Dances With Wolves at 36: Kevin Costner’s Three-Hour Western That Defied the Studios

Kevin Costner’s feature directorial debut arrived in 1990 as a three-hour Western at a moment when studios had stopped believing in Westerns. Dances With Wolves runs 181 minutes, carries Adventure, Drama and Western tags, and opens with a Union lieutenant who cannot die.

Trailer, via Oscars.

A Suicide Ride at St. David’s Field

In 1863, 1st Lieutenant John J. Dunbar is wounded in a stalemated battle in Tennessee. A surgeon intends to amputate his leg. Dunbar steals a horse and rides unarmed in front of Confederate lines, choosing death in battle over the loss of the limb.

He survives. Union troops use the distraction to mount a successful attack. Dunbar keeps his leg, is awarded the horse Cisco, and is granted his choice of posting. He asks for the frontier, to see it before it disappears.

At Fort Hays, Major Fambrough assigns him to Fort Sedgwick, the farthest outpost under his command. Fambrough is mentally ill, tells no one where Dunbar is going, and kills himself after Dunbar departs. Provisioner Timmons is later killed by a band of Pawnee. No soldiers ever come.

Inside everyone is a frontier waiting to be discovered.

Kicking Bird and Stands With A Fist

Dunbar rebuilds the deserted fort and records his days in a diary. The local Sioux try to steal his horse. Wanting peace, he seeks out their camp and finds Stands With A Fist, a white woman adopted as a girl by medicine man Kicking Bird after Pawnee killed her family. She is mutilating herself in mourning for her late Sioux husband. Dunbar carries her back to the tribe.

The Sioux are hostile at first. A rapport builds. Graham Greene plays Kicking Bird; Mary McDonnell plays Stands With A Fist; Rodney A. Grant is Wind In His Hair; Floyd ‘Red Crow’ Westerman is Ten Bears.

Much of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota with English subtitles. The translation was done by Doris Leader Charge, of the Lakota Studies department at Sinte Gleska University. That choice is the film’s spine.

$22 Million and a Genre Out of Favor

Costner pushed Michael Blake to turn a Western screenplay into a novel in early 1986, then bought the rights with an eye on directing. Blake wrote the screenplay and the 1988 novel.

The budget started at $15 million and ended at $22 million. Studios passed, citing the Western’s fading popularity and the length of the script. The project sat at Nelson Entertainment and Island Pictures before Costner and Jim Wilson sold foreign rights in several countries, funded pre-production, and struck a deal with Orion Pictures. Shooting ran July to November 1989 in South Dakota and Wyoming.

The film’s structure holds up:

1. The suicide ride — the opening that sets every stake.
2. Fambrough’s death — a small, brutal turn that strands the plot.
3. The Lakota dialogue — the choice that defines the film’s method.
4. The final act — the stretch that tests the runtime.

Dances With Wolves is a revisionist Western that took the genre’s tools and pointed them somewhere new, and it did so against every commercial signal of its moment. It is long, uneven, and sometimes too pleased with its own scenery.

7.2/10 (Metacritic 72/100).

1990 film · Dances with Wolves · Kevin Costner · Lakota · revisionist Western · Western