need a glossary of terms like the nadsat language in "A Clockwork Orange", to know what is going on. It is either a great movie or just an average one according to how you feel about a western that is mysterious, deep, intensely dark, full of atmospheric snow laden mountains, a god-like Buffalo that cannot be stopped and a stand out performance by Clint Walker as a very bad adversary. Incredibly the moody but excellent adaptive music was never released on this film until 2002!...and then only on a limited run for film buffs (no pun intended)You can almost classify this as a Western Horror movie and it has an excellent supporting cast, including Kim Novack,Slim Pickens, John Carradine and others who fill the stock characters to perfection. The poster used to advertise this film is a real collector's item and it is a film that should be preserved in the future with a quality DVD transfer. I normally don't like Westerns but this caught my attention. Bronson was the big box-office draw at the time and this movie was a critical failure in 1977 but it still endures and captures the imagination today due to it's wierd subject matter. Probably ahead of its time!.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite Bronson movies, June 29, 2002

By 

Kelli Bernard-Mallard (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Buffalo [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I have been searching all over the internet for a copy of this film, which I consider one of Charles Bronson's best. I much preferred him in movies like "The White Buffalo" and "Once Upon a Time in the West," as opposed to the "Death Wish" series. I find "The White Buffalo" to be one of those movies you don't forget. The climax scene where the buffalo crashes through a wall of snow and ice gave me nightmares when I first saw it! If you're a Charles Bronson/Old West genre fan, buy or rent this movie.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hammer Films Meets D.W. Griffith In A Western Setting., May 9, 2010

By 

Chip Kaufmann (Asheville, N.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The White Buffalo (MGM Limited Edition Collection) (DVD)

A decidedly odd combination to be sure but that was my impression after seeing this atypical Charles Bronson Western again after more than 30 years (I first saw it on its original release in 1977). The supernatural elements of the story along with the unreal reality of some of the lighting and use of color recall such Hammer horrors as THE GORGON and THE BRIDES OF DRACULA. The beauty of some of the images and the uneven editing resemble the later films of D.W. Griffith. Portions of the movie were even filmed where Griffith shot the battles for BIRTH OF A NATION back in 1914. The town sequences were shot at a Western museum in Colorado while most of the mountain scenes were shot in New Mexico. The sometimes jarring editing, lapses in continuity, and occasional sloppiness are typical of director J. Lee Thompson's (THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, CAPE FEAR) later films probably the results of tight budgets. A good example of this is Jack Warden's glass eye make-up which changes from scene to scene. Sometimes he doesn't appear to be wearing any make-up at all. But these are minor distractions. Thompson's pace is excellent. He knows how to move the film along while staging his action set pieces effectively.

The setting is 1874 during the gold rush that took place in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Wild Bill Hickok (Bronson) has come there not for gold but to find a monster white buffalo which has been haunting his dreams. He has syphilis ("caught a cold in the pants that won't go away" is how it's described) and needs to wear shades to protect his eyes. Chief Crazy Horse (Will Sampson) also seeks the white buffalo to avenge the death of his child and regain his lost honor. Take this storyline, add a number of seasoned performers like Slim Pickens, Clint Walker, and Kim Novak, along with Paul Lohmann's striking cinematography and you have a Western unlike any other. The film flopped on its original release and it's not hard to see why. Too strange for Western purists, not enough action for Bronson fans, and bad word of month about the title animal (which was mechanical not CGI) kept people away. Looked at today the unreal quality of the buffalo fits the dreamlike nature of the film and several striking images such as the mountain of buffalo bones and the cave scenes linger in the memory long afterwards. THE WHITE BUFFALO is another in the new MGM DVD-R series of requested but previously unreleased films which means no extras of any kind but the widescreen transfer is gorgeous and John Barry's vivid score sounds as haunting as ever