This 1977 Charles Bronson Western Is A Bizarre Experience You Can Stream For Free

Early in his career, Charles Bronson appeared in a horror classic before the low-budget crime thriller turned him into a star. The actor subsequently made an entire career out of his tough, nuanced anti-hero persona, starring in actors of all kinds while also managing to maintain a sense of vulnerability to his tough, intense characters. Of course, with Bronson gaining notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s, there are plenty of Westerns on the man’s resume. The genre wouldn’t truly die out until the end of the 1970s, and Bronson became as much a Western legend as an action hero.

Although best known for his role as ruthless vigilante Paul Kersey in the “Death Wish” films, Bronson has also had an enviable career as one of the best Western actors of all time. From Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece “Once Upon a Time in the West” to John Sturges’s acclaimed remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” Bronson’s westerns are highly regarded. But what you may not hear much about is the strange and offbeat Western version of the Moby Dick legend that he presented in 1977.

“The White Buffalo” saw Bronson play a legendary lawman obsessed with hunting down the titular monster. It’s a fairly simple premise, but the film itself is a strange and often surreal experience, peppered with dream sequences and questionable practical effects. It’s also a unique example of a genre trying to modernize itself at a time when the West was losing popularity. This means that “The White Buffalo” is worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet, and fortunately, it’s streaming for free on Tubi.

Although The White Buffalo is not the most famous, it is one of Charles Bronson’s best films. This 1977 effort was the actor’s second collaboration with director J. Lee Thompson, who had directed Bronson in St. Ives the previous year. While this crime thriller was a fairly specific exercise that failed to impress critics, the duo’s second collaboration was never official, though it also debuted to less-than-stellar reviews.

Bronson stars in The White Buffalo as famed lawman Wild Bill Hickok, whose dreams of a giant white buffalo have become so consuming that Hickok resolves to find the beast no matter what. The film follows him as he travels across the West in search of buffalo, which may or may not be a legend. Along the way, he teams up with Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, played by Will Sampson, who a year earlier played Chief Bromden in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” As it turns out, a giant buffalo has killed Crazy Horse’s daughter, prompting the Lakota chief to launch his own quest for revenge, which ultimately leads Hickok and his unlikely companion to question their assumptions about the other.

While such a premise could have made for a haunting, reflective take on a Western story, much of that potential was undermined by the titular mammal, seen on screen in the form of a constructed buffalo, which was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Monthly Film Bulletin, “a clumsy mechanical contraption resembling a giant shaggy toy whose roar bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the sounds of a growling stomach.” But there’s something about the mismatch between the unwanted practical effects and the film’s surreal ambition that makes it at least an interesting watch.

“The White Buffalo” isn’t as surreal or subversive as something like 1970s “El Topo,” an unsettling work credited as the first “Acid Western” and the film to which Roger Ebert gave a perfect score. But it’s also not your typical Old West adventure, striving for more with its fantasy elements. Although it doesn’t always work out, it’s a tough journey. If you want to know the Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s 17%. But this critic score is based on just six reviews and doesn’t really represent much. The film received more positive reviews on Letterboxd and was certainly deserving of more praise than critics gave it at the time of its release.

More than anything, “The White Buffalo” is worth a watch, even if you’re only interested in seeing where the Western genre was in the mid-1970s. This was when the revisionist West truly came to the fore, with standard archetypes of heroes and villains completely dismantled before a mass audience that was similarly questioning their leaders in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the increasingly apparent failure of the 1960s counterculture to stem the rise of mercantilism and corporate greed. Bronson’s obsessive lawman, haunted by dreams of a wild beast that may or may not exist, is a far cry from the swaggering gunmen of traditional Westerns, and although the lone character was a long-standing Western trope, Bronson’s version was truly unique. In “The White Buffalo” you can see one of the most interesting examples of a genre trying to evolve with the times.

“The White Buffalo” is streaming free on Tubi.