Buffalo Bill and the Indians is director Robert Altman's dead-on satire of the entertainment industry, especially the way in which show business can gobble up real events and spit out entirely new versions of them which will be swallowed whole by audiences. Altman demythologizes his title character, presenting him as a simple and unexceptional man inflated to far above his natural state, to a level of expectations he could never hope to meet. Paul Newman does a tremendous job as Buffalo Bill, and as the film goes on and the legend begins to deflate, Newman allows more and more of the man beneath to show through. This culminates in a stunning scene in which a drunk and hallucinating Newman imagines a conversation with the Indian chief Sitting Bull. By this point, the legend has completely fallen away and the man himself is stripped bare; you can see Bill trying to rebuild his myth completely from scratch, pausing, stumbling, rewriting his own script on the fly. Buffalo Bill is also Altman's wry commentary on America's own mythologizing history. As Sitting Bull says at one point, "history is just disrespect for the dead." The film's central premise involves Bill recruiting the famous chief for his Wild West show, but when Sitting Bull arrives, he refuses to participate in any of the canned acts, in which cowardly and sneaky Indians are routed by brave cowboys. Instead, the chief proposes a new performance, in which the unarmed Indians welcome the white men, trade with them, agree to peace, and then are promptly slaughtered. Altman's film is a real marvel, something of a forgotten masterpiece buried amid a string of such amazing films in the 70s. Though the film's central focus is clearly on Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, the sidelines are packed with the distinctive large Altman ensemble, all turning in great performances and getting some choice gags and scenes of their own. Geraldine Chaplin is perfect as Annie Oakley, Joel Grey gets another choice role, as the promoter who's constantly inventing his own words, and a young Harvey Keitel shines as Bill's eager nephew. This is one of Altman's best and most complex films, from a decade in his career which spawned an inordinate number of masterpieces.