Screen actor Aidan Quinn, who played Stanley Kowalski in the 1988 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, stars in the new HBO Films production "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."
Based on Dee Alexander Brown's book of the same name, the film will make its debut on the cable network May 27 at 9 PM ET. Joining Quinn in the cast are Broadway's J. K. Simmons (Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Guys and Dolls, Peter Pan) and Colm Feore (Julius Caesar) as well as Adam Beach, August Schellenberg, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, Gordon Tootoosis, Fred Thompson and Anna Paquin.
Check out the whole thing. See also this New York Times story. Dee Brown's book made a big impact when it was published in 1971, quickly becoming a national bestseller. It still remains in print today and in fifteen different languages. Historians have assessed his book as "polemical and thinly researched," but it was "immensely popular" and made a big impact on a society awash in self-criticism over Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the environment [1]. I'm working on a paper about the intellectual origins of Brown's book and the impact it had, and this film seems to be another part of the book's aftermath and how it still influences our view of the nineteenth century American West. HBO is good at creating westerns, such as the Deadwood series, as historically flawed as it may be, so I'm looking forward to see how they portray Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
[1] Rodman W. Paul and Michael P. Malone, "Tradition and Challenge in Western Historiography," Western Historical Quarterly vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1985), 41. See also Francis Paul Prucha, review of Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American Historical Review vol. 77 no. 2 (April 1972): 589-590.
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