Where The Buffalo Roam
with Bill Murray, Peter Boyle, Bruno Kirby
Directed by Art Linson
Written by Hunter S. Thompson
(Columbia, 1980)
by Mark Phinney
Bill Murray is indeed the funniest man on the planet, and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, at one point, was the most dangerous man on the planet. While Murray still holds his scepter, Thompson dropped his somewhere along the road (in a drunken stupor, no doubt). However, this takes nothing away from the tale of a journalistic madman, as played by a comedic wunderkind, in Where The Buffalo Roam. From the opening rambling, so attuned to the Thompson character, in the Hemingwayish hideaway deep in the ice caps of the Northwest, Murray mutters his way right into the insane spirit ol’ Hunt wrote, drank, and freaked out with. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the political wonder years of the now-mossy Rolling Stone, the whole Nixon/Thompson orgy attack… Yes, this film takes us through those journeys and long years of drunken flights, gun-toting parties, and even some hostage crisis situations, but what it captures best is the fact that no matter how much this guy fucked, was late for deadline, or on the verge of government arrest, he remained the foremost voice in American politics and pop culture, and Jann Wenner knew this. (Compare that to the John Travolta character in Perfect.) Now this poses an interesting parallel. Murray, like the rest of the original SNL bad boys, was as outrageously uncontrollable as Thompson, and at the same time turning this T.V. show into a overnight success and of course now legend, yet as with Rolling Stone, SNL has seen better days.
Murray was a perfect casting choice with his dynamics in mimicking Hunter’s drunk persona alone – just looking at him we think he’s drunk, and even if he isn’t, we laugh all the same. There are many stories attached to this film, from the dangerous one-on-one coaching of Bill by Hunter, to the wild incidents that ensued when too much drink was about, on and off the set. This may very well be the reason Murray floats through Thompson as if he hijacked all the drug-ingesting, cigarette-smoking mentality of this American icon, and Murray stands alone among the bad craziness, he too an American icon.
